News

The Fondation is currently closed. We look forward to welcoming you back on 17 October for the exhibition "Pop Forever. Tom Wesselmann &..."

Dial-A-Poem

  • 1968
  • John Giorno
  • Four telephones, each containing a record of the voices of 80 poets reading 200 poems, reandomly delivered to the listener.
  • 22 x 26 x 12 cm each
For more than four years, people could dial 212 628 0400 and listen to recordings of poems being read by artists and poets such as Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashberry and Bobby Seale. Dial-A-Poem has taken different forms over the years. In 2012 it became an installation composed of four telephones linked to 200 recorded poems, played at random.

© John Giorno. Photographie © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Félix Cornu

Hangs

John Giorno

A cult figure of the New York underground scene (he is the sleeper in Warhol’s "Sleep"), a member of the beat generation, artist and poet, John Giorno founded the Giorno Poetry System label.

Between 1965 and the late 1980s he produced more than 40 albums including the first recordings by William Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Andy Warhol and Bryon Gysin, to name just a few of the many writers and artists he frequented at the time. Today, he still believes that poetry must be present at all times in life, and accessible to everyone.

Read more

In the same hang