Randy Kennedy

For more than 50 years, artist Lawrence Weiner has worked with a primary material so plentiful as to be practically endless: words. And he has made his language-based works on so many different kinds of surfaces — walls, floors, windows, matchbooks, manhole covers, hats, drinking glasses, industrial fish crates that wander through ports like vagabond billboards — it sometimes seems as if there is no place where a Lawrence Weiner could not conceivably appear. But Weiner, who turns 77 in February, has long held a special reverence for artist’s books, of which he has made dozens, some in humble editions so small he distributed them himself by leaving them behind in coffee shops. (“I still do,” he says. “I just don’t tell anyone.”)

Weiner is one of the fathers of conceptual art, which, beginning in the 1960s, attempted to turn its back on object-making and instead present ideas themselves, in the most evanescent of forms, as art works. His foundational 1968 statement helped set the terms of the movement, or at least the terms of the debate over its terms:

“1. The artist may construct the piece.

“2. The piece may be fabricated.

“3. The piece need not be built.

“Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.”

If you think of this three-point proposition as the Father, Son and Holy Ghost of the conceptualist creed, Weiner’s work has often existed in Holy Ghost mode.

Works like “An Object Tossed From One Country to Another” (1969) or “Stacks of Severed Trees Laid Beside a Fissure in the Earth” (2007) remain purely linguistic sculpture, verbal descriptions of actions or states not enacted or embodied; an object is not tossed; trees are not severed.

In 2004, during a visit to Berlin, slightly bored and perched on a bar stool, Weiner struck up a conversation with a man next to him, London designer and artist Jonathan Ellery, a founder of Browns studio. The two stayed in touch, writing, seeing each other when they happened to be in the same city. Their deepening conversations led to the idea of making a book together, but for years the plan seemed destined to stay a kind of Holy Ghost. “It very well might have never happened, because we’re both at ease with things that aren’t supposed to be,” Ellery, 54, says. “But then it came together.”

The highly anticipated book, “Here It Is, Here It Aint,” to be published in January by Browns Editions, is an elliptical 68-page waltz of words and images that shimmies poetically away from attempts to elucidate narrative or metaphor, though it may be offering some considerations about the present political climate.

(Weiner’s phrase “With a Lateral Move Forward,” in bright red lettering, is the first thing the reader sees.) It is the first collaboration in many years by Weiner, who has previously made books with fellow artists like Edward Ruscha and John Baldessari and writers like French scholar Luc Vezin.

Ellery recently visited Weiner’s studio in Manhattan’s West Village. These are edited excerpts from their conversation.

RANDY KENNEDY: At the time you met Lawrence in Berlin, did you know who he was?

JONATHAN ELLERY: No idea. Just the other guy at the bar. A perfect way of meeting, really.

LAWRENCE WEINER: We got to know each other and we kept talking. And I must say I like to work with people who are good at what they do, who know how to do things. I relate it to brushing your teeth before you go out on a date.

JE: [Laughs.] There’s an analogy!

LW: I mean there’s a dignity and respect that should be involved in making something. In getting it right. Making the design suit the gravity of what you’re trying to put out.

RK: You’ve collaborated often on books, but this is the first time with someone who hails primarily from the design world.

LW: People often see art and design as very, very different worlds, but I disagree. Every time you make a work of art and have to show it to somebody, there are theatrics involved. Theatrics require a sense of design.

JE: Lawrence has always been well loved in the design world but mostly, I think, because he works with type. It suits designers. They’re not thinking much deeper. They just like the aesthetic: “Oh, it’s type!” But for me, Lawrence was the only person I’d ever worked with who had done more books than I had. His team was as sharp as me and my team about ink and paper and binding, about smell and feel.

LW: Which was lucky. But I think we’re missing the point of what’s worthwhile to talk about. It’s not about the specifics. It’s about the concept. Why would you throw a very talented designer and, it turns out, a reasonably talented artist together in the same pot? It’s what we thought we were going to get that interested me.

RK: What did you hope for? Many years ago you described the ideal condition of being an artist as being “perplexed in public ... because the artist was to be invested in things that did not have a pat answer.”

LW: We’re stuck in an aesthetic now in the art world where people have the answer and then try to rationalize the question. We did this in order to enter something into the culture in a way that the culture has to adapt in order to use it. Well, that’s what art should do!

JE: This morning I found an email Lawrence sent me a couple of years ago, when we were really working toward something. He said: “My envisagement of the work would be like one of those people on the street with a cardboard box and three walnut shells and the public is supposed to find which shell the pea is under, very much like three-card monte. And all of the images that inspired you would be translated into a composite image, a development that would allow us to speak of our anguish and speak of our aesthetics in a presentation of line and form.” It ends: “I think that with the inherent talents we have, we can come up with an innate book that, when found, requires no explanation other than itself, because in fact it does not refer to anything but itself.”

RK: Do you think the book feels like a document of its time?

JE: Through most of it there was Brexit and Trump, and we enjoyed the freedom of being international when it seems that no one wants anyone to be international anymore. So that was certainly the backdrop, certainly in our minds. As for the book itself …

LW: I don’t really know what “a document of its time” means. I think of this as two people who have a tendency to tell the truth and of the possibility that truth might collect. I’m very pleased we got a book out of this. I thought we were going to lose our friendship in the middle, if you want to know the truth. It didn’t look good.

JE: It’s not easy to put two strong sensibilities together, even if the people tend to get on with each other.

LW: This was about making each one of these pages into the right thing without having to explain it. You miss it sometimes, you don’t see it the same way. What can you do?

JE: There’s a page of mine in the book with writing that says “A soft landing is not a given.” And it wasn’t. It’s wonderful to have this book in the world, but it was quite rough along the way. As I guess it should be. But I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Would you, Lawrence?

LW: Oh, God no. Not unless you’re a masochist.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/arts/design/here-it-is-two-artists-on-their-mind-stretching-art-book.html" id="da8c8033-025d-3e22-ab9a-97c31156c88f">The New York Times</a>.

“Ideally,” painter Frank Auerbach once said, “one should have more material than one can possibly cope with.”

'Here It Is': Two Artists on their Mind-Stretching Art Book

His death, after a heart attack, was confirmed by artist Ugo Rondinone, his husband.

Possessed of Greco-Roman good looks and a gregarious, benevolent spirit, 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 Giorno’s slumbering body for more than five hours, turning him into a filmic, pop-era version of Mantegna’s Christ.

But 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 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.

“In 1965, the only venues for poetry were the book and the magazine, nothing else,” he said. “Multimedia and performance didn’t exist. I said to myself, ‘If these artists can do it, why can’t I do it for poetry?’ ”

That year he founded Giorno Poetry Systems, a nonprofit foundation, to promote his work and that of his peers. And four years later, inspired by a phone call with his friend, writer William S. Burroughs, he started Dial-A-Poem, a rudimentary mass-communication system for cutting-edge poets and political oratory.

Initially using six phone lines connected to reel-to-reel answering machines in a room at the Architecture League on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it was callable around the clock for anyone with a few minutes and a desire to be read to.

Millions of people dialed in, hearing verse recited by poets like Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Peter Schjeldahl and Ron Padgett, later joined by dozens of other poets and groups like the Black Panthers.

At a time when the culture at large and the art world were still relatively prudish and also deeply homophobic, Dial-A-Poem — which was featured in the highly influential Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 — was often unabashedly erotic and heavily gay in content. (The service is still in operation, now at the number 641-793-8122.)

“It seems strange that in 1968, everything was still externally puritanical,” Giorno told Obrist. “We all took lots of drugs, and in our personal lives were liberated. But in the media, and outside world, pornographic or erotic images were never used.”

His own work drew heavily from the ideas of the found imagery that fueled the pop revolution and also from the tradition of the ready-made — plain, found objects presented as art — articulated by Marcel Duchamp and filtered through the writing of Burroughs and Brion Gysin. In his earliest work, Giorno mined news items and presented them virtually untouched as verse, as in this piece from his first, privately circulated collection, “The American Book of the Dead,” in 1964:

A plainsclothesmanwas beaten to his kneesby a mob of teenage girls yesterdaywhen he and his partnertried to break up a fightbetween two girl gangsin a school yardin the Bedford-Stuyvesantsection of Brooklyn.

John Giorno was born Dec. 4, 1936, and raised in Brooklyn and Roslyn Heights, on Long Island. His father, Amadeo Giorno, whose family Giorno traced to Norman nobility in Puglia and Basilicata, Italy, owned a clothing manufacturing company and his mother, the former Nancy Garbarino, worked as a fashion designer.

Giorno, an only child, said that he discovered his sexuality in his early teens when he began to lust after attractive priests when his parents took him to church.

He graduated from James Madison High School in Brooklyn, which Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Bernie Sanders attended around the same time; to the end of his life, Giorno spoke of the importance of the English teachers he encountered at the school. In 1958, he graduated from Columbia University, where he had met Ginsberg. During a brief stint as a stockbroker, Giorno began to befriend artists and poets like Warhol and Ted Berrigan and filmmaker Jonas Mekas.

He and Warhol were living together off and on when Warhol came up with the idea of filming Giorno sleeping, naked.

“He said to me on the way home: ‘Would you like to be a movie star?’ ” Giorno told The Guardian in 2002. “ ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I want to be just like Marilyn Monroe.’”

Though Warhol and Giorno split in 1964, the movie — which was among the first footage Warhol ever shot and which became an underground classic — linked them indelibly in postwar art history.

In 1962, Giorno had moved into a hulking Queen-Anne-style building on the Bowery that had been built as the first YMCA and then had a second life as a warren of studios for artists, including Mark Rothko and Fernand Léger.

He eventually occupied three spaces in the building, one of which became known as the Bunker, christened as such by Burroughs, who began living there part time, in a windowless former locker room, in 1975.

After Burroughs’ death in 1997, Giorno preserved his bedroom just as he left it, with his hat hanging from a hook across from his single bed, his manual typewriter on a small stand and a working blowgun resting against the wall.

In 1963, the artist Wynn Chamberlain threw a 27th birthday party for Giorno in the building that became renowned later as a remarkably comprehensive snapshot of the emerging art scene at the time: attendees included Warhol and Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank O’Hara, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Frank Stella, Barbara Rose, Roy Lichtenstein, John Ashbery, Merce Cunningham and John Cage.

“They didn’t really know me,” he told Obrist. “It was billed as a pop birthday party for a young poet. By the late ’60s, everybody became very famous and nobody went to anybody’s party anymore. It was over.”

For more than three decades Giorno, a longtime practicing Buddhist, also hosted annual gatherings known as fire pujas in the building for hundreds of Tibetan Buddhist adherents.

Over several decades, Giorno Poetry Systems produced dozens of albums, videos and events of the work of Giorno and other writers, musicians and artists, and in 1984 the foundation started the AIDS Treatment Project, which disbursed hundreds of thousands of dollars to help those suffering in the epidemic.

For the past several years, Giorno had been at work finishing a memoir, titled “Great Demon Kings,” scheduled to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next year, which he said he hoped would communicate the possibilities of a life radically open to art and to others. In a 2006 poem titled “Thanx 4 Nothing,” written on his 70th birthday, Giorno wrote:

May every drug I ever tookcome back and get you highmay every glass of vodka and wine I ever drankcome back and make you feel really good,numbing your nerve endsallowing the natural clarity of your mind to flow free,may all the suicides be songs of aspiration,thanks that bad news is always true,may all the chocolate I’ve ever eatencome back rushing through your bloodstreamand make you feel happy,thanks for allowing me to be a poeta noble effort, doomed, but the only choice.

This article originally appeared in

John Giorno, Who Moved Poetry Beyond the Printed Page, Dies at 82

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 Friday at his home in New York in a building that he had made into a gathering place for practically everyone from the avant-garde of his time. He was 82.

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Randy Kennedy

Articles written by the author

'Here It Is': Two Artists on their Mind-Stretching Art Book

John Giorno, Who Moved Poetry Beyond the Printed Page, Dies at 82