Recognized in America chiefly for his films, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) in fact reinvented interdisciplinarity in postwar Europe. Pasolini self-confessedly approached the cinematic image through painting, and the numerous allusions to early modern frescoes and altarpieces in his films have been extensively documented. Far less understood, however, is Pasolini’s fraught relationship to the aesthetic experiments of his own age. InAgainst the Avant-Garde, Ara H. Merjian demonstrates how Pasolini’s campaign against neocapitalist culture fueled his hostility to the avant-garde. An atheist indebted to Catholic ritual; a revolutionary communist inimical to the creed of 1968; a homosexual hostile to the project of gay liberation: Pasolini refused the politics of identity in favor of a scandalously paradoxical practice, one vital to any understanding of his legacy.Against the Avant-Gardeexamines these paradoxes through case studies from the 1960s and 1970s, concluding with a reflection on Pasolini’s far-reaching influence on post-1970s art. Merjian not only reconsiders the multifaceted work of Italy’s most prominent postwar intellectual, but also the fraught politics of a European neo-avant-garde grappling with a new capitalist hegemony.
Ara H. Merjian is professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History. He is a member of the College of Professors in the Department of History, University of Milan, and the author of
Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris and
Blueprints and Ruins: Giorgio de Chicrico and the Architectural Imagination from the Avant-Gardes to Postmodernism, both from Yale University Press.
Introduction Heretical Aesthetics
Technical Sacrality/Heretical Aesthetics
Against the Avant-Garde
Communisl)
![Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism [Hardcover]](/itemImage/2/9/0/1/2_5354501.jpg "Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism [Hardcover]")