In the new spaces of the Palais de Tokyo, John Giorno presents a new chapter of his Poem Paintings, so extending his research. On the surface of canvases as well as in the monumental scale of the place, he balances his short, spontaneous, powerful poems. He exploits the very specific material and surface of the walls of the Palais de Tokyo, to stencil large letters, which through an interplay of colors and forms give the words back their full intensity and their expressive strength. With “the words of these drawings” – Thanx 4 Nothing, Life is a Killer, A Hurricane in a Drop of Cum, Just Say No to Family Values, Chacun est une Déception Totale– which in the context of the Palais de Tokyo are isolated and magnified, John Giorno yet again succeeds in stirring the poetic imagination and the benchmarks of writing. Recognized as one of the most influential poets of his generation, John Giorno has constantly made his work spill over from the book. For a few years now he has been creating visual poems entitled Poem Paintings from short fragments taken from his texts. Using a very special typography and layout, these elliptical, enigmatic aphorisms or brief sentences are projected on to the surface of a canvas or a wall. These poetic and visual art experiments thus take the poem off the page, confronting it with new contexts. This visual poetry that makes the acidity of the word resonate in strident colors in turn becomes the pictorial space. The writing now becomes a drawing, and the word becomes an image.
Born in 1936, John Giorno was a major figure in the New York underground of the 1960s, a friend of Andy Warhol(who filmed him sleeping in his famous Sleep, 1963) and Robert Rauschenberg as well as of William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg and Brion Gysin, leading figures of the Beat Generation. In contact with them, he fed into his poetry using the cut-up method, a montage of found texts, and composed his first sound poems. He also thought up new extensions for poetry to make it accessible to everyone. As early as 1965, he founded Giorno Poetry Systems, a label that has issued around 40 albums. In 1968, he created Dial-A-Poem, a telephone poetry service offering audio poems. Dial-A-Poem 2012 retrospective is currently at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Photo. Pascal Gillet
