Tag Archives: John Giorno

PETER HUJAR — CRUISING UTOPIA

In conjunction with their online Peter Hujar exhibition CRUISING UTOPIA, Pace will convene a virtual panel discussion moderated by  Oliver Shultz.

Panelists include Nayland Blake,  Every Ocean Hughes (Emily Roysdon), Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Stephen Koch, a close friend of Hujar’s and the director of his archive.

See link below for details.

CRUISING UTOPIA—A CONVERSATION ON PETER HUJAR

Wednesday, July 15.

10 am on the West Coast; 1 pm East Coast.

Peter Hujar, Cruising Utopia, Pace, June 30, 2020–July 28, 2020, from top: Christopher Street Pier #5, 1976, vintage gelatin silver print; John Giorno, Jim Carroll, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Jayne Cortez, circa 1982, vintage gelatin silver print; Fran Lebowitz [at Home in Morristown], 1974, vintage gelatin silver print; Richie, 1985, vintage gelatin silver print; John Heys in Lana Turner’s Gown (III), 1979, vintage gelatin silver print; Paul Thek Masturbating, 1967, pigmented ink print; Two Cockettes, 1971, vintage gelatin silver print; Greer Lankton in a Fashion Pose (I), 1983, vintage gelatin silver print; Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs), 1976, pigmented ink print; Christopher Street Pier #4, 1976, vintage gelatin silver print; Hudson River (III), 1976, pigmented ink print. Images courtesy and © The Peter Hujar Archive and Pace Gallery.

UGO RONDININE — MATTITUCK

Finding myself in an empty studio for the last three months, I resorted to an intimate work: drawing poems and brushing sunsets and moonrise paintings. This is a good time for me to work in silence—cocooning myself into my own time, these two pastimes I love most and tire of least. 

The Mattituck paintings show the view from my studio window across the Long Island Sound. My first summer in Mattituck was a revelation, forcing me to examine my surroundings with the freshness of a friendly alien. Every day, just when the twilight started, John [Giorno] and I would set our chairs in position and experience a new sunset, a magical illumination of the ordinary—lucid and lyrical. Looking at the sunset makes one feel that the physical and the spiritual are not separate. Like a diarist, I record the living universe: this season, this day, this hour, this sound in the grass, this crashing wave, this sunset, this end of the day, this silence.

In the middle of the AIDS crisis in 1989, I turned away from grief and found in nature a spiritual road map for solace, regeneration, and inspiration. In nature, you enter a space where the sacred and profane, the mystical and the mundane, vibrate against one another.

There is not much to say about this new group of paintings. They exist to be looked at—to let go of words and look at what is in front of our eyes. An artist is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with the visual. — Ugo Rondinone, May 2020

UGO RONDINONE—MATTITUCK

Viewing room through June 26.

Gladstone Gallery

Ugo Rondinone, Mattituck, Gladstone Gallery, May 29, 2020–June 20, 2020, watercolors on canvas in artist’s frame, from top: aprilfifthtwothousandandtwenty, 2020; decembereleventhtwothousandandnineteen, 2019; novemberthirdtwothousandandnineteen, 2019; octobereighthtwothousandandnineteen, 2019; septembertwentythirdtwothousandandnineteen, 2019; junetwentyfirsttwothousandandnineteen, 2019. Images and text courtesy and © the artist and Gladstone Gallery.

ART-RITE LAUNCH

Join ART-RITE founding co-editor Walter Robinson, Pat Steir, Robin Winters, moderator Carlo McCormick, and host Jeffrey Deitch for a panel discussion and launch of the facsimile reprint of ART-RITE.

Collected in a 600-plus-page volume, this co-publication of Primary Information and Printed Matter contains all twenty issues of the newsprint magazine edited by Robinson, Edit DeAk, and Joshua Cohn—who would leave after issue 7—between 1973 and 1978.

(DeAk, Robinson, Sol LeWitt, and Lucy Lippard were among Printed Matter’s 1976 co-founders.)

Contributors to ART-RITE included Vito Acconci, Kathy Acker, Bas Jan Ader, Laurie Anderson, David Antin, John Baldessari, Jennifer Bartlett, Gregory Battcock, Lynda Benglis, Mel Bochner, Christian Boltanski, AA Bronson, Marcel Broodthaers, Trisha Brown, Chris Burden, Daniel Buren, Scott Burton, Ulises Carrión, Judy Chicago, Lucinda Childs, Christo, Diego Cortez, Hanne Darboven, Agnes Denes, Ralston Farina, Richard Foreman, Peggy Gale, Gilbert and George, John Giorno, Philip Glass, Leon Golub, Guerrilla Art Action Group, Julia Heyward, Nancy Holt, Ray Johnson, Joan Jonas, Richard Kern, Lee Krasner, Shigeko Kubota, Les Levine, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Babette Mangolte, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rosemary Mayer, Annette Messager, Elizabeth Murray, Alice Neel, Brian O’Doherty, Genesis P-Orridge, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Judy Pfaff, Lil Picard, Yvonne Rainer, Dorothea Rockburne, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Carolee Schneemann, Richard Serra, Sylvia Sleigh, Jack Smith, Patti Smith, Robert Smithson, Holly Solomon, Naomi Spector, Nancy Spero, Pat Steir, Frank Stella, David Tremlett, Richard Tuttle, Alan Vega, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, Hannah Wilke, Robert Wilson, and Irene von Zahn.

ART-RITE PANEL and LAUNCH

Tuesday, December 10, at 7 pm.

Jeffrey Deitch

18 Wooster Street, New York City.

From top: Art-Rite (2); Edit DeAk, photograph by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Walter Robinson, photograph by Greenfield-Sanders; Art-Rite facsimile reprint cover; Art-Rite cover by Christo; Art-Rite launch card. Images courtesy and © the photographer, Walter Robinson, Primary Information, and Printed Matter.

JOHN GIORNO

I am standing on the corner of Stanton and Chrystie,
waiting for the traffic light to change.
A man is sitting on the steps of a building
holding his young son on his lap.
He is eating fried chicken
from Chico’s take-out on Houston.
He chews on the wings
and feeds bits of the breast to his son. The man finishes eating
and puts the leftover chicken and bones,
french fries and soda can in a paper bag
and leaves it on the sidewalk.
A brown dog from a neighboring building,
snoops around
gets his nose in the bag,
chews on the bones
and makes a mess.
The man hits the dog with a newspaper,
and it yelps and runs away.
A black cat sitting in a window,
watches wide-eyed,
staring down at the dog,
chicken bones and gristle. I see their past and present lives.
The man eats the chicken
and the chicken
was his mother,
who had died of cancer two years ago; the dog chewing on the bones
was his father,
who had died of a heart attack five years ago;
and the cat in the window
was his grandmother;
and his young son, whom he holds so tenderly,
was the man who killed him in his previous life.
His wife comes home with groceries
and takes the boy into the building.
She had been his lover in many past lives,
and was his mother for the first time in this one.
The world just makes me laugh. Fill what is empty,
empty what is full,
light
as body,
light
as breath.Welcoming the flowers:
daffodils
baptized in butter,
lilacs lasciviously licking the air,
necklaces of wisteria
bowing to magnolia mamas,
the cherry blossoms are razor blades,
the snow dahlias are sharp as cat piss,
the lilies of the valley are
lilies of fur,
lilies of feather,
lilies of fin,
lilies of skin,
the almost Miss America rose,
the orchids are fat licking tongues,
and they all smell so good
and I am sucked into their meaty earthy goodness. You make
my heart
feel warm,
I lay my head on your chest
and feel free,
filling
what is empty,
emptying
what is full,
filling what is
empty, emptying
what is full,
filling what is empty, emptying what is full,
filling what is empty, emptying what is full,
the gods
we know
we are,
the gods
we knew
we were.I smell you
with my eyes,
see you
with my ears,
feel you
with my mouth,
taste you
with my nose,
hear you
with my tongue,
I want you to sit
in my heart,
and smile. Words come from sound,
sound comes from wisdom,
wisdom comes from emptiness,
deep relaxation
of great perfection. Welcoming the flowers:
armfuls of honey suckle
and columbine,
red-tipped knives of Indian paint brush,
the fields of daisies are the people
who betrayed me
and the lupine were self-serving and unkind,
the voluminous and voluptuous bougainvillea
are licking fire loving what it cannot burn,
the big bunch of one thousand red roses
are all the people I made love to,
hit my nose with stem of a rose,
the poppies have pockets packed with narcotic treats,
the chrysanthemums are a garland of skulls. I go to death
willingly,
with the same comfort and bliss
as when I lay my head
on my lover’s chest. Welcoming the flowers:
the third bouquet is a crown of blue bells,
a carillon of foxglove,
a sunflower snuggles its head on my lap
and gazes up at the sky,
may all the tiny black insects
crawling on the peony petals
be my sons and daughters in future lives,
great balls of light
radiating white, red, blue
concentric dazzle,
yellow, green
great exaltation,
the world just makes me laugh. May sound and light
not rise up and appear as enemies,
may I know all sound as my own sound,
may I know all light as my own light,
may I spontaneously know all phenomena as myself,
may I realize original nature,
not fabricated by mind,
empty
naked awareness. — John Giorno

John Giorno—poet, artist, organizer, AIDS activist, Buddhist, catalyst, muse, husband of Ugo Rondinone, star of Andy Warhol’s Sleep—died last week at home: 222 Bowery in lower Manhattan.

From top: John Giorno at the Chelsea Hotel, New York City, 1965, photograph by William S. Burroughs; Giorno, Don’t Wait for Anything; Giorno with Ugo Rondinone (right) in front of Rondinone’s Target, New York City, 2005; Andy Warhol, Sleep (1963), still; Giorno performing at the Tibetan Benefit, Washington Square Methodist Church, New York, 1974, photographed by Gianfranco Mantegna, courtesy the John Giorno Archives, New York; poster for the Nova Convention, 1978, organized by Giorno, James Grauerholz, and Sylvère Lotringer; Keith Haring (left), Burroughs, and Giorno in 1987 at a shooting range in Lawrence, Kansas, where Burroughs lived after leaving New York City, photograph by Kate Simon; Brooklyn Rail poster for performance events during the exhibition Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno; Giorno, The World Just Makes Me Laugh. Images courtesy and © the John Giorno Archives, the artists, the filmmakers, and the photographers.

JOHN GIORNO AT WARHOL DRAWINGS PANEL

A trove of over 150 drawings by Andy Warhol—now on view at the New York Academy of Art—trace nearly four decades of work by the hand of the artist who wanted to be a machine.

This week—in conjunction with ANDY WARHOL: BY HAND—join curator and Warhol associate Vincent Fremont, curator Donna De Salvo, and poet, artist, and Warhol actor John Giorno for a panel discussion on the exhibition, moderated by curator and New York Academy of Art president David Kratz.

ANDY WARHOL: BY HAND—

DRAWINGS 1950s–1980s

JOHN GIORNO, DONNA DE SALVO, and VINCENT FREMONT panel

Monday, February 11, at 6:30 pm.

Exhibition runs through March 10.

New York Academy of Art

111 Franklin Street, New York City.

From top: Andy Warhol, Two Male Heads; Andy Warhol, Self Portrait, 1986 synthetic polymer paint on paper; Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, 1975; Andy Warhol, Serious Girl, circa 1954, ink and graphite on paper. Images courtesy the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS).