Page 55 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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in isolation from one another but which are now placed together in false
connection:
Museums: cemeteries! . . . Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of
so many bodies unknown to one another.
Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or
unknown beings.
Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaugh-
tering each other with colour-blows and line-blows, the length of the
fought-over walls!
(Marinetti 1973)
Marinetti’s manifesto announced a contempt for history and historicism,
which we find in other writings of the avant-garde, but unusually, Marinetti
hitched anti-museum sentiment to nationalism (he later joined Mussolini’s
Fascists). The manifesto was published in the French newspaper Le Figaro,
but he emphasized its source – ‘from Italy’ – at the same time as he rejected
the museum culture of Italy, and by implication France too, in the effort
to pronounce himself of the present and of the future. Marinetti associated
museums with an obsession with the past which was corrupting and infecting
the body of the nation.
Critical writing today tends to see museums as having been instrumental in
the construction of concepts of nationhood, encouraging the patriotic feeling
necessary to the projects of imperialism and colonialism (see Duncan 1995).
That Marinetti could instead join nationalism with anti-historicism is perhaps
due to the fact that he had lived in countries crawling with the ‘professors,
archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians’ of foreign colonial powers. He had
grown up in a wealthy Italian family in Alexandria, Egypt, which was at that
time a fast-growing modernized city. But Egypt had been a source of anti-
quities for European museums since the Napoleonic invasions. After the British
occupation of Egypt, which began in July 1882 with the bombardment of
Alexandria, excavation became more intensive, as the Egypt Exploration Fund
began to export antiquities to the British Museum. There, the Egyptian collec-
tions more than tripled in size between the late 1880s and the 1920s (British
Museum, n.d.). Like Egypt, Italy had had many of its antiquities appropriated
by the French in Napoleon’s invasion. Through the museums, the historians
and the antiquarians, both countries had gained an identity that was bound
up entirely with their glorious past. Their loss of status was evidenced by the
presence of their antiquities in the national collections of colonial powers such
as France and Britain. For Marinetti, the past was stifling and enfeebling,
associated with physical weakness and illness (rotting, poisoning, gangrene,
the sickly). Against it he eulogized youthful strength and rebelliousness and