Past Event

Abstract

Just over century ago, a young Antonio Gramsci took up his pen for various humanitarian crises across the globe: from acts of class struggle, to the Armenian Genocide taking place in what seemed a world away. For Gramsci, these events’ distance, like the foreignness of their sufferers, belied an abiding moral urgency.

“Always the same story.  For an event to interest us, to move us, it must be recognizable, it must affect a people of whom we have heard before, and who thus belong to our circle of humanity.”

In a related vein, Diderot’s famous Letter on the Blind, for the Use of Those Who See (1749) improbably names moral apathy as the natural inclination of the blind, whose inability to see leads Diderot to “suspect them of being, in general, unfeeling toward their fellow men.”

To what extent have twentieth- and twenty-first-century aesthetics elaborated strategies of representing connections to bodies unseen or unacknowledged? What, in artistic terms, might constitute a phenomenology of distance and implication, as it relates to the witnessing of history or micro-history? In what sense does an ostensibly interconnected globalization belie an indifference which, Carlo Ginzburg writes, “already implies a form of complicity”?

If several distinguished studies have addressed these questions along historical and philosophical lines, the visual arts – and their role in redressing the moral “blindness” of which Diderot writes – have been given comparably short shrift.  How do the visual arts – whose domain is sight itself – potentially shore up such distance, or else render intelligible its effects? This paper ventures some tentative answers in the light of specific efforts by European and American artists, from both before and after the late twentieth-century digital revolution: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Renato Guttuso, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Martha Rosler, Eric Fischl, Francesco Arena, and Maya Zach.

Bio

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, as well as Director of Undergraduate Studies. He is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris, Modernism (Yale University Press, 2014), and the forthcoming Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism, 1960-1975, for which he won a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant.  His writing has appeared in publications such as Grey Room, Oxford Art Journal, Art in America, The Getty Research Journal, Word & Image, Artforum, and The Brooklyn Rail.  He is currently at work on a study of de Chirico’s twentieth-century legacies, as well as a volume on the theory of Free-Indirect Style as it relates to modernist painting.

Reception to follow. All welcome.