Published Articles by Ara H. Merjian
Art in America, 2024
This year marks the centenary of Surrealism, or more specifically the publication of its founding... 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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Art in America, 2022
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Art in America, 2022
Nearly as familiar as Surrealism's imagery is the movement’s fixation on
Freudian psychology: use... 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.
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frieze, 2021
At more than 300 pages, Carla Lonzi's absorbing and innovative Self-Portrait (1969) records her i... 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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Word & Image, 2021
Dorothea Tanning’s Fatala (1947) reveals a solitary a female figure reaching her hand through a d... 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.
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Metaphysical Art: The De Chirico Journals, 2021
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Art in America, 2020
An art historian and an expert on internet culture discuss media, technology, and political collage.
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SubStance, 2020
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s tireless opposition to neocapitalism throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s to... 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.
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Modern Painters, 2009
As the first Italian-born movement since the Renaissance to leave its mark on the international 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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Art in America, 2020
Filmmakers around the world have adapted the stripped-down style of postwar Italian cinema to cre... more 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.
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Cabinet, 2020
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Oxford Art Journal, 2019
A survey of prominent intellectuals on the subject of ‘Fascism and Culture’ in 1926 prompted some... 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."
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Art in America, 2019
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Hyperallergic, 2019
Pondering the legacy of Jannis Kounellis, a titan of Arte Povera, away from the crowds of Venice.
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Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989, 2019
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Art Bulletin, 2019
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Art in America, 2019
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qui parle, 2017
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Art History, 2018
It has long formed an art historical truism that Ferrara’s notable Jewish history reinvigorated G... 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.... 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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Published Articles by Ara H. Merjian
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.
and genres – representations relatively overlooked in his influential oeuvre, and which this article examines in detail.
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.
and genres – representations relatively overlooked in his influential oeuvre, and which this article examines in detail.
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.
„Pier Paolo Pasolini's ‘Third World’ between Africa and America: Race, Class, and the Analogical Imagination”
13. Mai 2019, 19.00 Uhr im Hauptgebäude der Universität Bern, Hochschulstrasse 4, Raum 220 / 2. OG Ost
Mit einer Einführung von Dr. Toni Hildebrandt (Abteilung für die Kunstgeschichte der Moderne und der Gegenwart, IKG) und einer Respondenz nach dem Vortrag von Dr. Vega Tescari (Istituto di storia e teoria dell’arte e dell'architettura Università della Svizzera italiana, Mendrisio).
14. Mai 2019, 10.00-11.30, Walter Benjamin Kolleg, Muesmattstrasse 45
Workshop mit Prof. Dr. Ara H. Merjian, Dr. Toni Hildebrandt und Dr. Vega Tescari über ein Walter Benjamin-Portrait von Joseph Ortloff (1935). Der Workshop findet vor dem Original im Walter Benjamin Kolleg statt. Bitte um Anmeldung bei: toni.hildebrandt@ikg.unibe.ch
http://www.ikg.unibe.ch/ueber_uns/aktuell/archiv/index_ger.html
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.