UGO RONDINONE: I ♥ JOHN GIORNO Dial-A-Poem Radio Marathon

On the occasion of Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno Red Bull Arts New York presents a Dial-A-Poem Marathon, featuring 28 artists, poets, and musicians presenting or performing work to audience members in the gallery. Celebrating Giorno’s pioneering career and the continued vitality of American poetry, the marathon will be recorded for later broadcast.

Created by John Giorno and active from 1969 to 1971, Dial-A-Poem was a series of phone lines that connected callers to answering machines with recordings of poetry, speeches, words, rants, mantras, and sounds left by a number of poets, musicians, artists and other cultural figures including Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Patti Smith, and others. It was first set up at the Architectural League of New York and later at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. Dial-A-Poem had a life beyond the telephone, too, in a series of albums released by Giorno Poetry Systems, Giorno’s record label and publishing arm, that included the works on the phone lineup as well as dozens of new texts.

The Dial-A-Poem Marathon revisits and updates Giorno’s historic project, presenting poetry, lyrics, and texts from initial participants as well as a new generation of authors.

In the spirit of the original project, poets will read alongside musicians, visual artists, and other cultural figures, generating a new body of text.

Participants include:
Penny Arcade, Janani Balasubramanian, Anselm Berrigan, Alexis Bhagat, Billy Cancel, Todd Colby, Steve Dalachinsky, Helga Davis, Chris Funkhouser, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, David Henderson, Shelley Hirsch, Bob Holman, Christopher Knowles, Julie Martin, E.J. McAdams, Jonas Mekas, Tracie Morris, David Moscovich, Tommy Pico, Nicole Sealey, Edwin Torres and more!

Special recordings by:
Christian Bok, Joan La Barbara, Michael Peters, Aram Saroyan, Anne Waldman, and Matthew Zapruder.

This public program was organized by Lauren Rosati on the occasion of I <3 John Giorno.

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About Lauren Rosati:

Lauren Rosati is a curator and art historian currently completing her Ph.D. at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she is writing a dissertation on sound and the historical avant-garde. She was previously the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in Performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015-2016), the Andrew W. Mellon Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (2014-2015), Assistant Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the National Academy Museum (2012-2014), and Assistant Curator at Exit Art (2007-2012). She is also the founding co-curator of AUDIENCE, a non-profit presentation organization for sound art and experimental music.