Public Lecture: The Zero Moment of History: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Abstraction, Neocapital will be held Thurday 10 March 6.30pm-7.45pm.
Keynote: Ara H. Merjian Associate Professor of Italian Studies at New York University.
From the forthcoming book, Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Post-War Art and Politics, 1960-1975 by Ara H. Merjian.
Why did Italy’s most prominent counter-cultural figure abjure the post-war avant-garde, even as his work helped to dynamize its activity? Why, for all his own iconoclasm, did Pier Paolo Pasolini – director, poet, critic, and painter – specifically reject the ethos of abstraction? Along with his intermittent critical writings, the films La Rabbia (1963) and Teorema (1968) provide some answers, particularly regarding abstraction as a metaphor of – and vehicle for – the “barren wasteland” of neocapitalism. This talk will situate Pasolini’s defiance of abstraction in the context of early 1960s Italy, specifically Rome’s burgeoning neo-avant-garde.
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 received his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris, Modernism (Yale University Press, My 2014), which earned the College Art Associations Meiss/Mellon’s Author Award. He is at work on two further studies on de Chirico’s work, for which he recently won a grant from the Graham Foundation, as well as a new volume, Against the Avantgarde: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Contemporary Aesthetics, for which he received a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. At NYU, he teaches the Italian and French avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, the modernist legacies of Nietzschean philosophy, and the cultural politics of fascism and anti-fascism. His articles have appeared in such forums as Grey Room, Oxford Art Journal, Modernism/Modernity, Artforum, and The Getty Research Journal. Before joining the faculty at NYU, he taught at Stanford and Harvard Universities.
Thursday 10 March 2016
6:30pm – 7:45pm
Theatre A
Elisabeth Murdoch Building
The University of Melbourne
PARKVILLE VIC 3010
Admission is free. Bookings are required. Seating is limited.
To register visit: http://alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au/merjian
Registrations from 25 February
For further information please contact <a.white@unimelb.edu.au>