Poet and performance artist John Giorno is many things to many people. It depends on who you talk to. To some, he’s simply lost in translation. The author of Suicide Sutra and Thanks for Nothing is fatalistic, shockingly blunt, incendiary, controversial, and pornographic – according to his critics. His defenders claim the iconic figure in Gotham’s counterculture since the 1960’s is woefully misunderstood, instead seeing him as an innovator, a visionary, fierce, passionate, prophetic and teased with erotic charm. Our intrepid photographer, after spending a solid late summer afternoon with Giorno, came away with this impression, “He’s very sweet and kind – John radiates a certain happiness and gratitude towards the world. You can tell he is still thrilled to wake up and produce work all day –  creating art and making this his reality.” Ultimately, all characterizations may be correct, leaving us with an individual possessing a peculiar and electric mix of contradictions.

A native New Yorker, John Giorno was born in 1936. Armed with an Ivy League education (from Columbia), the former stockbroker turned poet gained his street-cred in the 1960’s underground. He began hanging out with those brash young artists who were on the cusp of immense notoriety – characters like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and Roy Lichtenstein. Giorno eventually ended up the protagonist in Andy Warhol’s 1963 film Sleep, which featured him sleeping for five hours. That led to another by Warhol called Handjob - we will spare you the details of this never released film. In his book You Got to Burn to Shine: New and Selected Writings (Serpent’s Tail, 1993), Giorno details his fast and furiously promiscuous youth.

He talks about his relationships with Warhol and artist Keith Haring and goes on to share how he was able to redirect his energies toward acts of humanitarianism through AIDS activism. In an effort to fight, with compassion, the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic, Giorno launched the AIDS Treatment Project in 1984, which provides direct financial support to people with AIDS.

John Giorno has also for more than four decades been innovating through poetry. It was in 1965 that his entrepreneurial spirit collided with his passion and he launched Giorno Poetry Systems. In short a record label, GPS allowed him to experiment with the use of technology in poetry, create new venues for delivery and introduce the art form to a broader audience. GPS has a catalogue of over fifty titles – LPs and CDs of poets working with performance and music, cassettes, poetry videos and film, poem paintings and books. Some of the poets and artists who recorded or collaborated with Giorno Poetry Systems were novelist (and his sometimes spoken word performance partner) William S. Burroughs, John Ashbery, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Mapplethorpe. Continuing to look for new opportunities, it’s said that following a phone conversation in 1968 with Burroughs, Giorno initiated the Dial-A-Poem service. It worked like this: several phone lines were connected to individual answering machines, and people could call GPS to listen to a poem offered from fragments of various live recordings by contemporary poets. As far as topics, a wealth of material was available to GPS given the times. Social, political and civil unrest, the sexual revolution and the Vietnam War stirred up at times feverish fits of public interest in the Dial-A-Poem service. And with this project, Giorno claims to have given impetus to the development of dial-for-stock market info and dial and for sports-info services that become so ubiquitous.

Although he’s firmly planted in the modern age, Giorno’s living and workspace recalls a New York of the 60’s and 70’s, when an artist could live in a huge loft on the Bowery and just create all day. He has three generously sized loft units in what was the first YMCA in New York. One is his apartment where he sleeps. Another is more like a studio for his words on canvas projects. The other, known as “the bunker”, is the apartment that he leased to Burroughs for several decades. All three units are a little dank but open and bright, with the exception of the Burroughs apartment: not much light there. Meanwhile, it would be an intriguing exercise to tag John Giorno before releasing him into the wild as his craft keeps him at a curious pace that takes him to multiple destinations. Brussels, Berlin, Paris, London are all recent stops. And there’s no indication that he plans to slow down.

Text by Erickson S. Blakney
Photography by Weston Wells

“Until now, every magazine was a bunch of pages stapled together. It arrived in your mailbox folded, mutilated spindled — usually with more ads than editorial. Last year, a group of us enjoying the sun, skiing and unique cultural climate of Aspen Colorado, asked ourselves, ‘Why?’

Why, for example, couldn’t a magazine come in a box? Why shouldn’t an article exploring jazz be accompanied by an LP record illustrating in sound our words in print? Why couldn’t each article be a separate booklet, in the shape, color and paper most appropriate to the subject?

We kept asking why for months. Aspen magazine is the answer.” – August 1966 advertisement for Aspen

Since I first stumbled upon some excerpts from Aspen my freshman year in college, I have been enthusiastically telling anyone who will listen that the magazine stands, perhaps alongside Wyndham Lewis’ and Ezra Pound’s Vorticist journal BLAST from the 1910s, as easily the best (and, for that matter, although here the hyperbole is somewhat less warranted, most influential) publication of the 20th century.  Regardless of its short run and truncated distribution – it only spanned ten ‘issues’ over six years – its influence on contemporary media radiates through to even the most somnambulant of readers, as magazines such as Visionaire (and, perhaps, even our own Dossier) have picked up on Aspen‘s discursive folding-over of various, often incongruent, forms of media; and, crucially, they have appropriated its sort of lofty self-awareness of, among other things, the very implications of publishing: of calling this disseminated assemblage of various works a ‘magazine.’

But you really don’t need me to convince you of anything. The list of  contributors that founding editor Phyllis Johnson brought together for Aspen‘s short run is truly astounding, and should, in a sort of silent, coercive demonstration, do all of the convincing itself.  Among them: Andy Warhol, John Cale, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, Marcel Duchamp, Philip Glass, Richard Serra, Jasper Johns, Ken Jacobs, J.G. Ballard, John Cage, Carolee Schneemann, Morton Feldman, Timothy Leary, Gerard Malanga, Alain Robbe-Grillet Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Richter, John Lennon, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, La Monte Young.

Like its contemporary cousin Visionaire, Aspen has had the good fortune of being regarded as a ‘collector’s item’; and, unfortunately, for most that means that getting a copy of a fully-intact issue is something of a monetary issue.  Thankfully, UbuWeb has been kind enough to post every issue, in its entirety, on its site, in a very clean, navigable layout.  Click on the image above (of the cover of the third issue, designed by Andy Warhol) to navigate to that page.