At the end of last week, I caught a budget flight to Milan to see a woman. As soon as I arrived I was bundled into a Fiat Panda and sped southwards for Bologna’s annual art weekend, its events ranging from the reverential to the ridiculous. In the latter camp was MAMbo’s John Giorno retrospective, which – for Giorno is a bona fide hero – promised to be superb.

It wasn’t, but a bad homage to Giorno is a homage to Giorno all the same. Born in Brooklyn in 1936, he joined the merchant navy as a young man and, on returning to New York, became both a highwire avant-garde poet and an acolyte of Andy Warhol, who filmed him sleeping for five hours straight and presented the result as mode-shifting cinema. The result is presented in its entirety here, surrounded by wallpaper covered with Giorno’s poster-poems.

Giorno didn’t hold back. Forcefully gay at a moment when, even in boho New York City, that could be a nosedive of a disadvantage, he sourced his verse from salacious newspaper cuttings, pornographic samizdat, whatever; it wasn’t in the least facetious, rather, a raised fist in defence of his medium and identity, and from early on he........

© The Spectator