At the beginning of this month, I was in Rome with some friends: we had heard that Danny Elfman himself was going to be on stage at the Auditorium, performing some pieces from his soundtracks, and we’re hardcore fans (I have mixed feelings about the concert, but that’s a story for another time). We were staying very close to the Auditorium, and that means being close to the MAXXI – National Museum of 21st-century Arts, a celebrated structure designed by Zaha Hadid. I read there was an exhibition on Andrea Pazienza, a famous comic book artist, and I proposed we go for a visit. I don’t like Pazienza, but I had never seen a show and I was hopeful I could understand him a little better and maybe learn to like him. I don’t like Zaha Hadid, and I had perplexities about the museum, but I had never been inside, and I hope I’d be transformed by the experience.
I should learn to listen to my gut.
1. The Building did its Number
Andrea Pazienza’s exhibition is on the third-floor gallery, at the end of the long, winding corridor that hangs suspended on the entrance hall, and yet I wasn’t dizzy from the heights. I was too busy thinking about my knees.
This is not a metaphor I am reaching for to make a point about discomfort as critique. It’s about the floors slope. They slope the way a stage set slopes when a director wants you to feel slightly seasick without knowing why, except here nobody intended the seasickness as an effect: it’s just how the building is, in every temporary exhibition unlucky enough to be staged inside it. My calves were trembling within twenty minutes. One of my friends, already running on the kind of tiredness that makes architecture either invisible or unbearable, got properly sick. Not dramatically. Just that grey, swallowing-hard, where-the-fuck-is-the-exit sickness that comes from a body being asked to process the wrong information for too long: uneven pitch, unnecessary curvature, walls that never resolve into a right angle when you need one.
I don’t think this is incidental to what I want to say about the show. I think it’s the first and most honest thing the show told me.
Zaha Hadid’s building at MAXXI is not a container. A container disappears in service of what it holds: that’s the whole discipline of exhibition architecture, arguably the whole ethics of it and, if you want to see how it looks like, take a trip to Portugal and see anything designed by Alvaro Siza.
Hadid’s building does the opposite. It performs, it curves and cantilevers and insists, room after room, that you notice it noticing itself, and it does this regardless of what’s hanging on its walls: Pazienza today, someone else tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter. The architecture was finished being an argument about itself before the curators ever walked in with the plates, and the archival letters, and the restored mural, and whatever the hell. Andrea Pazienza — a man who drew directly, urgently, often in a matter of hours, who hated preciousness as a matter of principle — has been posthumously installed inside the single most precious, self-regarding structure Rome’s contemporary art scene has produced in the last quarter century. If that isn’t already a small act of violence against any work, I don’t know what is.
And I keep thinking about the people who don’t get to leave after two hours. The invigilators, standing eight-hour shifts on that same slope. The installation crew who spent days hauling five hundred plates and a restored eight-metre mural through corridors that were clearly designed by someone who has never had to carry anything heavier than a concept through them. Nobody asks Zaha Hadid’s building to justify its comfort, because it isn’t there for comfort: it’s there to be photographed by architects who go ooooh and aaaah without thinking. The workers and the visitors are incidental to it. We are, all of us, load-bearing extras in someone else’s architectural statement.
Which is enough to shape my bad mood.
2. Revolution in the Head, Blowjob in the Frame
Here is the thing nobody warns you about walking into a room full of Zanardi plates: how quickly a certain pattern becomes visible, and how tired you get of seeing it confirmed.
After a room with some drawings he did as a child, and some letters in which he says some pretty chilly stuff about his father, the first… gallery? room? blob of crooked walls? The first section of the exhibition, let’s say, is dedicated to Massimo Zanardi, a fictional character invented by Pazienza as he was a student in Bologna. He first appeared in 1981 in the magazine Frigidaire, and he’s an asshole.
Like most of the men in Pazienza’s Bologna, and Pazienza’s men are busy. They’re busy thinking, arguing, failing at revolution, failing at heroin, failing at each other, failing at length, because failure rendered with enough style is the closest thing this whole tradition has to a moral position. Their interiority is the subject.
The women are not busy in the same way. The women are on their knees, or bent over something, mouths occupied, eyes occasionally rolled toward the reader as if to confirm that yes, this is still happening, while the men above them keep talking about Marx, about the state, about themselves. Pazienza’s sex is never, ever, ever about the women having it. It’s set dressing for the men’s monologue. A body doing something so that a mind can keep doing something else.
I want to be explicit about what bothers me here, because “trivialisation of sex” can sound prudish, and I am not remotely interested in prudishness as a critical position. Sex on the page can be vulgar, explicit, ugly, funny, anything: none of that is the problem. The problem is the division of labour and the genderisation of ugliness. One gender gets to have a mind in these panels: the other gets to have a mouth (not to mention other parties). Pazienza draws revolution as something that happens in a man’s head while a woman’s body services the scene around it, and he draws this so often, so casually, that it stops reading as observation of a specific milieu’s specific rot and starts reading as a compositional default, the thing he reaches for when he needs to fill the bottom third of a panel with something that would look underground and uncensored without having to think about it any further than that.
And the show’s own curatorial language works against itself, a little. The wall text wants Zanardi as “the incarnation of cynicism in the 80s,” the character as a mirror held up to a rotten decade. Fine. I’m too young to say otherwise, ’cause I was 6 years old at best. But that’s a mirror held up to misogyny that simply reproduces the misogyny without ever turning to look at it, and that’s not cynicism, it’s just… the thing itself, uncommented on. Cynicism requires a vantage point outside what it’s mocking. I never found one. I looked. I stood in front of enough plates of blowjobs and gang-bangs, for as long as my knees allowed me, actively wanting to find the ironic distance that would let me read this as critique rather than habit. It wasn’t there. Or if it was, it was so thin that five hundred plates and a comprehensive retrospective should have been more than enough evidence to surface it, and it wasn’t.
And this is the part that actually irritates me more than the images themselves: none of it shocks. It wants to. It’s positioned, by the artist and by every essay in the catalogue, as transgressive — the underground comic that told the truth nobody else would tell about Bologna, about heroin, about the collapse of ’77 — but reducing women to receptacles for male monologue isn’t a truth nobody else would tell. It’s the oldest and laziest truth in the room. It was old in 1980. Pretending that ugliness is inherently honest, that romanticising squalor is the only sincere response available to a left-wing intellectual watching his generation implode, is not a hard-won position. It’s the easy one. Life is not ugly, I’ll die on this hill. And treating ugliness as the sole available register for authenticity is, I think, a fundamentally childish idea dressed up in a leather jacket.
3. The One Man he respected
Then you turn a corner — another one of the building’s non-corners, some crooked half-room that isn’t quite a room — and there’s Pasolini.
Pazienza drew Sandro Pertini more than once, as part of a series, and something changes when he does. The line doesn’t loosen into caricatures of throbbing veins as if everything’s an erected penis, there’s no sloppy woman folded into the bottom third of the frame performing a service for somebody else’s monologue. Pertini gets to simply be — the old partisan, the “missionary partisan president,” — rendered with a warmth Pazienza otherwise seems constitutionally allergic to, as if tenderness were a resource he rationed carefully and had decided, for once, to spend.
It would be easy to read this as evidence that Pazienza was, deep down, capable of real affection for another person — proof that the flatness everywhere else in the show is a stylistic tic rather than a genuine failure of imagination. I don’t think that’s quite it, and I think the more honest reading is worse for him, not better.
Pertini was, by the early 80s, one of the few figures in Italian public life almost nobody was willing to attack, and the only guy I would trust with an atomic bomb. A partisan, a former political prisoner, a president who watched football with the crowd and answered his own phone, a man Italy had already, collectively, agreed to love before Pazienza ever picked up a pen to draw him. Respecting Pertini cost Pazienza nothing. It required no imaginative labour, no risk, no argument with anyone. It was the safest, most pre-approved tenderness available in the entire decade. You could draw Pertini with warmth and offend absolutely no one, least of all yourself.
What Pazienza couldn’t do — or didn’t bother to do — was extend that same attention sideways, to the people he was actually living among: the women in his own Bologna, the addicts, the girlfriends, the extras in his own life who never had a nation agree in advance that they deserved dignity, and so had to rely on him to grant it, and didn’t.
That’s the tell.
Not that Pazienza was incapable of drawing another person as fully human. The Pertini plates prove he could, when the person in question arrived pre-approved. The tell is who he chose it for: a figure so universally sanctioned that warmth toward him carried zero cost, rather than the unresolved, uncanonised people a few feet away from him in real life, the ones who actually needed him to look properly, because no one else was going to.
I don’t think this makes Pazienza a monster: he wasn’t a guy consequential enough for me to go that far. I think it makes him something more common and less interesting than his mythology allows: a man who reserved tenderness for the figure everyone had already agreed was worthy of it, and couldn’t or wouldn’t find any to spare for the people who hadn’t been pre-approved by history. And that’s not very revolutionary, if you ask me.
4. Honesty about Ugliness
None of this is an argument that art should look away from squalor, degradation, addiction, or the general mess of bodies behaving badly. I have no intention of pushing that argument, of course. What I’m interested in is the difference between an artist who looks at a marginal life and sees a person, and an artist who looks at the same life and sees material.
Let me make a couple of examples.
Fabrizio De André made an entire career out of exactly the territory Pazienza claimed as his own — prostitutes, thieves, drunks, the people respectable Italy stepped around on the pavement — and somehow never once needed to reduce any of them to a mouth or a set of knees. Bocca di Rosa is a prostitute who scandalises an entire village and gets a song written in her defence, not her judgment; the priest who condemns her from the pulpit is the target of the song’s irony, not she. De André’s marginal people carry moral weight precisely because he refuses to let them collapse into the function they serve for somebody else’s story. Same historical moment as Pazienza, arguably a rougher and more explicitly working-class gallery of subjects than anything in Zanardi’s Bologna, and yet dignity survives every verse.
Pier Paolo Pasolini did the harder version of this same work. Accattone, Ragazzi di vita: pimps, thieves, the Roman sub-proletariat filmed and written about with a rigour that never once tips into either sentimentality or contempt. Pasolini’s degraded people are not redeemed, exactly — he doesn’t sand down the ugliness to make them palatable — but they are never merely furniture for somebody else’s revolutionary monologue either. The camera holds on them as subjects, not props. If Pazienza wanted a model for how to draw people at the bottom of a collapsing society without reducing them to service, it was sitting right there, a few years earlier, in the culture he claimed to be extending.
And then there’s Elena Ferrante, working decades later and in a different form entirely, which is exactly why she belongs here: she proves the problem was never the material, it was always the eye. Ferrante’s Naples is at least as violent, as squalid, as sexually blunt as anything in Pazienza’s Bologna: men who use women, women who use each other, poverty that disfigures everyone it touches. But the interiority never migrates entirely to one gender. Lila and Elena are never furniture. Their bodies are not the site where someone else’s story happens; their bodies are where their own stories happen, in full, with all the ugliness left intact and none of the personhood subtracted from it.
None of these three needed to lie about how ugly things were to make the ugliness land. That’s the whole point. Beauty and squalor were never actually in competition: De André, Pasolini, and Ferrante all prove you can hold both at once, ugliness rendered exactly as ugly as it is, and still let every person inside it keep their mind. Pazienza’s version of honesty only ever manages the ugliness. The minds, it turns out, were optional, and he only handed them out to the people he’d already decided deserved one.
5. Why Should I Care?
Ok, so I don’t like Pazienza. Why should I care? Nobody forced me to see the exhibition.
Well, I care because every artist canonised as a voice of a generation eventually gets heirs, and the heirs are usually the most useful evidence for what the original artist actually taught, because they learn the lesson without any of the excuses of context.
Pazienza’s most obvious contemporary descendant is Limescale-Free Guy, the Guy-With-No-Calcar, and I say this with the specific, targeted irritation of someone who has sat through more of his output than I’d like to admit. CalcarFree’s entire persona (I can’t even stand to say his name) is built on failure as an aesthetic: the anxious, self-deprecating cartoonist who can’t hold a relationship together, can’t finish anything, can’t quite believe he deserves the space he’s taking up, endlessly narrating his own inadequacy in a shaky, deliberately unglamorous line. It’s Pazienza’s failure-rendered-with-style, inherited almost intact, minus the drugs and most of the sex, plus a great deal more merchandising.
Here is the part that actually irritates me, though, and it isn’t the aesthetic. It’s the dishonesty sitting underneath it. Zero-Limestone has a Netflix series. He fills the Circo Massimo for free public screenings. He is, by any reasonable measure available to a cartoonist in this country, one of the most successful cultural exports Italy has produced in the last fifteen years: translated, adapted, distributed, discussed in exactly the mainstream venues his persona claims to be too much of a failure to access. And yet the brand never updates. He is still, panel after panel, series after series, the guy who can’t cope, the guy who never measures up, the guy failure happens to. At some point “I’m a failure” stops being a vulnerable confession and starts being a costume that’s very convenient to keep wearing, because it inoculates the wearer against every criticism in advance. How do you criticise someone for succeeding on the backs of the marginalised when the artist has already told you, first, loudest, that he considers himself one of the marginalised too?
This is Pazienza’s real legacy, I think, more than any specific technique or any specific character. Not the drawing. Not even the underground credibility. The lesson the heirs actually absorbed is that self-declared failure functions as a permanent alibi, that if you narrate your own inadequacy convincingly enough, nobody gets to ask you to actually reckon with the people your work uses along the way. Pazienza never had to answer for what he did with the women in his panels, because the culture around him had already decided that a man drawing his own collapse this honestly must, by definition, be too damaged to also be held responsible. No-Limestone has simply automated that same immunity for an audience with better broadband.
And this is where the cultural machinery closes the loop, because MAXXI needs exactly this kind of figure. An anniversary retrospective isn’t built around someone whose reputation is settled and boring; it’s built around someone whose “difficulty” can be marketed as edge while the institution absorbs none of the actual risk, five decades safely after the fact, with a restored mural and a Coconino Press catalogue and a public program to make sure nobody leaves confused about how to feel. Pertini gets warmth because Pertini is safe. Pazienza gets an anniversary because Pazienza, at this distance, is safe too: dead thirty-eight years, uncontroversial enough now to be called revolutionary, difficult enough on paper to be called important, and unable, notably, to be in the room to answer any of these questions himself. The heirs figured out you don’t need to die to get the same deal. You just need to keep telling everyone how much you’re failing while the numbers say otherwise.
6. Not Always Dead, Not Always Alive
The show’s title is a quote from Pazienza himself, given to a British interviewer the year before he died: non sempre si muore, you don’t always die. MAXXI has turned this into a kind of mission statement, printed at the entrance, repeated in every press release: Pazienza is still alive, in the plates, in the unpublished sheets, in the mural finally restored and shown. I understand why an institution reaches for this. It’s a tidy sentiment. It makes an anniversary feel less like an anniversary and more like a resurrection, which sells better and photographs better and gives Francesco Stocchi something warm to say at the opening.
I don’t buy it, and I don’t think I’m supposed to, entirely: I think even Pazienza, saying it in 1988 with whatever he already knew about his own body by then, meant something closer to gallows humour than to legacy management. But MAXXI took the joke and framed it.
Here’s what I actually think, walking back out through that sloped corridor with my calves still complaining: Pazienza is not more honest than the rest of us for having decided that ugliness was the only believable register left. He had the talent to draw people — actual, complicated, minded people — and he spent most of it on men thinking and women serving, and reserved the rare exception for a president everybody had already agreed to love before he ever picked up a pen. That’s not transgression. That’s the safest possible use of a dangerous gift. De André found people worth defending in the same gutters Pazienza only found material. Ferrante found interiority in exactly the kind of violent, sexually blunt world Pazienza claimed required flattening it out of the women in it. Neither of them needed to lie about how bad things were. They just refused the shortcut of deciding that bad things exempted them from looking properly at who was inside them.
I don’t think life is ugly, as I was saying. I don’t think poverty is ugly, I think there’s a dignity in being desperate, even when you’re depriving yourself of your own dignity through drugs, alcohol, violence, you name it. I think there is beauty available even in collapse, even in addiction, even in a supposedly dying decade in a supposedly dying city, and I think reaching for it is harder and more honest than reaching for squalor, because squalor asks nothing of you except a strong stomach and a willingness to shock people who, frankly, stopped being shockable decades ago. Pazienza’s refusal of that harder work has been rebranded, forty years and one museum later, as courage. It wasn’t courage. It was the easy chair dressed up as the barricade, and an entire institutional machine — MAXXI, the catalogue, the anniversary, the heirs still cashing the same cheque — has a considerable interest in making sure nobody looks at it too closely.
So no, he’s not always dead. But he’s not always as alive as they’d like him to be, either. Some of what’s on those walls should have been allowed to stay in 1981, where it was already old news.
Anyway, here’s some stuff I actually liked, and some more pictures from the exhibition.
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