Against the Avant-Garde

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism

Ara H Merjian (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

304 Seiten

2020
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-65527-7 (ISBN)

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Recognized in America chiefly for his films, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) in fact reinvented interdisciplinarity in post-war 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. In Against 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-Garde examines these paradoxes through case studies from the 1960s and 70s, 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 post-war intellectual, but also the fraught politics of a European neo-avant-garde grappling with a new capitalist hegemony.

Ara H. Merjian is associate 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 the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City.

Introduction    Heretical Aesthetics

Technical Sacrality/Heretical Aesthetics
Against the Avant-Garde
Communism, Humanism, Modernism
Aesthetic Deceleration
A Tradition of Antitradition

One                 Abstraction: The Zero Degree of History

Abstraction and Neocapital
History, Rage, Painting
Abstraction and/as Failed Revolution
A Cinema of Poetry and Painting
The Zero Moment of History

Two                 Pop: A Mimesis of the Future

Mass Culture and the Crisis of Communism
Pop Polemics on the Left
“All the World at Home”
Objective Indifference/Pop Vernacular
Pop, Politics, and the Ends of Irony
The Division of History
A Mimesis of the Future

Three               Arte Povera: Prehistory and the Aesthetics of Contamination

An Irrational Marxism and the “Intimacy of ‘Things’"
Contamination, Craft, and the “Slang” of Matter
The “Third World” between History and Prehistory
Double Representation
Phenomenology versus Frame
1968 and After: Cold War, Hot Autumn

Four                 Performance: A Semiology of Action

Body/Struggle
Intellectual Flesh
Intimacy and Exposure
From What Is Fascism to Salò
Performing the Pseudorevolution

Conclusion      Hopes and Alibis: Pasolini and Contemporary Art

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	10.01.2020
Sprache	englisch
Maße	178 x 254 mm
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-226-65527-X / 022665527X
ISBN-13	978-0-226-65527-7 / 9780226655277
Zustand	Neuware