In 1984, the organization expanded its scope with the creation of the AIDS Treatment Project, providing direct support to artists living with AIDS. In later years, Giorno’s work reached new audiences through collaborations with contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe [fig. 6], Michael Stipe, Rirkrit Tiravanija [fig. 7], and Ugo Rondinone. Rondinone, his partner since 1998, dedicated a major retrospective to him in 2015 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, I ♥ John Giorno, which was later restaged across thirteen venues in New York in 2017 [fig. 8].
I ♥ John Giorno was the first retrospective ever dedicated to a poet from the American counterculture of the 1960s [fig. 9]. Conceived by Ugo Rondinone as both a declaration of love and an autonomous artwork, the exhibition celebrated Giorno’s life and work in a highly personal way. “I imagined the show as having eight chapters,” Rondinone explained, “each representing an aspect of John’s work. Taken together, they reflected his creative process and revealed the dual influence of American culture and Tibetan Buddhism on his life and art. I ♥ John Giorno was an immersive experience: his voice, his breath, his physical presence.”
The exhibition represented the culmination of their personal and professional relationship. It was not a conventional retrospective but rather an intimate and sensory portrait—a visual and sonic narrative of Giorno’s life and work, curated by Rondinone to convey its complexity without blurring their two distinct identities [fig.10, 11].
Their connection was not based on aesthetic similarity but on a personal and curatorial bond. Rondinone—Giorno’s life partner—chose to tell his story through his own sensibility, presenting Giorno’s voice, physical presence, and breath without seeking stylistic fusion. While their works shared a radical expressive honesty, free of artifice, they remained what Rondinone described as “opposing mirrors”: even in collaborations like Lowland Lullaby (2001) [fig. 12,13], differences were more visible than similarities. Rondinone never tried to imitate Giorno stylistically; instead, he sought to convey Giorno’s subjectivity, reconstructing his world—his home, his objects, his words, and cultural influences—filtered through his own artistic perspective. In this sense, their artistic relationship took shape as a mirror of otherness: Rondinone made Giorno’s complexity visible, emphasizing the differences between their languages rather than flattening them into a shared aesthetic.
In 2017, Giorno withdrew from public performance to focus entirely on meditation, writing, and art-making. He spent the final years of his life in this way, completing his memoir Great Demon Kings [fig.14] published posthumously in 2020.
Dial-a-Poem
In 1968, John Giorno created Dial-A-Poem, a pioneering project that transformed the telephone into a large-scale tool for spreading poetry [fig. 15]. Launched at the Architectural League of New York, the project was later presented in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as part of the landmark exhibition “Information”, which explored new conceptual and media-based languages in contemporary art.
Its mechanism was as simple as it was revolutionary: by dialing a phone number, the caller was connected to a pre-recorded poetry track. Giorno installed an automated system capable of playing back recorded messages by poets, activists, and artists. Among the voices featured were legendary figures such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Patti Smith, Frank O’Hara, Laurie Anderson, as well as members of the Black Panther Party [fig. 16]. Dial-A-Poem anticipated, by decades, the logics of cultural virality and podcasting, expanding poetry’s boundaries into the world of mass communication. It also became a tool of cultural resistance: many recordings tackled political, erotic, and psychedelic themes, prompting police authorities to threaten its shutdown in several cities [fig. 17]. Giorno was not interested in poetry as a traditional literary form, but in the voice itself—as a sonic presence, a noise, or a recorded message transmitted directly and intimately through the telephone network. Over time, the project has been reimagined in various versions, evolving alongside technological changes and Giorno’s ongoing artistic experimentation. To this day, Giorno Poetry Systems continues to produce new editions of Dial-A-Poem, activating phone numbers in different parts of the world to keep this unique and revolutionary poetic experience alive. In 2022, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acknowledged the historical and innovative significance of the project by dedicating a permanent gallery space to Dial-A-Poem, underlining its lasting impact on poetry, sound art, and experimental voice practices [fig. 18].
Visual Works
In the 1980s, John Giorno began translating his poetry into visual form with his first series of paintings, the Vinyl Paintings. These works take the shape of large, monochrome or two-toned canvases onto which short phrases or fragments of his poems are applied in vinyl. The words appear like slogans: sharp, direct, and easy to remember [fig. 19].
Phrases like “JUST SAY NO TO FAMILY VALUES,” “YOU GOT TO BURN TO SHINE,” or “LIFE IS A KILLER” convey a life lived intensely, with implicit references to sexuality, spirituality, drug use, homosexuality, and death. The use of vinyl is deliberate: it’s cheap, industrial, and ephemeral—much like the advertising language and consumer culture that Giorno sought to critique and transform. Building on the exploration he started with the Vinyl Paintings, in the early 2010s Giorno developed the Black and White Paintings, a series of silkscreens on canvas marked by visual minimalism. Here, fragments of his poetry—brief, contradictory, at times commanding, ironic, or provocative—are reduced to simple, direct text-images. The black-and-white palette sharpens the contrast between word and surface, turning language into both graphic sign and physical presence, constantly balancing sacred and profane, detachment and emotional intensity [fig. 20,21].
The Rainbow Paintings series represents one of the most lyrical and visually intricate phases of Giorno’s visual work. First created in 2015, these pieces bring vibrant visual energy into his aesthetic. The rainbow motif also evokes the colors associated with the LGBTQ+ community, whose rights Giorno had long championed as an activist. Text remains central—short lines from his poetry or unfinished verses—but merges with the symbolic shape of the rainbow, which takes on both political and spiritual meaning. The arcs of color sweep across the canvas, interacting with texts that either amplify or subvert the visual lightness of the rainbow. This motif becomes a threshold between hope and apocalypse, between vision and revelation. Giorno’s words evoke the themes that define his work: death, radical love, Buddhist meditation, and the inner self [fig. 22].
This series featured prominently in the major retrospective I ♥ John Giorno at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, where the Rainbow Paintings acted as a link between language and color, offering visitors a synesthetic experience that encompassed fifty years of Giorno’s poetic and visual experimentation. In that setting, the works also took on a more intimate dimension, symbolizing the personal and artistic connection between Giorno and Ugo Rondinone—his partner and the exhibition’s curator [fig. 23].
Around the early 2000s, Giorno started composing a series of poems dedicated to flowers, later collected in the volume Welcoming the Flowers, written in 2004 [fig. 24]. This poetic cycle gave rise, in 2007, to a portfolio of eighteen prints, created in collaboration with Durham Press. Each print, produced in an edition of seventy, functions like an abstract bouquet: rich pastel tones combine to suggest the idea of a flower, turning each composition into an explosion of color and light.
From this poetic core emerged the Perfect Flowers, a series of luminous works characterized by glittering surfaces. In these paintings, Giorno’s concise poems—focused on life cycles—are amplified through the use of color and light. Texts break free from their literal meaning, addressing universal themes of birth, death, and reincarnation [fig. 25, 26].
Flowers, timeless symbols in both Western and Eastern traditions, take on renewed significance in these works: shifting from emblems of fleeting beauty to metaphors for life’s fragility and the planet’s vulnerability in an era marked by climate change and pollution. Through sparkling surfaces and, at times, irreverent texts, the Perfect Flowers and the Welcoming the Flowers prints invite reflection on multiple levels: from the historical tradition of the flower as an artistic and spiritual image, to Giorno’s personal poetic inquiry, and finally to the vulnerabilities of the present world.
In 2019, Giorno opened a new phase of his visual work with the Stone Sculptures, a series of works carved directly onto large stone boulders [fig. 27]. By inscribing his most iconic phrases onto these heavy surfaces, he created a powerful dialogue between the ephemeral nature of language and the physical solidity of stone. These “stone poems” stand as metaphors for the contrast between what disappears and what endures, presenting the viewer with words that emerge like apparitions, suspended between memory and eternity. In this way, Giorno’s work comes full circle, resting in a delicate balance between transience and permanence—a final reflection on the role and destiny of language in art.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
[1]: Ugo Rondinone (ed.), I ♥ John Giorno (exhibition catalog), Paris, Palais de Tokyo, 2015
[2]: Interview with John Giorno in: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lives of the Artist, Penguin Books, 2015
[3]: The Guardian: "He’s a poet and the FBI know it: how John Giorno’s Dial-a-Poem alarmed the Feds"
[4]: Arteecritica: ‘Una Nuova Età Della Poesia / A New Age of Poetry’, by Ilari Valbonesi
[5]: Artforum, Press Reviews, Laura Hoptman, ‘John Giorno’
[6]: Press Release: John Giorno, Oct 12 — Nov 13, 2021 | London, Almine Rech
WEBSITES:
[1]: Palais de Tokyo, I ♥ John Giorno 2015-2016 - https://palaisdetokyo.com/
[2]: Galleria Thomas Brambilla, Perfect Flowers 2023-2024 - https://www.thomasbrambilla.com/it/
[3]: MoMA, Information 1970 - https://www.moma.org/calendar/galleries/5579
[4]: Triennale di Milano, Labour of Love 2025 - https://triennale.org/eventi/john-giorno-labour-love
