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

Patti Smith seems to be everywhere these days. She’s got a new book Just Kids, an upcoming tour, and just opened an exhibition of drawings, photographs and personal things: Patti Smith and Steven Sebring: Objects of Life.

There were some great faces in Chelsea’s Robert Smith Gallery during the opening night: Michael Stipe turned up to congratulate Patti, Ryan McGinley and Terry Richardson were there, even my beloved film archivist Jonas Mekas came out, and it was nice to notice the abundance of older art lovers, not only the typical gallery opening show-offs.

There was a reason why all these great people came. In the exhibition, the persona that is Patti Smith gets featured in four ways: you can find her drawings and writings; still-lifes of her iconic belongings done by Steven Sebring, a photographer, who spent a decade filming Patti and put it into a documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life; another room is highlighting Patti Smith as a performer with grand images of stage acts and singing; and the middle of a gallery is dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe, as seen through Patti Smith’s camera lens.

The exhibition is powerful and insightful. The pictures of Patti Smith’s belongings talk about the icon that she is: her beat boots, her guitar, a necklace, childhood dress, luggage covered in old concert stickers, a Polaroid camera, a tambourine made by Robert Mapplethorpe. The objects in towering pictures appear illuminated, translucent. Real objects lay right there on pedestals: there’s a knight’s helmet, few pictures, a typewriter, and a Jeanne d’Arc book, which seems so fitting here.

Steven Sebring documents Patti on stage as well: pictures of her performing are powerful, and the image of Patti’s face with a bandana covering her eyes is breathtaking. However, here she is as a public persona, a performer. Her drawings – raw, outlined scribblings with text, sticky tape, lines drawn on dark albumen silver prints, attached pictures, screen prints of buildings – feel like free hand sketches, private and instinctive. The drawings are recent works, some of them created in collaboration with Steven Sebring, meanwhile Patti’s pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe remember the late ’60s and ’70s and her relationship with him. This part of exhibition introduces Patti’s new book, Just Kids.

The exhibition sums up everything that makes Patti so iconic: it’s not only her music, but her free spirit, non-conformism, style, and her relationships.