John Giorno: The Performative Word is the first monograph dedicated to the American artist, poet, and activist John Giorno (1936–2019) and accompanies a retrospective exhibition presented at the MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, curated by Lorenzo Balbi.

Emerging from the New York downtown scene of the 1960s, Giorno developed a singular artistic voice at the crossroads of poetry, performance, painting, and political activism over the course of more than six decades. By bringing the written word off the page and into performance, technology, and visual art, Giorno consistently challenged disciplinary boundaries and advanced a radical vision of language as central to human expression. Though often positioned at the margins of multiple downtown scenes — the Beats, Andy Warhol’s Factory, punk music, queer counterculture, anti-war activism — he was in fact an influential presence within all of them, operating as a conduit between coexisting cultural communities. His collaborators included Robert Rauschenberg, William Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ugo Rondinone, among many others.

This publication introduces some of the many ways Giorno wove poetry into all aspects of daily life — by putting words on the wall, on the performance stage, on LP vinyl records, or on the telephone, in the context of the iconic Dial-A-Poem, one of his most celebrated works. A wide range of archival documents, images, and ephemera also form an intimate portrait of Giorno as an activist, performer, Buddhist practitioner, collaborator, and friend.

This publication was made possible with the support of Almine Rech.