Page 54 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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was characteristic of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. The Italian
Futurist Filippo Tomaso Marinetti denounced museums as cemeteries in his
1909 ‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (Marinetti 1973). The Soviet
painter Kasimir Malevich compared the art of the past to corpses, while the
Soviet critic N. Tarabukin described the art museum as a cemetery and art
historians as grave robbers (Groys 1994: 148–50). In the late nineteenth century,
the metaphor was used by critics of various political and aesthetic inclinations.
In France the Romantic poet Alphonse Lamartine called the museum a ‘cemet-
ery of the arts’, the nationalist politician and writer Maurice Barres referred
to it as the place where ‘the dead corrupt the living’, and the writer Paul Valéry
described it as a place where ‘dead visions’ compete for attention (Bazin 1967:
265; Valéry 1956). These attacks on the museum were informed by different
politics, but they shared a vehement rejection of the Victorian obsession with
the past, and especially, the art of the past.
The cemetery metaphor was also used by members of the museum world
who were pressing for change. In 1888, George Brown Goode, the assistant
secretary of the Smithsonian in Washington, argued that ‘the museum of the
past must be set aside, reconstructed, transformed from a cemetery of bric-a-
brac into a nursery of living thoughts’ (cited in Conn 1998: 20). By contrasting
the cemetery with the nursery, Goode evoked the two poles of life and implied
a distinction between the overcrowding of ‘bric-a-brac’ and the neatly planted
seedlings of the nursery. He meant that museums need to change, become
more systematic and organized to ensure that their objects become objects of
knowledge.
The cemetery metaphor was quite differently employed by Marinetti. In the
‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, he denounced museums as cemeteries,
suggesting they only be visited as we might visit a grave, to annually place a
wreath beneath the Mona Lisa. He announced:
It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting
incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism because
we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archae-
ologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in
second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums
that cover her like so many graveyards.
(Marinetti 1973)

Marinetti attacked the museum’s orientation toward the past and toward
‘dead’ things, and scorned the encyclopaedic pretensions of the late Victorian
museum. Like Goode, he described cemeteries as overcrowded spaces, but the
effect of this overcrowding is not disorder (to which he was rather partial)
but an intimacy between strangers, between bodies whose lives had been lived