Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present “space forgets you”, an exhibition featuring works by the artist and poet John Giorno. It is Giorno’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. In the early 1960s, the poet John Giorno realized that poetry was at least 75 years behind art in its development. While emerging Pop-Artists started to find their sources in mass-culture and copy-and-paste newspapers and to use advertisements in their works, poetry still remained within its established modernist paradigm. John Giorno became friends with the pioneers of Pop-Art – and even lovers with Andy Warhol –, notably Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns on the threshold of their success, and applied their techniques to his own writing. Consequently, Giorno created texts through the techniques of Pop-Art and brought them from paper into space.
In “space forgets you”, John Giorno arranges parts of the work Dial-A-Poem, in which texts are ordered via telephone, together with texts which can be read on monitors and listened to simultaneously through headphones, and a variety of his poem paintings.
In 1965, John Giorno founded his label and network Giorno Poetry Systems. The foundational idea behind Giorno Poetry Systems was to gain a bigger audience for poetry and thereby shorten the gap between mass audience and poetry. In 1968, after a call with William Burroughs, he developed the project Dial-A-Poem. People could call and directly listen to a recording of the Giorno Poetry Systems. Through Dial-A-Poem, Giorno made use of information technology as a media to spread texts long before the invention of the internet as we know it today. Among the dialable texts were not only traditional poems but also other contemporary texts, such as extracts from Jim Carrolls’ Basketball Diaries or from William Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch, read by Frank Zappa. The technique was subsequently adopted by news channels and banks to spread information about the stock market, weather, and sports.
Giorno then began to tour the United States with Burroughs. Together, they performed their texts in rock clubs. This mode of performing stands as one of the foundations of Spoken Word Poetry and Poetry Slam. In “space forgets you”, Giorno’s performance presentation of texts is reenacted through monitors. In his performances, he speaks freely and does not rely on paper that would build a barrier between poet and audience.
Giorno approaches the internet as a medium that revitalizes poetry. The short form of tweets and other posts is often used to condense other content found elsewhere on the internet: “Everybody works with words now, constantly, so that’s a new form of poetry taking shape which includes lots of other media, lots of other techniques. Just even texting. A brilliant person texting is like a haiku. Everything is minimalist on twitter, where you only have 20 words. ”
In “space forgets you”, John Giorno takes his multimedia-based treatment of language into space. Within the exhibition, poem paintings, flat-screens and the presence of old-fashioned telephones overlap, and remind us of the fact that the internet is much younger that Giorno‘s innovative poetic techniques. However, it occurs to the viewer that the short messages of his poem paintings do not originally come from his canvases but rather from the screens that today reproduce news millions of times over. In other words: directly from the internet. Depending on one’s visual perspective the texts arrange themselves anew and make the viewer move through the exhibition: As if John Giorno had exhibited the internet itself.
John Giorno was born in 1936 in New York, NY, where he still lives and works. Dial-A-Poem was shown in 1970 in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and exhibited since in galleries. In 2015/2016, a retrospective curated by Ugo Rondinone took place at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. His books of poetry include: Poems by John Giorno, New York: Mother Press, 1967; Johnny Guitar, New York: Angel Hair Books (today Artist Books), 1969; Balling Buddha, New York: Kulchur Foundation, 1970; Birds, New York: Angel Hair Books (today United Artist Books), 1971; Cancer in my left ball: Poems, 1970-1972, New York: Something Else Press, 1973; Shit, Piss, Blood & Brains, New York: The Painted Bride Press, 1977; Grasping at emptiness, New York: Kulchur Foundation 1985; You Got to Burn to Shine: New and Selected Writings, New York: Serpent’s Tail Publishing Ltd, 1993; Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962-2007, New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008. His published recordings including: Rasberry and Pornographic poem, The Intrevenus Mind Records, New York [LP33], 1967; You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With, East side Digital, Audio CD, 1993 (together with Laurie Anderson and William Burroughs).
Tillmann Severin
For more information, please contact Andreas Grimm.

OPENING : FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 6 TO 8 PM.

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