John Giorno, who turned to the world of art and the mechanisms of mass media to shake poetry loose from the page and embed it more deeply in the fabric of everyday life, died on Friday at his home in Lower Manhattan in a building that he had made into a gathering place for practically everyone from the avant-garde of his time. His death, after a heart attack, was confirmed by the artist Ugo Rondinone , his husband. Possessed of Greco-Roman good looks and a gregarious, benevolent spirit, Mr. Giorno played an important role early in his life as a muse and lover of other artists, among them Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, who created his seminal 1963 film “Sleep” by focusing a mostly static Bolex movie camera on Mr. Giorno’s slumbering body for more than five hours, turning him into a filmic, Pop-era version of Mantegna’s Christ. But Mr. Giorno’s lasting contribution to art came through his restless experiments in the circulation and political potential of poetry, which he felt had been unjustly overshadowed by other genres of expression. “It occurred to me that poetry was 75 years behind painting and sculpture and dance and music,” he told the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2002, adding that he had been inspired, in part, by the way the work of Pop artists jumped the rails of the traditional art world and reached a broader audience.

Source: New York Times October 13, 2019 22:18 UTC