A2. | EP.4 | S.12 | John Giorno: No Nostalgia

(participants)

Alina Enero, Anthony Huberman, Hanneke Skerath, & Carlos Valladares

(Organizations)

Marciano Art Foundation

(Master Shot)

AROUND LA - MONTAGE

(A)

INT. "GAVE A PARTY FOR THE GODS" PAINTING BACKDROP - AFTERNOON

Before the painted assembly of gods, ALINA stands in a white dress against a black void. She recites the text of the painting. One voice becomes many. Through the triptych she multiplies, each apparition entering on a slight delay until the frame swells into a chorus, a congregation of goddesses speaking across time, as though the painting itself has awakened and found its voice.

(B)

INT. - "FILLING WHAT IS EMPTY EMPTYING WHAT IS FULL" BACKDROP

A dissolve carries Alina into another landscape, now clothed in white against a white field. She no longer merely occupies the space. She generates it. Her figure doubles, triples, then proliferates until the architecture is inhabited by her successive selves. Presence becomes atmosphere. Body becomes landscape. She dissolves into the field she has conjured, empty and full at once.

(c)

INT. - "I RESIGNED MYSELF TO BEING HERE" BACKDROP

At the edge of day, the white cube and concrete floor become a threshold between worlds. One panel of the diptych slowly slips beneath the earth like a setting sun. Between the two remaining frames, Alina passes impossibly from one to the other, as if crossing dimensions rather than distance. She pauses only briefly before turning away, walking beyond the frame and into the gathering dusk, leaving the image behind like the final trace of an apparition.

(Film Abstract)

What happens when painting extends beyond the canvas? Beginning with the JOHN GIORNO: NO NOSTALGIA exhibition at the Marciano Art Foundation, this micro-film examines how painting operates across language, performance, recording, exhibition, and public circulation. Drawing from an interview with Giorno Poetry Systems Art Director Anthony Huberman, who describes Giorno's paintings as "venues" for language, alongside the conversation with exhibition curators Carlos Valladares and Hanneke Skerath on the return of genuine feeling in exhibition making and the performative condition of painting, filmmaking, and poetry once they enter the public sphere, the film interweaves the observational and constructed moments that Giorno's language sets into motion. Painting is approached not only as an object but as a point of departure through which images, language, and cultural meaning continue to circulate.

Featuring Alina Enero, Giorno’s poems are performed before his paintings, gradually separating from their source through repetition, phasing, layered recordings, and delay. As the imagery drifts from language toward rhythm, breath, and duration, the silence of painting emerges not as a static image but as a site where perception continues to unfold across space and time.

The film approaches montage as the cinematic extension of collage, bringing painting, language, performance, and exhibition into a shared field of perception. Working within the scenes established by Giorno's paintings, it unfolds through repetition, rhythm, duration, jump cuts, and dissolves, allowing meaning, and the destabilization of meaning, to emerge through the movement between frames. The film considers how abstraction, language, and spirituality continue to circulate through the spaces we inhabit each day: exhibitions, computers, smartphones, and digital platforms. In doing so, it proposes that while the painting does end at the edge of the canvas surface, it also extends into the gallery, and into the temporal and spatial rhythms of everyday breathing.