John Giorno

kurimanzutto presents John Giorno: Life Is a Killer, the first solo exhibition in Mexico City by the American artist, poet, and activist (1936–2019).

The exhibition brings together works on canvas and paper, wall paintings, audio recordings, videos, and live performances to explore Giorno’s prolific creative practice through language. His iconic phrase reappears in paintings, recordings, performances, and publications throughout the exhibition, reflecting Giorno’s conviction that a poem did not end on the page, but took on a life of its own and acquired new meanings each time it was transformed into another medium.

Some of these wall paintings and works on canvas, or Poem Paintings, a series Giorno began in the late 1980s, appear in stark black-and-white contrasts or vivid rainbow colors, transforming words into visual compositions. These works draw on the graphic language of Pop art and on the exchange between poetry and the visual arts that characterized New York at the time, an environment also shaped by Giorno’s relationships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Andy Warhol. His lifelong commitment to Tibetan Buddhism also informed his conception of language as something that could be continually reinvented through repetition, scale, color, and context.

In these monumental paintings and works on canvas, phrases such as LIFE IS A KILLER, SPACE FORGETS YOU, and EVERYONE GETS LIGHTER reveal how shifts in scale, color, and architecture can transform the experience of words that reappear again and again. Responding to the architecture of the building, these wall paintings extend Giorno’s poems beyond the canvas and allow language to occupy the gallery space.

The exhibition also includes a selection of screenprints from the late 1960s and early 1970s, based on newspaper headlines, magazine articles, and advertisements, alongside texts by Giorno himself. Two of these works use the double-column format that Giorno employed repeatedly, inviting audiences to read the poems aloud and bringing voice, rhythm, repetition, and the multiple layers of language to the forefront.

As a reminder of Giorno’s lifelong commitment to performance, a suspended microphone hangs at the center of the gallery above a platform that serves as a stage for live presentations. Surrounding it are four turntables, made in collaboration with artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who knew Giorno well. They can be used to play vinyl records released by Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS), the nonprofit organization Giorno founded in 1965. The recordings include a selection spanning the history of GPS, including The Dial-A-Poem Poets: Totally Corrupt (1973), Big Ego (1978), and Life Is a Killer (1982). Visitors can select and play the LPs themselves, making it possible for up to four recordings to play simultaneously. As visitors put on the records, voices fill the gallery, combining poems into an ever-changing soundscape. These recordings reflect Giorno’s commitment to taking poetry beyond the page and bringing it to new audiences in everyday life.

To further explore Giorno’s figure through performance, the gallery’s project room presents untitled 2008 (john giorno reads) (2008) by Rirkrit Tiravanija. Filmed over several days at Giorno’s home at 222 Bowery in New York, the ten-hour film follows the artist as he performs poems, shares music, and recounts anecdotes spanning five decades of his career. The work reflects Tiravanija’s desire to preserve Giorno’s energy, as well as the friendship and artistic dialogue between the two. The film also invites viewers to experience the intimate environment in which Giorno lived, worked, and performed.

Following the spirit of the peer-to-peer exchange that GPS has fostered for decades—in which one artist is invited to present the work of another artist they admire—the organization has also invited Abraham Cruzvillegas, who in turn invited La Bruja de Texcoco to perform on September 9 at 222 Bowery. As an extension of Giorno’s commitment to amplifying voices beyond his own, the event continues the mission of GPS to foster creative exchange between emerging artists and audiences.

In honor of Giorno’s legacy, a program of readings, performances, workshops, and public events will take place in collaboration with artists, poets, and performers working in Mexico City, approaching poetry as a shared act of performance and translation.

La Americana, an independent bookstore specializing in books from across the Americas, will coordinate a translation workshop in which poets, editors, and writers will read poems by Giorno and his contemporaries to produce new Spanish-language versions that approach translation as a creative and interpretive act. These translations will be presented in the gallery, broadcast live through Montez Press Radio, and published in a zine by La Americana and kurimanzutto libros. Additional readings and performances will take place throughout the exhibition.

In addition, the gallery’s bookstore will present an archive of photographs, publications, documents, recordings, and ephemera spanning Giorno’s life and practice. Drawing from materials related to Dial-A-Poem, GPS, Buddhism, the artist’s political activism, and his collaborations, the archive reveals how, throughout his career, poetry, performance, and community became inseparable.

—kurimanzutto