GILD Faculty Research in Progress Lecture: Professor Jonathan Mullins
Friday, Jan. 24, 2025 | 12:30 PM | Pomerene Hall 240
An Art That is No Longer Art: Ephemera and the Leftist Everyday in 1970s Italy
This talk explores how and why Italian radical leftists in the 1970s embraced ephemera, or what one of them, Pablo Echuarren, defined “an art that is no longer art.” Methodology will be a central concern of the talk, which will explain how the larger book project from which it emerges marshals methods from queer theory, performance studies and visual culture to respond to longstanding conversations about the dematerialization of the art object in 20th century aesthetics. It will assess how these methods give us insights about leftist life that have long eluded social and political historians studying the period.
Figure 1 Unknown creator and title. Photograph. c. 1972. Quotidiano dei Lavoratori collection, Archivio storico della nuova sinistra Marco Pezzi (Marco Pezzi Archive of the New Left), Bologna, Italy.
Jonathan Mullins is Assistant Professor of Italian and Theatre, Film and Media Arts (by courtesy) at The Ohio State University, as well as affiliated faculty in the History of Art. The main concerns of his research are the history of the Italian left, the use and representation of the body and the way media facilitate the creation of mass, sub, and countercultures. He is currently preparing a book manuscript, Ephemeral Media, Everyday Dissent: the Radical Left in 1970s Italy, which tracks how radical leftists turned to ephemeral cultural forms—street performance, alternative radio broadcasts, photography, graffiti, and print marginalia—to invigorate their political practice. His most recent publication, which explores the legacy of Pier Paolo Pasolini in contemporary global queer art, will be published in the forthcoming ‘A Force of the Past…More Modern than Any Modern’: Pasolini for Art History and Practice, edited by Ara Merjian (University of Manchester Press).
If you require accommodation such as live captioning or interpretation to participate in this event, please contact Allison Buenger at buenger.2@osu.edu. Requests made two weeks before the event will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet requests made after this date.
