John Giorno, Let it Come, Let it Go | 38 St Marks Editions Portfolio

“When you’re a Buddhist, you work with your mind in meditation, and with various practices you train the mind to realize its empty nature. Strangely, that’s the way I make poems! Maybe it’s developing the ability to see what arises in one’s mind, how it arises and its nature, that makes Buddhism very sympathetic to poets.” — John Giorno

The cyclical message of this painting, Let if Come, Let it Go, emerges from Giorno’s long engagement with Tibetan Buddhism. An avid practitioner of the religion, Giorno draws both spiritual and linguistic inspiration from this tradition, yet the phrase is broad enough to encompass a plethora of associations such erotics, relationships, pain and politics. Since the 1970s, John Giorno has exhibited visual pieces generated from his poetry. Featuring short excerpts from his writing or phrases that have continually haunted him, these paintings, set on monochrome or rainbow backgrounds in their signature font, transform words to image.

John Giorno (b. 1936 in New York, NY) is an artistic innovator who has been defying conventional definitions of poet, performer, political activist, Tibetan Buddhist, and visual artist since he emerged upon the New York art scene during the late 1950s. In the 1960s, he began producing multi-media, multi-sensory events concurrent with Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. He worked with Rauschenberg’s Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) in 1966, and with Bob Moog in 1967-68. His breakthroughs in this area include Dial-A-Poem, which was first presented in 1968 at the Architectural Society of New York, and was later included in the MoMA’s Information exhibition in 1970. His contributions are significant to many culturally defining moments: the Beat generation, Pop Art, Punk, the Pictures Generation, and the hip-hop era. Giorno was recently the subject of Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno, a sprawling, multi-part exhibition that presented his extraordinary life and work at Palais de Tokyo in Paris and subsequently at thirteen non-profit institutions around Manhattan. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Musée National d ́Art Moderne, Paris; and Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; among others.