«OH, ART IS TOO HARD»

After love affairs with Andy Warhol , Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, it’s no wonder that poet John Giorno has always maintained that contact with visual artists is more important to his work than the influence of other writers. "It occurred to me," said Giorno of the early 1960s in a 2002 interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, "that poetry was 75 years behind painting and sculpture and dance and music." So he set out to help it catch up. Inspired by his lovers and friends, Giorno started using found texts for poetry in 1962. He also did quite a bit of curating, starting a company called Giorno Poetry Systems to record himself and his colleagues reading poetry on LPs. For the 1970 Museum of Modern Art show "Information," a who’s who of conceptual art curated by Kynaston McShine that also included Joseph Beuys, Gilbert and George, Robert Smithson and Yoko Ono, Giorno contributed Dial-a-Poem, a service modeled on the then common telephone numbers giving the correct time and providing info on the weather.

-Artnet