Futurism's Crypt: Failing to Mourn the Death of Futurism

My paper argues that contemporary museum collections of Futurist art represent a fundamental refusal to mourn the death of Futurism. It proposes firstly that Futurism died of wounds sustained in the First World War. This is argued with reference to the change from the diverse liberatory avant-garde politics of its pre-war years towards the Party based fascist politic of the second wave, which is indicative of the general movement from the fluid character of the avant-garde to the more stultified, in the futurist’s own image, dead art. This is supplemented with a presentation of the psychoanalytical theory of the crypt, as presented by Maria Torok, Nicolas Abraham and Jacques Derrida. The paper will provide a reading of the crypt as a psycho-social phenomenon. Finally the paper will synthesize the idea of the dead art and the crypt in order to present a clear image of the effect of collections of futurism since the end of the First World War. This will focus on the collection of the first and second waves together which has transformed our perception of the movement into an un-mournable living dead.