Ara H. Merjian
New York University, Italian Studies and Art History, Faculty Member
- Harvard University, Romance Languages and Literatures, Post-DocNew York University, Fine Arts, Faculty Member, and 3 moreadd
- French and Italian Avant-gardes, Art History, Friedrich Nietzsche, Modernism (Art History), Film Studies, Contemporary Art, and 29 moreCinema, Giorgio de Chirico, Surrealism, Dadaism & Surrealism, Futurism, Italian Futurism, Film Theory, Metaphysical Painting, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 20th century Avant-Garde, Modern and Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts, Neorealism, Armenian Genocide, Anti-Fascism, Italian fascism, Italian Fascist Architecture, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italian Studies, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Modernism, 20th Century Italian Literature, Art Criticism, Fascism and Modernism, History of Art, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Italian Cinema, Free Indirect Discourse, and Briony Feredit
- Ara H. Merjian is an art historian and Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an Affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History.edit
This year marks the centenary of Surrealism, or more specifically the publication of its founding manifesto and attendant journal. The title of the latter, La Révolution surréaliste (issued from 1924 to 1929), made plain the movement's... more
This year marks the centenary of Surrealism, or more specifically the publication of its founding manifesto and attendant journal. The title of the latter, La Révolution surréaliste (issued from 1924 to 1929), made plain the movement's ambition: nothing less than a social and political revolution, a radical synthesis of unconscious desire and waking reality.
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Nearly as familiar as Surrealism's imagery is the movement’s fixation on Freudian psychology: used not as a therapeutic tool, but as a thread to plumb the untapped depths of the unconscious, its drives and desires. Far less recognized... more
Nearly as familiar as Surrealism's imagery is the movement’s fixation on
Freudian psychology: used not as a therapeutic tool, but as a thread to plumb the untapped depths of the unconscious, its drives and desires. Far less recognized today are Surrealism’s engagements with Marxist politics—as fraught, and ultimately abortive, as they were impassioned. As attested in the titles of two of their journals—La Révolution Surréaliste and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution—insurrection was no ancillary metaphor to this enterprise, but its driving force and ultimate purpose. To that end, the Surrealists came—gradually, fitfully, and often uneasily—to reconcile the movement’s metaphysical ambitions with Marxist materialism.
Freudian psychology: used not as a therapeutic tool, but as a thread to plumb the untapped depths of the unconscious, its drives and desires. Far less recognized today are Surrealism’s engagements with Marxist politics—as fraught, and ultimately abortive, as they were impassioned. As attested in the titles of two of their journals—La Révolution Surréaliste and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution—insurrection was no ancillary metaphor to this enterprise, but its driving force and ultimate purpose. To that end, the Surrealists came—gradually, fitfully, and often uneasily—to reconcile the movement’s metaphysical ambitions with Marxist materialism.
Research Interests: Comparative Politics, French Studies, Marxism, Surrealism, Marxist theory, and 11 moreDialectical Materialism, Interwar Period History, Avant-Garde, 20th century Avant-Garde, André Breton, History of Modern France, European Avant Garde, Dadaism & Surrealism, Interwar Europe, Dialectical Image, and Marxism socialism and culture
At more than 300 pages, Carla Lonzi's absorbing and innovative Self-Portrait (1969) records her interactions with 14 different artists over the course of the 1960s. Now, for the first time, a welcome translation by Allison Grimaldi... more
At more than 300 pages, Carla Lonzi's absorbing and innovative Self-Portrait (1969) records her interactions with 14 different artists over the course of the 1960s. Now, for the first time, a welcome translation by Allison Grimaldi Donahue for Divided Press offers English readers the opportunity to read one of postwar Italy's most eccentric and irreducible texts.
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Dorothea Tanning’s Fatala (1947) reveals a solitary a female figure reaching her hand through a door which is also a book. Even as it animates this arrested space with a sentient female presence, Tanning’s canvas borrows from Giorgio de... more
Dorothea Tanning’s Fatala (1947) reveals a solitary a female figure reaching her hand through a door which is also a book. Even as it animates this arrested space with a sentient female presence, Tanning’s canvas borrows from Giorgio de Chirico's Metaphysical images, which formed one of Surrealism’s most prominent—and fraught—precedents. Tanning’s painting also conjures up another set of aestheticized fatalities by yet another of the Surrealists’ elected forebears: Marcel Allain’s series of detective fiction books, titled Fatala: Grand roman policier (1930–31). Tanning’s Fatala reveals the ambivalent centrality of women to Surrealism’s development: not simply as femme enfant or femme fatale, but as inventive agents in spaces – psychic, literary, and pictorial – plotted by men.
Research Interests: Art History, Feminist Theory, Surrealism, Painting, Literary Theory, and 14 moreCrime fiction, Detective Fiction, History of Art, American art/ Art of the United States, Modernism (Art History), 20th century Avant-Garde, Dadaism & Surrealism, Dorothea Tanning, Surrealist Women, Giorgio de Chirico, Surrealismo, Roman Policier, Metaphysical Painting, and Women and Surrealism
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An art historian and an expert on internet culture discuss media, technology, and political collage.
Research Interests: Political Theory, Political Science, Dada, Internet memes, Weimar Republic, and 11 morePhotomontage, Critique as Political Practice, The Internet, Dadaism, Memes, Dadaism & Surrealism, John Heartfield, Transmission of Cultural Tradition Via Memes, Berlin Dada, Memes, Internet Memes, Internet culture, and Dank Memes
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s tireless opposition to neocapitalism throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s took “Africa” as the allegory and instantiation of political resistance tout court – a fact not surprising given the number of countries which... more
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s tireless opposition to neocapitalism throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s took “Africa” as the allegory and instantiation of political resistance tout court – a fact not surprising given the number of countries which began wresting back their sovereignty from European colonizers during these years. Yet there is another dimension of Africanness – bound up with the continent’s history yet simultaneously alien to it – that figures prominently in Pasolini’s aesthetics throughout the period: the African-American community and its particular cultural and counter-cultural expressions. By virtue of the United States’ fraught racial politics, sprawling ghettoes, and imperialist ambitions, the country figured prominently into Pasolini’s “third-world” imaginary in a variety of media
and genres – representations relatively overlooked in his influential oeuvre, and which this article examines in detail.
and genres – representations relatively overlooked in his influential oeuvre, and which this article examines in detail.
Research Interests: Black Studies Or African American Studies, African Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Race and Racism, 1960s (U.S. history), and 15 moreCold War and Culture, Gay And Lesbian Studies, Critical Race Theory, Class, Race and Ethnicity, Communism, Post-Colonialism, African American History, African American Studies, New Left and the 1960s, Pier Paolo Pasolini, African-American Political Thought, Race and Class, Cultural and Political Activism of the 1960s and 1970s, and Post Colonial Theory
As the first Italian-born movement since the Renaissance to leave its mark on the international artworld, Futurism energized, and antagonized, an entire era. Seeking to liberate Italy from its role as Europe’s cultural cemetery—a... more
As the first Italian-born movement since the Renaissance to leave its mark on the international artworld, Futurism energized, and antagonized, an entire era. Seeking to liberate Italy from its role as Europe’s cultural cemetery—a storehouse of quaint relics, an open-air museum for the ages—the poet, publisher, and impresario Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proposed a ruthless purge of his nation’s aesthetic and ideological sentimentalisms.
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Filmmakers around the world have adapted the stripped-down style of postwar Italian cinema to create visual languages suited to local stories of postcolonial life and struggle.
Research Interests: Film Theory and Practice, Film Studies, Film Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Global Studies, and 15 moreItalian Cultural Studies, Italian Cinema, THIRD WORLD CITIES, Cinema, 'Third Cinema' Theory and Third World Radical Films, Italian neorealist cinema, Cinema Studies, Realism, Neorealism, Postwar Europe, Third Cinema, Italian Neorealism, History of Film Theory and Criticism, Third world Marxisms/Tricontinental Marxisms (Mao, and Modernism and Posmodernism in Post World War Two North America
Research Interests: Architecture, Cold War and Culture, Utopian Studies, Guy Debord, Urban Studies, and 12 moreModernist Architecture (Architectural Modernism), Situationism, Modernism (Art History), 20th Century French Literature, Situationist International, French Cultural Studies, Giorgio de Chirico, Metaphysical art, Architecture and Public Spaces, Lettrisme, Situationisme International, and Modernism and Posmodernism in Post World War Two North America
A survey of prominent intellectuals on the subject of ‘Fascism and Culture’ in 1926 prompted some fittingly conflicted replies. ‘Surely you jest?’ responded the journalist and novelist Curzio Malaparte: ‘A Fascist art? Just what might... more
A survey of prominent intellectuals on the subject of ‘Fascism and Culture’ in 1926 prompted some fittingly conflicted replies. ‘Surely you jest?’ responded the journalist and novelist Curzio Malaparte: ‘A Fascist art? Just what might that mean?’ One subject, however, already offered a means of figuring Fascism’s abidingly equivocal essence. ‘For the moment’, Malaparte writes, ‘the only original and powerful artistic expression of fascism is Mussolini himself. Spurred by the retrospective attention to the Duce’s portraits in 1932, the sculptor Renato Bertelli (1900–1974) emerged from relative obscurity to design one of the most striking images from Fascism’s twenty-year rule. It was, in fact, the very countlessness of Bertelli’s portrait – or more specifically, of its reproductions – that distinguished its import and impact. Not long after the work’s debut, Bertelli applied for a patent. After it was granted in July 1933, he set about distributing the design in a range of formats and sizes. This article places Bertelli's sculpture in the context of iconographic precedents both contemporary and archaic, while venturing an argument about the political etiology and effects of its proverbial "continuity."
Research Interests: Design, Design History, Fascism, Futurism, History of Sculpture, and 14 moreSculpture, Modernism (Art History), Philosophy of Time, Fascism and Modernism, Modernism, History of Design, Time Perception, 20th century Avant-Garde, Italy, Italian fascism, Benito Mussolini, Fascist propaganda, Modern Italy, and Italian Futurism
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Pondering the legacy of Jannis Kounellis, a titan of Arte Povera, away from the crowds of Venice.
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It has long formed an art historical truism that Ferrara’s notable Jewish history reinvigorated Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical painting after 1915, when he settled here to serve during World War One. “It was not simply the workshops,... more
It has long formed an art historical truism that Ferrara’s notable Jewish history reinvigorated Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical painting after 1915, when he settled here to serve during World War One. “It was not simply the workshops, the streets, or the people which drew [him] to it,” writes the art historian Paolo Fossati on de Chirico’s time in the city’s former ghetto, “but a certain culture and a precise intelligence.” How, precisely, did such an intelligence manifest itself? What formed the extant dimensions of such a culture? What, in short, is actually “Jewish” about de Chirico’s painted Jewish Angel, or his professed pictorial “evangelism,” or the increasingly involuted spaces of his painting after 1915? To reduce the question of Jewishness solely to its symbolic content is to miss a vital facet of Metaphysical imagery. For de Chirico’s avowed “Israelite system” distills ostensibly Jewish moral and cultural tendencies not simply to an arcane iconography, but – more ambitiously and ineffably – to an “ascetic” economy of painted form.
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Despite its seemingly singular curiosity, 'Hebdomeros' was not, in fact, de Chirico’s only novel. Begun in 1934 but never definitively completed, his second novel, 'Monsieur Dudron,' remains extant today in a number of disparate versions... more
Despite its seemingly singular curiosity, 'Hebdomeros' was not, in fact, de Chirico’s only novel. Begun in 1934 but never definitively completed, his second novel, 'Monsieur Dudron,' remains extant today in a number of disparate versions and editions.
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It is perhaps the fate - and perhaps the desire- of every manifesto to become obsolete. Yet, if it is to succeed at the moment of its issue, the text must pretend to a glorious permanence, an almost suicidal definitiveness. Does a... more
It is perhaps the fate - and perhaps the desire- of every manifesto to become obsolete. Yet, if it is to succeed at the moment of its issue, the
text must pretend to a glorious permanence, an almost suicidal definitiveness. Does a manifesto by any other name pack the
same punch?
text must pretend to a glorious permanence, an almost suicidal definitiveness. Does a manifesto by any other name pack the
same punch?
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Always Two: An Interview with Michelangelo Pistoletto
Fifty years after its first outing, the artist reprises his legendary Walking Sculpture performance in the US.
An interview with Ara H. Merjian
Fifty years after its first outing, the artist reprises his legendary Walking Sculpture performance in the US.
An interview with Ara H. Merjian
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Exactly fty years ago, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy’s controversial writer-activist- lmmaker, made his rst of two galvanizing visits to New York.
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Since the start of the Greek debt crisis in 2010, austerity measures have had a profound impact on life in the country. From biennials to occupations, Ben Davis and Ara H. Merjian reflect on how the art scene in Athens has responded.
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This is the ninth in a series on the legacies of World War I appearing on CNN.com/Opinion in the weeks leading up to the 100-year anniversary of the war's outbreak. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is guest editor for the series. Ara Merjian the author of... more
This is the ninth in a series on the legacies of World War I appearing on CNN.com/Opinion in the weeks leading up to the 100-year anniversary of the war's outbreak. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is guest editor for the series. Ara Merjian the author of "Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris, Modernism" (Yale University Press, June 2014).
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Luca Buvoli's single-channel video, Velocity Zero (2007-9) features various sufferers of aphasia – the brain disorder affecting speech (and often cognition) – as they read aloud the eleven points of F.T. Marinetti's ‘Founding and... more
Luca Buvoli's single-channel video, Velocity Zero (2007-9) features various sufferers of aphasia – the brain disorder affecting speech (and often cognition) – as they read aloud the eleven points of F.T. Marinetti's ‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909). First screened at the Venice Biennale in 2007 as part of a larger installation, this revision of Futurism – on the eve of its centenary – entails a literal re-reading of the movement's founding text. Combining live-action footage overlaid with animation, and filmed in both English and Italian versions, Velocity Zero unstitches the movement's ostensibly streamlined poetics. In the mouths of these readers, the manifesto's language is decelerated, elided, pulled apart, giving the lie to a Futurist dream of dehumanized speech and speed. Yet many of the readings approximate Marinettian principles even as they undercut them; involuntary slips and omissions wrest a new poetics from imperative fiats. Buvoli's work thus sets into relief some vital, if unlikely, affinities: between physiological disability and avant-garde prowess, between clinical diagnosis and critical methodology. Velocity Zero restores to Futurist pronouncements the fraught embodiment of language. But it also suggests the extent to which the movement – like modernism at large – was haunted by linguistic demolition from the start.
Research Interests: Aphasia, Fascism, Video Art, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism, and 13 moreModernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Postmodernism, Modern Poetry, Fascism and Modernism, Modernism, Italian Futurist Literature, Postmodern Literary Theory and Popular Culture, Manifestos, Postmodernity, Italian fascism, Futurist Studies, Giacomo Balla, and Italian Futurism
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Page 1. FASCISM, GENDER, AND CULTURE Ara H. Merjian In the wake of a post-World War II, leftist intellectual reckoning which needed to distance its politically suspect forebears, the no tion that fascist ideologues permitted - indeed... more
Page 1. FASCISM, GENDER, AND CULTURE Ara H. Merjian In the wake of a post-World War II, leftist intellectual reckoning which needed to distance its politically suspect forebears, the no tion that fascist ideologues permitted - indeed encouraged - di ...
T.J. Clark, preface to Heretical Aesthetics
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Recognized in America chiefly for his films, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) in fact reinvented interdisciplinarity in post-war Europe: as poet, painter, journalist, novelist, art critic, film theorist, and unrelenting polemicist. Having... more
Recognized in America chiefly for his films, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) in fact reinvented interdisciplinarity in post-war Europe: as poet, painter, journalist, novelist, art critic, film theorist, and unrelenting polemicist. Having studied with the distinguished art historian Roberto Longhi, Pasolini self-confessedly approached the cinematic image through painting. 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. In Against the Avant-Garde, Ara H. Merjian demonstrates how Pasolini’s campaign against neocapitalist culture fueled his hostility to the theory and practice of the avant-garde, even as his work drew upon its activity and helped to dynamize it in turn. An atheist indebted to the rituals of Catholic sacrality; 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. Like his theory of aesthetic “contamination,” these paradoxes prove vital to any understanding of his legacy, something Against the Avant-Garde examines through the lens of case studies from the 1960s and 70s: abstraction and informalism, pop art, Arte Povera and land art, and performance and body art, concluding with a reflection on Pasolini’s far-reaching consequence for contemporary art since the 1970s. Merjian’s volume not only reconsiders the work of Italy’s most prominent post-war intellectual, but also the fraught politics of the European neo-avant-garde as it grappled with a new capitalist hegemony.
Research Interests: Film Studies, Film Theory, Marxism, Modern Italian History, Contemporary Art, and 15 moreCultural Cold War, Painting, Performance Art, History of Capitalism, Capitalism, Pop Art, Cinema, 20th century Avant-Garde, Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Avant-Garde, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italian Modernism, Arte Povera, Post-World War II history, and Les théories hérétiques de Pier Paolo Pasolini
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Painted in Paris on the eve of World War One, the Metaphysical cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) redirected the course of modernist painting and the modern architectural imagination alike. Giorgio de Chirico and the... more
Painted in Paris on the eve of World War One, the Metaphysical cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) redirected the course of modernist painting and the modern architectural imagination alike. Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City examines the two most salient dimensions of the artist’s early imagery: its representations of architectural space and its sustained engagement with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Centering upon a single painting from 1914 – deemed by the painter “the fatal year” – each chapter examines why and how de Chirico’s self-declared “Nietzschean method” takes architecture as its pictorial means and metaphor. The first, full-length study in English to focus on the painter’s seminal work from pre-war Paris, the book places de Chirico’s “literary” images back in the context of the city’s avant-garde, particularly the circle of Guillaume Apollinaire. Merjian’s study sheds light on one of the most influential and least understood figures in 20th-century aesthetics, while also contributing to an understanding of Nietzsche’s paradoxical consequences for modernism.
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Capter Four of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City
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On the artistic afterlife of the Italian filmmaker, poet, novelist, and polemicist.
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e ´diteur des correspondances e ´changées avec Georges Bataille et Jean Paulhan. Les illustrations de ce livre célèbrent les poèmes de jeunesse de Leiris, inspirés par les peintres de la rue Blomet (Paris quinzième) et dispersés dans des... more
e ´diteur des correspondances e ´changées avec Georges Bataille et Jean Paulhan. Les illustrations de ce livre célèbrent les poèmes de jeunesse de Leiris, inspirés par les peintres de la rue Blomet (Paris quinzième) et dispersés dans des revues e ´phémères (La Révolution surréaliste, Messages, etc.) ou les collections privées de livres d'artistes. Dans les années 1920 Robert Desnos, Marcel Duchamp et Max Jacob sont déjà auteurs d'exercices col-lectifs basés sur des jeux de mots. Leiris procède en empruntant la forme d'un lexique, c'est-a `-dire des mots-entrées classés dans l'ordre de l'alphabet, tout en détournant l'objectif du dictionnaire, puisqu'il ne propose que des définitions subjectives obtenues au moyen des techniques de jeux de langage: par exemple, 'glossolalie (la glotte y sonne un hallali)'. Partant, l'ordre des mots ne suit plus les règles grammaticales, Leiris démanti-bule le langage pour imbriquer de nouvelles relations sémantiques ou pour y introduire des jeux sonores, qui font fi des règles syntaxiques, le plus souvent au profit de néolo-gismes et de jeux avec la typographie. Leiris apparaıˆt alors comme un auteur charnière entre les poètes Alphonse Allais et Guillaume Apollinaire — maıˆtres de la contrepèterie et du calligramme avant la Grande Guerre — et les nouvelles générations affranchies des formes classiques. Ces procédés sont a ` la fois ludiques et intellectuels pour Leiris, dans la mesure où les définitions font souvent appel au calembour et s'inspirent aussi de traditions interprétatives e ´sotériques, comme la mantique (divination). Avec Bagatelles végétales, Leiris laisse davantage libre cours a ` son imagination en s'affranchissant de la forme du dictionnaire, pour e ´laborer une sorte de traité constitué de proverbes, regroupés de manière thématique comme dans une encyclopédie. L'association est le principal moteur des procédés employés par Leiris, qui s'inspire notamment de savants, comme Sigmund Freud. Ce point n'est peut-e ˆtre pas assez développé dans l'Introduction de Louis Yvert, surtout soucieux d'e ´tablir une chronologie fine des textes (rédaction et publication). Rappelons, en effet, que la psychanalyse tend a ` expliquer les rêves, les lapsus et les symp-tômes névrotiques a ` partir des mêmes mécanismes: association, condensation, déplace-ment, etc. A ` noter que ce jeu avec le savoir a peut-e ˆtre davantage séduit les intellectuels que des poètes: un des grands intérêts du dossier e ´tabli par Louis Yvert est de citer de larges extraits de Gérard Genette, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss et Jean-Paul Sartre. Cependant, je pense qu'on peut e ´tablir d'autres liens avec des recherches savantes au début du vingtième siècle, puisque c'est aussi pendant cette période que l'anagramme fait l'objet des essais linguistiques de Ferdinand de Saussure, qui les analyse comme des jeux du système de la langue et les identifie comme les plus anciennes techniques de la poésie et du corpus e ´sotérique.
Research Interests: Philosophy, Art History, Architecture, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Avant-Garde and Politics, and 12 moreNietzsche, Modernism (Art History), Modernism, Heraclitus, 20th century Avant-Garde, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, German philosophy, Paris, European Avant Garde, History of Paris, Giorgio de Chirico, Architecture and Public Spaces, and Metaphysical Painting
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This essay considers how modernism undertook both to depict the spaces of modernity, and to remake them in its own image, by turns radical and reactionary. I focus on activities in and around Paris from the late nineteenth century up... more
This essay considers how modernism undertook both to depict the spaces of modernity, and to remake them in its own image, by turns radical and reactionary. I focus on activities in and around Paris from the late nineteenth century up until the Second World War, with an emphasis on activity around the First World War. I also attempt an overview of European modernism at large, particularly as it engaged with Parisian examples, especially those bound up with the city and its visual rehearsals.
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Nearly every piece of writing on Bruno Munari’s career includes passing nods to Dada and Surrealism: aesthetic (and anti-aesthetic) precedents casually appended to the more obvious influences of Constructivism and Concretism upon his... more
Nearly every piece of writing on Bruno Munari’s career includes passing nods to Dada and Surrealism: aesthetic (and anti-aesthetic) precedents casually appended to the more obvious influences of Constructivism and Concretism upon his prodigious body of work. Munari’s seemingly inexorable progression toward graphic and industrial design – the practices on which he le his most enduring mark – passed through various, successive stages, in ected in turn by Futurism and the Bauhaus, Abstraction-Création and Arte Programmata, among other movements and tendencies. These affinities appear well documented in scholarship. The nature of Munari’s rapport with Surrealism and Dada, however, has yet to receive any sustained examination – something this chapter aims to redress, considering along the way not simply Munari’s absorption of European currents, but the fittful reception of Dada and Surrealism in Italy at large.
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Most historians of the cinema know Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923) solely as the author of two early essays on film, or, alternatively, as the originator of those strange appellations, “The Sixth Art” and “The Seventh Art.” Canudo’s... more
Most historians of the cinema know Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923) solely as the author of two early essays on film, or, alternatively, as the originator of those strange appellations, “The Sixth Art” and “The Seventh Art.” Canudo’s involvement in cinematic theory, however, complemented a prodigious cultural activity in early twentieth-century Paris, almost unrivaled in its scope and scale. This essay focuses on Canudo's role as a precocious theoretician of film and a tireless animator of avant-garde activity. It seeks, furthermore, to understand these roles in relation to one another: How did Canudo’s close rapport with painter, poets, and musicians shape his conception of the cinema as a unifying medium? In what ways did Canudo’s enduring sympathies for Symbolism – as well as his precocious advocacy of Cubism, Orphism and other avant-garde movements – inflect his burgeoning film theory? How did Canudo’s expansive, “synthetic” model stand in comparison to subsequent theories of cinematic “specificity”? In proposing some tentative answers to these questions, I address both the theoretical dimensions of Canudo’s writings on film, as well as the larger oeuvre (film society management, manifestos, colloquia, novels, etc.) of which they formed a notable part.
Research Interests: Art History, Avant-Garde Cinema, Film Theory, Film History, History of Art, and 12 moreModernism (Art History), Modernism, Cinema, 20th century Avant-Garde, Film and Media Studies, Cinema Studies, French Avant-Garde, Paris, Guillaume Apollinaire, French and Italian Avant-gardes, History of Film Theory and Criticism, and Ricciotto Canudo
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As perhaps the most prominent Italian designer of the twentieth century, Bruno Munari also remains its most elusive and ineffable. Nearly every piece of writing on his career includes passing nods to Dada and Surrealism: aesthetic (and... more
As perhaps the most prominent Italian designer of the twentieth century, Bruno Munari also remains its most elusive and ineffable. Nearly every piece of writing on his career includes passing nods to Dada and Surrealism: aesthetic (and anti-aesthetic) precedents casually appended to the more obvious influences of Constructivism and Concretism upon his prodigious body of work. Munari’s seemingly inexorable progression toward graphic and industrial design – the practices on which he left his most enduring mark – passed through various, successive stages, inflected in turn by Futurism and the Bauhaus, Abstraction-Création and Arte Programmata, among other movements and tendencies. These affinities are well documented in scholarship. The nature of Munari’s rapport with Surrealism and Dada, however, has yet to receive any sustained examination – something this essay aims to redress, considering along the way not simply Munari’s absorption of European currents, but the fraught and fitful reception of Dada and Surrealism in Italy at large.
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The Beat Generation emerged shortly before Pier Paolo Pasolini—exiled to Rome following a sexual scandal in his native Friuli—took up residence on the capital’s outskirts, navigating between the subproletariat squalor upon which his... more
The Beat Generation emerged shortly before Pier Paolo Pasolini—exiled to Rome following a sexual scandal in his native Friuli—took up residence on the capital’s outskirts, navigating between the subproletariat squalor upon which his poetry drew, and an increasingly prominent role in Rome's high literary scene, earned through the very same verse. Though they had reached their peak prominence during the mid- and late 1950s in America, the Beats’ Italian afterlife crested at the end of the following decade. This essay addresses not only Pasolini's direct exchanges with Ginsberg, but also the wider context of the Beats’ reception in Italy; chiasmatically, it considers Pasolini’s extensive reflections on American subculture during the 1960s. Pasolini's fitful rapport with Beat culture sheds light on the wider paradoxes of his own corpus, including his fraught rapports with Communist officialdom, his affinities for racially and sexually marginalized cultures, and his brief fixation upon American culture as a beacon of New Left change.
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For a painting of such tiny dimensions, Salvador Dalí’s Apparatus and Hand (Aparell i mà) stirred up a rather large polemic upon its hanging at Barcelona’s Saló de Tardor in October of 1927. The previous summer found the painter on three... more
For a painting of such tiny dimensions, Salvador Dalí’s Apparatus and Hand (Aparell i mà) stirred up a rather large polemic upon its hanging at Barcelona’s Saló de Tardor in October of 1927. The previous summer found the painter on three months’ leave from military service, working on this small oil panel at his habitual holiday perch on the shores of Cadaqués. Having drawn upon nearly every modernist tendency on offer in Europe over the past several years – from Cubism and Futurism, to Purism and Metaphysical painting, whether in succession or combination – Dalí began with this summer’s work to slough off the traces of derivation. At once more “personal” and increasingly in tune with the burgeoning Surrealist movement in Paris, Dalí’s newest images – Apparatus and Hand and two versions of Honey is Sweeter than Blood – pack their spaces with a seemingly endless store of diminutive imagery, and recede into ever more distant horizons. At this transitional moment in his personal trajectory, Dalí makes visible the mutual implications of apparently contradictory conceptions of the human body as they percolated in the European avant-garde: rigidity and elasticity, organicism and artificiality, rationalism and oneiricism, scaffolding and flesh. For a brief moment, Apparatus and Hand managed to conflate seemingly contrary poles of the European avant-garde. Even as he began expressing an active desire to join Breton’s clan – making a first foray to Paris in April of 1926, and entering Surrealist circles fully by the spring of 1929 – he pledged in a letter to Lorca to keep his work “at the edge of Surrealism.” It is at this temporary edge, and its treatment of the body, that we find some insights into interwar European painting at large.
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Most historians of the cinema know Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923) solely as the author of two early essays on film, or, alternatively, as the originator of those elusive appellations, “The Sixth Art” and “The Seventh Art.” Canudo’s... more
Most historians of the cinema know Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923) solely as the author of two early essays on film, or, alternatively, as the originator of those elusive appellations, “The Sixth Art” and “The Seventh Art.” Canudo’s involvement in cinematic theory, however, complemented a prodigious cultural activity in early twentieth-century Paris, almost unrivalled in its scope and scale. He authored several novels, ballets, screenplays and volumes of poetry; theoretical treatises on music; a study of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s theater; a literary adaptation of Abel Gance’s film, La Roue; and nearly one thousand critical essays on topics ranging from the castles of Puglia to the painting of Marc Chagall. During the same years, he organized colloquia on Mediterranean languages and culture, lectured regularly at the École des Hautes Études on the literary legacy of Dante, and founded the world’s first Cinema club, the Club des Amis du Septième Art. In ways similar to his colleague, Guillaume Apollinaire, Canudo formed a vital nexus between artists and critics, and similarly championed the cause of French modernism with the fervor of the converted (both were permanent emigrés to Paris). The founder and editor of the ground-breaking journals Montjoie! and the Gazette des Sept Arts, as well as a contributor to the some of the most prominent publications from the turn of the century, Canudo served as a lightening rod for both the Parisian avant-gardes at large, and early film theorists in particular. Few figures in the history of early twentieth-century cinema were as prominent or as polyfacetic as Canudo. As Richard Abel writes, the pre-War tendency to view film as a synthesis of the arts gradually gave way to arguments about the specificity of cinema. This essay contends that Canudo must be seen as both an initiator of, and an exception to, this general shift.
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Setting out in his Fiat 1100 from the Ligurian coast in June of 1959, Pier Paolo Pasolini spent the next couple months wending his way around Italy’s seemingly endless shoreline, arriving—at summer’s end—in the northeastern seaport of... more
Setting out in his Fiat 1100 from the Ligurian coast in June of 1959, Pier Paolo Pasolini spent the next couple months wending his way around Italy’s seemingly endless shoreline, arriving—at summer’s end—in the northeastern seaport of Trieste, not far from the Slovenian border. Commissioned by the magazine Successo, Pasolini’s spirited travelogue appeared in successive issues, illustrated with shots by the photographer Paolo di Paolo of chaises longues and beachside cafés, the holiday jet-set and throngs of teenagers clad in swimwear. Expertly translated by Stephen Sartarelli (whose renderings of Pasolini’s poetry came out from University of Chicago Press in 2014), this handsome English-language edition of Pasolini’s features photographs by Philippe Séclier, who retraced Pasolini’s journey, taking images that provide striking counterpoints to the text and update di Paolo’s repertoire in a more personal, intimate vernacular.
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Research Interests: Modern Italian History, Abstraction, Autonomia, Operaismo, Neo-Avant-Garde, and 9 moreArte Povera, Modern Italy, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Antonio Negri Mario Tronti Massimiliano Tomba Raniero Panzieri Riccardo Bellofiore operaismo, Post-War Italy, Operaismo, Autonomia and Post-workerism, Piero Manzoni, and Monochrome Painting
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On the Museum’s tenth anniversary – inaugurated on May 30, 2010 – a new large display enhances the Collection’s project, displaying in the gallery dedicated to it a nucleus of works by nine masters representing the vitality and diversity... more
On the Museum’s tenth anniversary – inaugurated on May 30, 2010 – a new large display enhances the Collection’s project, displaying in the gallery dedicated to it a nucleus of works by nine masters representing the vitality and diversity of artistic research in Italy. Masters not yet present in the MAXXI Collection and who, thanks to a contribution from the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism on the occasion of this important anniversary, will become part of it.
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Bearing prominent geometries and consistently architectural dimensions, Dean Monogenis' paintings reveal an unswerving affinity between their painted spaces and the built environment at large. That he paints chiefly upon wooden panel –... more
Bearing prominent geometries and consistently architectural dimensions, Dean Monogenis' paintings reveal an unswerving affinity between their painted spaces and the built environment at large. That he paints chiefly upon wooden panel – itself a building material – only underscores the fundamentally tectonic preoccupation of his imagery. The utter newness of the images' buildings renders all the more unsettling their bizarrely arrested development, or apparent abandonment. A figurative world bereft of figures. Form supersedes any apparent functionalism, marking with meticulous precision a spatial trajectory leading nowhere.
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Panel Discussion: Mystery and Truth in "Pasolini’s Bodies and Places" Ara H. Merjian (Associate Professor of Italian Studies, NYU) in conversation with Ann Goldstein (editor and translator, New York), Breixo Viejo (Film scholar,... more
Panel Discussion: Mystery and Truth in "Pasolini’s Bodies and Places"
Ara H. Merjian (Associate Professor of Italian Studies, NYU) in conversation with Ann Goldstein (editor and translator, New York), Breixo Viejo (Film scholar, Columbia University), and Benedikt Reichenbach (editor and graphic designer, Berlin).
Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York University, 24 West 12 Street
March 6, 6:30pm
In 1980 in Rome, the two film critics - Michele Mancini and Giuseppe Perrella - produced an elaborate, 600-page volume of images from all of Pasolini’s films, organized into an extensive taxonomy of “bodies” and “places”: Pier Paolo Pasolini: Corpi e luoghi. Reviews of the time praised it as “the most Pasolinian publication to date” (Alberto Farrasino); as “an indispensable tool for future research on Pasolini” (Tullio Kezich); and “not just an illustrated book, but a unique model of critique” (Adriano Aprà).
Long forgotten and out of print, “Corpi e luoghi” is now available again in a new, quasi-facsimile edition in English (which also includes original Italian text). Tracing aspects of the book's original publication, the panel will discuss its artistic, cultural, and critical relevance today.
Ara H. Merjian (Associate Professor of Italian Studies, NYU) in conversation with Ann Goldstein (editor and translator, New York), Breixo Viejo (Film scholar, Columbia University), and Benedikt Reichenbach (editor and graphic designer, Berlin).
Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York University, 24 West 12 Street
March 6, 6:30pm
In 1980 in Rome, the two film critics - Michele Mancini and Giuseppe Perrella - produced an elaborate, 600-page volume of images from all of Pasolini’s films, organized into an extensive taxonomy of “bodies” and “places”: Pier Paolo Pasolini: Corpi e luoghi. Reviews of the time praised it as “the most Pasolinian publication to date” (Alberto Farrasino); as “an indispensable tool for future research on Pasolini” (Tullio Kezich); and “not just an illustrated book, but a unique model of critique” (Adriano Aprà).
Long forgotten and out of print, “Corpi e luoghi” is now available again in a new, quasi-facsimile edition in English (which also includes original Italian text). Tracing aspects of the book's original publication, the panel will discuss its artistic, cultural, and critical relevance today.
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Venerdì 16 aprile 2021, ore 16:30 / Aula virtuale della Scuola di Specializzazione in Beni Storico-Artistici dell'Università degli Studi di Perugia Partecipa alla riunione di Microsoft Teams Altre informazioni • Opzioni riunione Seminario... more
Venerdì 16 aprile 2021, ore 16:30 / Aula virtuale della Scuola di Specializzazione in Beni Storico-Artistici dell'Università degli Studi di Perugia Partecipa alla riunione di Microsoft Teams Altre informazioni • Opzioni riunione Seminario in collaborazione con la Scuola di Specializzazione in Beni Demoetnoantropologici dell'Università degli Studi di Perugia layout: R. Marciano
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Fresh off its victory as a newly minted Allied power, Italy appeared, by 1919, to have consolidated a still fitful national identity. Leaving behind the volatility of the Giolitti period, the still young country seemed poised to enter... more
Fresh off its victory as a newly minted Allied power, Italy appeared, by 1919, to have consolidated a still fitful national identity. Leaving behind the volatility of the Giolitti period, the still young country seemed poised to enter twentieth-century modernity with fresh confidence. Yet a spate of strikes and factory occupations – spurred on by revolutions in Russia and Germany – threw the political and social order into chaos, matched by an equally aggressive activism rising from the right. The violence and uncertainty of the “Red Biennium” of 1919-21 saw a newly radicalized left square off against an emergent Fascist movement, galvanized by equal parts social agitation and virulent nationalism. Published in Milan in March, the platform of the ‘Fasci di Combattimento’ – followed by Gabrielle D’Annunzio’s paramilitary occupation of the port city of Fiume later this same year – fatefully shifted the tenor of political discourse in Italy.
These new developments were significantly influenced by the example of F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist movement, which had long agitated for both war and an irredentist foreign policy. The rise – and eventual triumph – of Mussolini’s Fascist party drew extensively on Futurism’s rhetorical arsenal of virility, nationalism, and élan vitale, promising a slate wiped free of Italy’s weighty cultural patrimony. Yet the burgeoning Fascist revolution came to appeal in equal measure to a sense of order and rectitude – ideological values which echoed the “plastic values” pursued by various artists in the wake of World War One. Setting aside avant-garde fragmentation and violence, the period’s “return to order” witnessed a renewed visual investment in notions of stability, clarity, and architectural solidity, nourished upon the Mediterranean past. This lecture will examine some of these competing strains as they intersected in Italian politics and culture in 1919, as well as with a wider European moment: a moment riven by revolution and reaction, innovation and atavism, ruptures and returns.
These new developments were significantly influenced by the example of F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist movement, which had long agitated for both war and an irredentist foreign policy. The rise – and eventual triumph – of Mussolini’s Fascist party drew extensively on Futurism’s rhetorical arsenal of virility, nationalism, and élan vitale, promising a slate wiped free of Italy’s weighty cultural patrimony. Yet the burgeoning Fascist revolution came to appeal in equal measure to a sense of order and rectitude – ideological values which echoed the “plastic values” pursued by various artists in the wake of World War One. Setting aside avant-garde fragmentation and violence, the period’s “return to order” witnessed a renewed visual investment in notions of stability, clarity, and architectural solidity, nourished upon the Mediterranean past. This lecture will examine some of these competing strains as they intersected in Italian politics and culture in 1919, as well as with a wider European moment: a moment riven by revolution and reaction, innovation and atavism, ruptures and returns.
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With neo-fascist populism on the rise, two shows in Milan and Florence o er a timely look at a turbulent period in Italian history.
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New York City, Nov. 12, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE): Academics call on global institutions to save Armenian heritage before it's too late. The end to active combat in the 2020 Nagorno Karabakh war is far from the end of the war on a key... more
New York City, Nov. 12, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE): Academics call on global institutions to save Armenian heritage before it's too late. The end to active combat in the 2020 Nagorno Karabakh war is far from the end of the war on a key victim: the rich and irreplaceable cultural heritage of Artsakh, as the republic is known to Armenians.