Pier Paolo Pasolini has become so famous today that no one knows him any more. Continuous reprintings of his books, translations to multiple languages, journalistic profiles and magazine articles, academic conferences, photo exhibitions, film retrospectives, fan websites, documentaries and, a few years ago, even a commercial biopic (premiered at the Venice Biennale), all have kept the ‘Pasolini monster’ artificially alive. No matter how well-intentioned, most of these ventures have been short-lived and insubstantial – a product of those seeking a certain type of reflected glory, repeatedly falling back on the same clichés: Pasolini the polemicist, Pasolini the tragic poet, Pasolini the murdered artist (Salò, Ostia, November 1975, etcetera). By compulsively consuming it, his work has been erased – and so Pasolini’s legacy dies again and again, only this time on Instagram and Facebook. That mythologising his original thought directly leads to its political neutralisation is fully evident in Italy. Nowhere is Pasolini more talked about than in his native country: the Italy of Giorgia Meloni and the Fratelli d’Italia.

It’s not all bad news. Some artists and scholars genuinely interested in Pasolini’s revolutionary oeuvre are resisting its rampant commodification. In the USA, perhaps no one has done more to revitalise Pasolini’s work than the Italianist and art historian Ara Merjian. His unrelenting dedication to the poet–writer–filmmaker through numerous programmes at New York University’s Casa Italiana has been paralleled by the publication of three outstanding books: Against the Avant-Garde (University of Chicago Press, 2020), an in-depth study of Pasolini’s tense relationship with experimental art in the age of neocapitalism; Heretical Aesthetics (Verso Books, 2023), co-edited with Alessandro Giammei, the first collection of Pasolini’s essays on painting translated into English; and now this hefty Pier Paolo Pasolini for Art History and Practice, assembling no fewer than 35 essays by international scholars and contemporary artists. (A fourth volume, Beat, Black, Queer: Pasolini’s ‘Other America’, is forthcoming from Verso).

In Merjian’s books, Pasolini’s world begins to breathe again. It emerges as the extraordinary constellation it once was, populated by drawings, poems, novels, plays, translations of ancient texts, short films and feature films, anthropological documentaries, journeys to Palestine and India … This resuscitation occurs not only through Merjian’s extensive and meticulous archival research, but above all because of his ability to connect Pasolini’s own discoveries with the narratives of our times – in other words, to bring Pasolini back to us. ‘How can we make use of his work in a different era, one governed by a network of visual reproductions and distractions even more exponential and insidious than Pasolini’s own?,’ Merjian asks the reader in his Introduction. ‘[How] might Pasolini’s work serve as a methodological stimulus not simply to art historical research but to artistic practice?’ (p. 6). This book is an attempt to answer both relevant questions.

Organised into three sections, the volume focuses on a multitude of artworks and aesthetic topics that were influential and/or present in Pasolini’s corpus. The first section, ‘A force of the past’, brings together essays by Tommaso Mozzati, on classical and modern sculpture; Jacopo Galimberti, on the communist artist Renato Guttuso; Vega Tescari, on painter Giorgio Morandi; Francesco Galluzzi, on Pasolini’s poem ‘Picasso’; and Toni Hildebrandt, on the image of Marilyn Monroe in Andy Warhol’s paintings and Pasolini’s La rabbia. This first part ends with a delightfully informal interview by Dan Ward with the renowned American art historian T. J. Clark, who states: ‘Pasolini believed profoundly, I think, that one of the strengths of Italian cinema was that it could be in continuity with its long visual past’ (p. 133). The book clearly demonstrates this assertion and, by doing so, shows to what extent Pasolini’s work cannot be understood through the optics of film studies or literary theory alone.

The second section, ‘More modern than any modern’, includes essays by Todd Olson, on Roberto Longhi’s influence on Pasolini; Ava Shirazi, on the visual representation of Oedipus; Stephen Campbell, on the sixteenth-century painter Girolamo Romani; Armando Maggi, on the Velázquez turn in Pasolini’s Calderón and Che Cosa sono le nuvole?; and Alessandro Giammei, on the aesthetic influences of La ricotta. The third section, ‘Inactual afterlives’, completes the book with six essays by Stefano Chiodi, on Fabio Mauri and Dino Pedriali’s collaborations with Pasolini; Benjamin Fellmann, on American artist David Wojnarowicz; Barry Schwabsky, on Pasolini’s presence in the art of Richard Serra, Sharon Hayes and Lili Reynaud-Dewar; Jonathan Mullins, on contemporary queer artists; Gian Maria Annovi, on recent works referencing Salò; and Andreas Petrossiants, on Pasolini’s relevance for activists today. The overall quality of these essays is excellent and readers will find some chapters captivating. Olson’s study of Pasolini’s use of film lenses to capture images à la Masaccio is particularly striking.

The greatest strength of the book, however, may well be the 60-page chapter ‘Pasolini in/and practice’, inserted between the second and third sections, where Merjian collects one- or two-page contributions by 16 living artists, including Alfredo Jaar, Adrian Paci and Francesco Vezzoli, discussing how Pasolini has informed their practice. Each mini-essay includes at least one image of the artwork analysed. As Merjian points out: ‘[P]ersonhood blurred into performance; ideology melded with biography; thought extended into physical action – these elements have long attracted the interest of contemporary artists to Pasolini’ (p. 4). The fact that most of these artists were born in the 1970s, shortly before or after Pasolini died, in countries including Albania, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Palestine, Senegal and Singapore, demonstrates how his ‘aesthetics and politics’ – the apt subtitle of the book – continue to have a profound influence on a large number of visual artists working outside Italy today.

Nowadays, when the rewiring of cultural experience is leading to an alarming de-politicisation of our lives, as Pasolini prophetically anticipated, books like this are not only necessary but also indispensable.