The Written Language of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Performance Art, and the Neocapitalist 1970s

A gay, Catholic, communist master of Italian poetry and cinema, Pier Paolo Pasolini had a complex and controversial relationship with visual art. Anti-avant-garde and anti-capitalist, he was suspended between iconophilia and iconoclasm as a film-maker, art-critic, and political activist. Eventually, he became an icon himself, and contemporary artists have worked on his figure from many points of view. Ara Merjian, professor of Italian and Art History at NYU, is going to explore Pasolini’s engagement with performance art in the 70s and beyond, offering us a glimpse on his forthcoming book “Heretical Aesthetics: Pier Paolo Pasolini against the Avant-Garde”.