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GIORNO’S PERFORMANCE:
completely inside of a totally mad situation

by Vincent Tinguely, Montreal
on John Giorno and his performance at the 2008 Festival Voix d’Ameriques

After John Giorno’s first headlining performance at the 2008 Festival Voix d’Ameriques, a solo show, I was gripped by a profoundly unprofessional urge. Seeing him emerge into the audience at the Sala Rossa, I rudely shoved my way past the poets and performers I’d been quietly hobnobbing with, intercepted him on his way to the bar and yelled, "That was REALLY FUCKING GREAT!" Giorno responded gracefully, diverting my energy into a quiet conversation about winter weather in Canada, before politely turning his attention to another supplicant.

The point of this isn’t my lack of social graces, per se, but rather the fact that Giorno’s performance had moved me in a way that I am only rarely moved. Whether it’s by a rock band, a poet or some other form of time-based art, it’s not often that I am as utterly galvanized by a performance as I was by Giorno that night.

Like so many experiences in our heavily-mediated world, my first exposure to the performance art of John Giorno came to me through film. In the early eighties, I drifted into Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Theatre, Halifax’s repertory cinema at the time, to see Poetry in Motion, a documentary film by Canadian director Ron Mann. I was curious to see William S. Burroughs. I’d already ingested several of his early novels – Naked Lunch, the cut-up trilogy Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded – and I wanted to see the face of this Beat icon. And so it was through the relative popularity of Burroughs that I was introduced to the esoteric realm of spoken word performance, including The Four Horsemen, Jayne Cortez, Allen Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima, Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman and John Giorno.

The film completely transformed my conception of poetry. Suddenly it was clear that poetry was not some musty antique artifact. Poetry was dynamic, poetry was absolutely vital, it was a living form. POETRY MOVED.
  

John Giorno in performance, at Montreal's 2008 Festival Voix d'Ameriques
John Giorno in performance at the 2008 Festival Voix d’Ameriques, at La Salla Rossa in Montréal, Quebec. Photo by Caroline Hayeur.

  
And in the forefront of the kinetic, sweating maniacs of poetry up on the big screen, there was John Giorno. John Giorno spewing forth some kind of mind-bending, disjointed tale of modern anomie, repeating phrases, motifs, and gestures. The way he moved, loving the mic, gesturing spasmodically like an erudite Joe Cocker, eyes closed upon an ecstatic inward landscape. "I like to be really drunk and stoned when I work," he says in a brief interview segment before his performance in the film. "It’s like a blade. It’s actually seeing if that’s exactly what I want to say, to somebody – whoever it is. That’s the beginning of that feeling that I get, that later on if it performs well, that one completely is inside of a totally mad situation. But I think the audience is very important because one figured out one is performing all the time. That’s one of the intentions of the poems."

Small wonder I began to try my own hand at poetry shortly after my exposure to this ground-breaking film. While an independent project in its own right, Poetry In Motion was also issued as part of a series of "Video Paks" by the Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS) label, and indeed, it strongly reflects Giorno’s curatorial focus on the series of over forty poetry anthologies GPS issued on LP and video from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. It was mainly through these anthologies that John Giorno stayed on my radar throughout the eighties.

Having missed the opportunity to catch The John Giorno Band at Foufounes Electriques in the eighties, my first chance to see him "live" came when curator W.J. Stanley brought him to Montreal for a group exhibit at articule gallery, and a performance at the intimate Geordie Space on September 21, 1996, where he read from his prose collection You Got To Burn To Shine.

But to say "he read" is inaccurate. Although Giorno stood with book in hand, his focus was on his audience throughout the "reading." It was clear he had spent the time to commit long prose passages from the book to memory, and his performance was very much as a raconteur or storyteller, spinning yarns about his memories of Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs and Keith Haring – and, almost incidentally, illuminating the intricacies of New York’s gay subculture, its commercial art scene and literary underground. It was a different John Giorno from the man I’d seen on film. In the eighties he had seemed like a man delivering his last words teetering at the edge of a cliff; now, he had transformed himself. He was a survivor, a warrior poet who had finally found time to draw a breath, to turn his gaze back on his life, and take pleasure in his memories.

Part of this impression came from the simple technical reality that Giorno was speaking prose, not poetry. Prose isn’t as compressed as poetry; prose breathes, it wanders, it doesn’t agonize quite so much over every syllable. But part of this impression came from a very real life change, the change that arrives for everyone, man or woman, with age. How does the man who titled a book You Got To Burn To Shine deal with the reality of ageing?

The answer, gleaned from Giorno’s three performances at the 2008 Festival Voix d’Ameriques, is to accept it, to acknowledge it, and at the same time, not to reject one’s past, because the past is part of what one is now. In other words, while Giorno may no longer be making himself "really drunk and stoned" these days, he retains the intensity of focus and intention that was at the core of those earlier performances.

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