Ara Merjian on Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Neo-Avant-Gardes

Pasolini’s surprisingly conflictual engagement with the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s
Ara Merjian, Professor of Italian at New York University, discusses his new book Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism, published in 2020
by the University of Chicago Press. In conversation with Christine Legros, PhD student in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard, they discuss Pasolini’s fraught relationship with the Italian experimental art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the social and political ramifications of Pasolini’s extraordinarily interdisciplinary output.