John Giorno’s Former Home Is Now One of New York’s Coolest Art Spaces

One recent evening, not far from the perfectly preserved bedroom of William S. Burroughs and a vintage Orgone Accumulator set up to capture esoteric energies, the late poet and artist John Giorno could be seen reciting the quizzical line “God, please fuck my mind for good!” He was present in the form of footage from a documentary from 1995, but the occasion was more timely: a 50th-anniversary celebration of Giorno Poetry Systems, a nonprofit that has been the impetus for some intriguing activity of late in downtown New York. 

Established in 1974 and ambitious in its undertakings before Giorno’s death in 2019, the organization had since been mostly devoted to matters of estate-planning and preservation before being revitalized by Anthony Huberman, who took over as executive artistic director early last year. Part of his premise was to go back to the roots of what Giorno—a longtime galvanizer and scene-maker known for his transgressive poetry and text-based visual art—had conceived to be a collaborative enterprise among artists working on the margins.

“What I think is important in our day, right now, is the idea of modeling an art world based on peer-to-peer mutual support and artists showing up for other artists, especially in a world so dominated by ruthless competition and billionaire-based philanthropy,” said Huberman, who worked previously for 10 years as the director and chief curator of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco. “Our model, at a smaller scale, involves artists, poets, and musicians trying to create conditions to make it possible for other artists, poets, and musicians to do what they do.”

Over the past year, the primary focus of Giorno Poetry Systems has been programming performances and events centered on artists showcasing or otherwise paying tribute to work other than their own. The setting is unique: a 19th-century YMCA building on the Bowery that Giorno called home since 1966—and, more specifically, a former locker-room floor in the building that Burroughs lived in on-and-off for decades. Affectionately known as The Bunker, the space retains Burroughs’s bedroom as he left it, with an old typewriter, a strange rifle-stand floor lamp, and things like ripped-up shooting-practice targets on the walls—as well as remnants of a Buddhist shrine that Giorno set up and used as part of a community meditation center.

The Bunker is currently open for free visitation on Tuesday evenings (“listen to records, browse books, say hello,” reads an invitation on the GPS website), and is used for ticketed events that serve as its main draw. Recent highlights include Elizabeth Peyton presenting a concert by Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, the singer of the punk band Iceage, whose portrait she has painted; fellow painter Leidy Churchman leading a meditation in total darkness with their teacher steeped in Tibetan Dzogchen tradition; and artist Nick Mauss talking with art historian Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen about “writing as artistic intervention.” Events to come include artist Niloufar Emamifar convening with sociologist Asef Bayat about protest movements in Iran, and author Dodie Bellamy reading from a forthcoming MIT Press book drawn from more than 2,000 out-there Amazon reviews written by the late Kevin Killian.

“We spent the year establishing [The Bunker] as a venue where artists are bumping into each other and an audience has access to that entanglement,” Huberman said. “We’re distinct from other organizations because the prompt we give artists is to share their interest in someone else, whether they want to talk about them or curate a performance or host a dinner salon. Whatever the format is can change, but the focus is on artists’ perspectives on the work of their peers.”

The same ethos applies to The Bookcase, an artist-curated shop within The Bunker that features books and records for sale in respective sections given over to more than two dozen artists including Kim Gordon, Philip Glass, Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Lucy Raven, and Anne Waldman. The selections offer a glimpse into an artist’s mind (see: writer Renee Gladman’s shelf space devoted to LPs by Alice Coltrane and poetry by Fred Moten).  

It also carries over into GPS Records, a label that Giorno started in 1972 to release LPs, tapes, and CDs of avant-garde music and spoken-word work by luminaries such as Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Frank O’Hara, Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, The Fugs, Bobby Seale, and countless others. Giorno Poetry Systems recently digitized the label’s first 13 releases and made them available on streaming services for the first time. (Among those releases are a compilation titled Biting Off the Tongue of a Corpse and three records related to Dial-a-Poem, the phone-based collective poetry project for which Giorno is best known.)

Huberman said GPS is working on plans to continue the record label with new artist-curated releases and to expand Dial-a-Poem with international editions for which callers can ring a number and hear randomly selected readings by poets in different languages. New Dial-a-Poem phone lines were recently activated in France and Mexico, and another will follow in January in Brazil.

After that, Huberman said he hopes to resurrect a grant-giving program that Giorno made an integral part of his practice after recognizing a need to help friends and fellow cultural travelers during the onset of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and continued through the early 2000s. But for now, the plan for the organization is to continue to cultivate The Bunker as a kind of art space that feels like a throwback to a time when artists and the culture that surrounds them could thrive on a small scale that would support big ideas.

“The goal is to foster community between artists in this town, and the scale of this room speaks to that,” Huberman said while seated at a communal table in The Bunker beneath artworks by Giorno and Keith Haring on the walls. “It’s at people-scale, so it’s about how people relate to each other. It’s not just about how great the art is, and I think this room is underlines that in productive ways.”