In my independent museum visit experience, I opted for the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street. It seems out of all the museums I have had the pleasure to visit, the MoMA takes the crown in providing a new experience every time you visit. This time around, I spent the majority of my time, if not all, playing around and experiencing Chris Giorno’s “Dial-A-Poem” exhibit. 

Located on the 4th floor of the museum, the exhibit features 6 phones on separate table displays, with a small couch for seating in the middle of the array. Furthermore, in large bold letters, the words “DIAL-A-POEM” with a telephone number underneath is pasted on the wall surrounding the exhibit. The general ambience is quite inviting and offers viewers an interactive experience because the phones on display are meant to be picked up, followed by a random poem playing from the device. I couldn’t get enough of this exhibit. Every time I would pick up a phone, a new poem, story, or concept would be relayed back, and I have never thought something like this could be experienced in a typical museum environment. The overall tone, through the lighting, seating in the middle, and just the array, enabled a satisfying type of feeling every time you picked up a phone and heard something new. This satisfaction tapped into a cultural trend of the now “digital world” in which my generation craves to continuously pick up their technological devices. Although Giorno’s work was created for the “pre-digital world,” this exhibit being experienced by a future generation fueled by social media and smartphones can provide awareness on our reliance on technology. 

Giorno’s use of telephones as a medium to display poetry was a ground-breaking idea when he first explored it in 1968. The array shown in this exhibit stemmed from an earlier idea where Giorno transmitted recordings of poems to millions of callers throughout New York City in an instant, free of charge. These poems, as I mentioned before, were sometimes sounds or stories and diverted from the usual archetype of what a poem is. Giorno has been recorded to say that “Poetry is not, should not, cannot be confined to the printed word.” The inclusion of a variety of spoken word media that he includes in the devices conveys this very idea. He aimed to expand what it meant for something to be poetry and wanted to share this idea with viewers on a large scale. However, when picking up a phone, you are the sole viewer which also retains a sense of intimacy between you and the art you are experiencing. 

Regarding the specific works shown in the exhibit, on the wall surrounding the telephones, there are a multitude of papers that were used in the planning of how audio would be inputted in each respective phone. The documents were derived from the first presentation of “DIAL-A-POEM” in 1970 where Kynaston McShine organized Giorno’s prior work. Similarly, there is a video displayed through a projector that outlines the process of how Giorno prepped these “DIAL-A-POEM” systems on March 1, 1969.These two works in the exhibit show intention, by allowing the viewer to experience behind the scenes Giorno’s artistry and what went into the quality of his production. The scenes in the video and the system layout papers highlight the creation of a medium to convey poetry, while the telephone systems highlight the radical poetry itself. 

However, understanding the nuances of the exhibit and its display is only halfway through the journey of understanding Giorno’s purpose for this artwork. As mentioned earlier, organizing radical poems in these devices in 1970 was an opportunistic decision. Ushered by various social movements including the opposition to the war in Vietnam, Giorno chose to randomize over 200 different poems with three-fourths of those texts seen in the MoMa were from radical poets and political activists of the time. I find it so intriguing that Giorno simply is creating a method for a message to get out and is sending a message to the public by doing so. Giorno also said “what they have to say is so important now… At this point, with the war and the repression and everything, we thought this was a good way for the Movement to reach people.” This was such a bizarre thing to wrap my head around. Giorno didn’t have an agenda to push any media he had created, but instead used the telephones to cast forward a multitude of ideas from cultural movements separate from his production.  

The lesson I have taken away from this museum visit is that an artist does not always require a media production of their own. Giorno has taught me a new aspect of artistry that focuses on amplifying the creations of others through implementing new mediums to experience art.