Prof. Ara Merjian’s Lecture: “Giorgio de Chirico’s Willful Claustrophilia”

18 Sep 2014 - 16:00 / 18 Sep 2014 - 18:00

100 St. Joseph Street, St. Michael’s College, U of T
Carr Hall 404
Toronto

A reception to follow. Everyone is welcome and admission is free. Please RSVP at italian.studies@utoronto.ca

 With wooden fragments pressed close to the picture plane and set in shallow, cloistered spaces, Giorgio de Chirico’s so-called “Metaphysical Interiors” from Ferrara (1915-18) seem resigned to confinement.  In his mid-century monograph, James Thrall Soby described the scenes as “still lifes…for which the word ‘claustrophobic’ does not seem too strong.”  This description has stuck to de Chirico’s interiors ever since: a convenient counterpart to the presumed agoraphobia of his pre-war piazzas.  A close reading of the paintings and their philosophical sympathies tells a different story.  And it is a story of willful claustrophilia.

 

“My room,” de Chirico writes from Ferrara, “is a magnificent ship in which I can set off on adventures worthy of a stubborn explorer.”  Even leaving aside the nautical pennants and maps that punctuate several paintings, these interiors posit the still and the static as means to exploration; they insist upon the willful constriction of space as the only path to mental transcendence. Continuing his self-appointed apprenticeship to Friedrich Nietzsche, de Chirico insists in word and image upon the liberation of finitude. What Nietzsche calls “the prison-house of language” forms not a hampering limitation, but rather – for a select few initiates – a means to far-flung exploration.  The unrelenting interiority of de Chirico’s Metaphysical still lifes, this paper argues, burrows into the building blocks of architecture as a site of mental adventure, beginning with the wooden support of the canvas itself.

 

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 received his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, under the direction of T.J. Clark.  He is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris, Modernism (Yale University Press, My 2014), for which he won the College Art Associations Meiss/Mellon’s Author Award, as well as two forthcoming studies: Blueprints and Ruins: De Chirico’s Untimely Futures, and The Return of the Poet: Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical Painting in Word and Verse. Prof. Merjian is currently researching a new volume, Heretical Aesthetics: Pier Paolo Pasolini against the Avant-garde, for which he recently won the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. 

 

At NYU, Ara teaches the Italian and French avant-gardes and neo-avant-garde, the modernist legacies of Nietzschean philosophy, and the cultural politics of fascism and anti-fascism. Among some of Prof. Merjian’s published essays are articles on Le Corbusier and Metaphysical painting for Grey Room; Giacomo Balla’s design practice for the Oxford Art Journal; Jean Cocteau’s belle-lettrist criticism for the Getty Research Journal; Luca Buvoli’s “post-utopian” video practice in Word & Image; and Gabriel Alomar’s fin-de-siècle poetics in Modernism/Modernity.  Before joining the faculty at NYU, he taught at Stanford and Harvard Universities, and he is a contributing critic to Artforum and frieze.

 For more info, please contact Nina Di Trapani  italian.studies@utoronto.ca , tel: (416) 926-2345