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John Giorno's performance: completely inside of a totally mad situation
part 3
review by Vincent Tinguely
Underlying all of this performative activity is Giorno’s concept of the venue. In Giorno’s poetics, the poem is the key, and every form that the poem takes in order to transmit itself from the poet to the audience is a ‘venue’. In other words, a poem printed on a page is one venue; a poem performed by the poet live on stage is another venue; a recording of the poem on an LP is a third venue. The form the venue might take isn’t what is important – what is important to Giorno, is how effectively the poem can be made to reach a wide audience. Performing with musicians was simply one more ‘venue’ for Giorno to explore throughout his career.
On 2 February and 3 February 2008, Giorno was featured in a line-up of poets and spoken word artists from the francophone milieu of Montreal, and from the anglophone milieu of Canada. As is the practice in francophone Quebeçois literary performance, Giorno and the other performers worked with musicians from Quebec’s improv-based musique actuelle scene. While performing "Wisdom of the Witches" on 2 February, the musicians were visibly responding to the nuances of Giorno’s ecstatic lines, as his eyes seemed to open and close in rhythm with the cadence:
Put your ear
To the stone
And open your heart
To the sky
However, perhaps because of the rhythmic quality of Giorno’s delivery, the musicians of 2 February sometimes seemed willing to simply supply a riff or beat, rather than plunging into the almost telepathic responsiveness
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But I must say, my favourite performances of Giorno came during the second set of his solo show on 1 February: the unaccompanied versions of "Demons in the Details," an ironic tribute to his Beat predecessors, and especially, "Thanks For Nothing." Hearing Giorno perform "Thanks For Nothing" was like seeing a man build a tower, single-handed, out of thin air. Is there grief? Let it be a foundation stone for this tower. Is there anger? Let it form the lintel of this door to the tower. Is there joy? Strong buttresses to the tower. He dwells within the tower -– he is at the still point, the eye of the hurricane, as he conjures all the intensity and chaos of lived existence.
The key to this piece is Giorno’s Buddhist practice. As he stated during a question and answer session on the afternoon of 3 February, it has only been in the past decade that he’s been able to include Buddhism as a subject in his work. Without understanding this, the signature line "Thanks for nothing," or lines like, "The bad news is always true," could come across as cynical or pessimistic. However, Giorno really, literally means it when he says, "Thanks for nothing," because from the perspective of a Buddhist, form is emptiness, and everything received must be empty because it will inevitably fade away. So everything from "the bad news" to "countless lovers of boundless sex" is nothing ... for which Giorno gives heartfelt thanks.
This brings me back to Giorno’s concept of the venue again. The poem is like life itself: it can take the form of a text on a page, or a recording, or a film, or a performance. The performance, the recording, are like the traces of life’s fleeting existence. The poem comes, the poem goes; it lasts a moment on stage, perhaps a little longer in its recorded form, and when it is gone, was it ever really "there"?
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