John Giorno – the New York radical who broke art and poetry's boundaries

‘What do telephones, poetry and the Museum of Modern Art have in common?” read a press release issued by the New York institution on 21 July 1970. A question to which they might have added gay liberation, Aids activism, the aesthetics of advertising, Tibetan Buddhism and sleeping for Andy Warhol, and still received the answer of John Giorni. The artist and poet, who died on Friday aged 82, was the linchpin of New York’s downtown scene.

The list of his collaborators, friends and lovers, many of whom made their work at the Bunker, the studio complex Giorno established on the Bowery, which the New York Times described in 1965 as “a vision of Montparnasse replacing Skid Row”, is as numerous: John Cage, Anne Waldman, Mark Rothko, Lynda Benglis, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Trisha Brown and Carolee Schneeman were all contemporaries. In 1963 he appeared in Warhol’s film Sleep, which lasted five hours and 20 minutes and consisted of a static shot of Giorno asleep.

At MoMA visitors were invited to pick up a telephone receiver from a bank of four, on which they could hear one of 50 poets, commissioned by Giorno, reciting their work. The project was an extension of Dial-a-Poem, established two years earlier by the artist in which anyone could call a New York number and listen to one of 15 poetic answerphone messages. Those participating were in the avant garde of the spoken word scene at the time, a reaction against what Giorno saw as the poetry establishment’s obsession with tradition.

“It occurred to me that poetry was 75 years behind painting and sculpture and dance and music,” he recalled in 2002. Instead Dial-a-Poem was to feature “found poetry, black poetry, New York school poetry, chance poetry or pop poetry”.

Giorno had first made his name on the scene with his cut-up compositions – inspired by his relationships with William Burroughs and artist Brion Gysin – which took lines of texts from magazines and advertising. In 1967 he further cemented the radical nature of his work with the release on LP of his “Pornographic” Poem.

Consisting of 12 readings of the same lines by, among others, Rauschenberg and Yvonne Rainer, the sexually explicit poem starts “Seven Cuban army officers in exile were at me all night … I lost count the number of times they fucked me in every conceivable position …”

The record was an innovation: “In 1965, the only venues for poetry were the book and the magazine, nothing else,” Giorno explained. His record label, Giorno Poetry Systems, would go on to work with dozens of artists right into the late 80s, including Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Hüsker Dü, Philip Glass and Frank Zappa.

Forever looking to move poetry forward, Giorno started working with silkscreen printing in the early 70s, creating designs that, though incorporating lines of Buddhist spiritual texts, aesthetically owed more to advertising and the prevailing pop art movement. This led him to text painting, establishing a trademark font in 1984 in which pithy phrases, sometimes genuine, sometimes mocking, were set on monochrome or rainbow backgrounds.

“GOD IS MAN MADE”, “SPACE FORGETS YOU”, “WE GAVE A PARTY FOR THE GODS AND THE GODS ALL CAME”, “I WANT TO CUM IN YOUR HEART” read the canvases at an exhibition in New York’s Elizabeth Dee gallery in 2015.

Yet what many of those who fell under the artist’s spell appreciated most about his work was that Giorno argued for a wide-ranging, ever expanding, definition of art. So diverse and profuse was his output it took 13 New York institutions, including the Kitchen, the New Museum and Artists Space, to host a retrospective conceived by his partner of 18 years, the artist Ugo Rondione, in 2017.

Giorno not only paid scant regard to the boundaries between media – latterly he experimented with sculpture and even augmented reality – the artist’s activism and community organisation never felt separate from his studio practice but integral to it.

Many of the Dial-a-Poems took the form of speeches against the Vietnam war or in support of black civil rights. Conversely, as the Aids crisis deepened, Giorno became heavily involved in speaking out, fundraising and forming support systems for the victims, as well as their friends and partners.

“The world is getting empty of everyone I know one by one in every direction they are leaving this world for some people everyone they know has died” reads one stream-of-consciousness poem from 1993.

For over two decades from 1983 onwards, Giorno Poetry Systems made emergency grants to those who fell ill, proving a lifeline during the crisis. “The 60s and 70s were the golden age of gay promiscuity” Giorno said. “My thought was I should help people with Aids the same way, with promiscuous love and compassion, just like when we fucked.”