Palais #22 – Ugo Rondinone – I Love John Giorno

An iconic character in Andy Warhol's early films, Giorno was influenced by Pop artists who opened his eyes to the idea of “found poetry,” and he captured the real-life colloquial language of advertisements, television, newspapers, and street slang. Seeking to create a new audience and a new relevance for poetry since the mid-1960s, Giorno has developed viral strategies to share poetry with as many people as possible. Whether recorded on albums or on an answering machine, silk-printed or painted on canvas, proclaimed on a stage or de-structured on the pages of a book, Giorno's poems are images capable of limitless forms of technological reproduction.
With the exhibition “I Love John Giorno,” that he conceived as a work of art in its own right, Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone has reinvented the retrospective format as portraiture. “Taken as a whole, the eight chapters of the exhibition reflect how John Giorno works and help us to understand the dual influences that American culture and Buddhism had on his life and art.” (Ugo Rondinone)
This issue of Palais magazine follows the organization of the exhibition in eight chapters, each standing for one facet of John Giorno's multifarious work and life. It includes a series of original contributions and artists' testimonials, documents from John Giorno's personal archives, and also a selection of John Giorno's writings.