American poet and performance artist († 2019). Founded the production company Giorno Poetry Systems. Warhol’s 1964 Sleep film features Giorno sleeping on camera for five hours. His text-based poetry evolved rapidly in the late 1960s, often with radical political content. He was also an AIDS activist. In 2008, his first career-spanning collection of poems was published. In the later years, he exhibited profusely in well-known contemporary art galleries.
About his work:
The work of John Giorno embraces two disciplines: poetry and art, which have been a source of mutual fascination and inspiration for the artist. Giorno is recognized today as one of the most influential poets of his generation. He is also considered the inventor of Performance Poetry, and of Dial-A-Poem - a free telephone line to connect listeners to recordings of original works of poetry. Giorno's words transform to images in his Poem Paintings which are short excerpts from his writings, phrases that have continually haunted him. At the crossroads between poetry, visual arts, music and performance, Giorno's work directs itself toward a broad public, redefining the capabilities of poetry and linguistic form.