Douaumont

  The photo of a former village in Northern France is framed with texts above and below it, something like you see here. Toby Everett and I took this a few days before Christmas in 2013. It was the second time we had been there, and had been talking for quite some time about what kind of image would be adequate to represent the history of this landscape.



Douaumont has Gallo-Roman origins and was called “divine name” (divus noms) in Latin; at 380 meters in altitude, the village sat on the highest land of the region. Two hundred and eighty-eight people lived here in 1914. On their land grew potatoes, linen, hemp and fruit trees. Horses, chickens, cows, dogs and pigs were part of everyday life in the streets, homes and yards. In February of 1916, as the Battle of Verdun began, Douaumont was erased. Today it remains a destroyed village, a permanent reminder of the cost of war.

Vibrant grass and mature trees grow over a rolling aggregate of brick, cement, limestone, bones, barnyard, household items, and artillery shells. Yet aggregate is too mild a term to describe this violently haphazard assemblage, this polluted, exploded land whose permanently mixed (yet never thoroughly fused) materials had once made up a place and a community. We saw this unidentifiable mixture laid bare where the grass had been pulled away by a souvenir hunter with an illicit metal detector or a wild boar rooting in the soil.

These are photos of Douaumont and its one main street, before and after the war. 

 

 

Wall of the Disappeared

   

The cemetery in the village of Ploubazlanec on the North Coast area (Cotes d’Armor) of Brittany has a Wall of the Disappeared at Sea. In this area, many boys and men departed from the port of Paimpol to fish the long cod season on the banks of Iceland or Newfoundland for the better part of a year. As on Ouessant, many men died at sea and their bodies never returned to the home soil; mourners here too lacked the emotional closure of a proven death and a physical body as ritual focus—thus the array of homemade cenotaphs and plaques affixed to the wall in Ploubazlanec’s cemetery. 

The sight of local women grieving at the wall was first articulated in the best-selling novel Pêcheur d'Islande (Iceland Fisherman) (1886) by Pierre Loti (the pen name of Jules Viaud). In this sad tale of frustrated love and loss, a young fisherman Yann, like so many of his family, dies at sea far from home as his new bride, Gaud awaits his return, looking to sea from a high point in the village of Ploubazlanec beside a stone monument known as the ‘Widow’s Cross.’ 

As part of her tormented waiting, she goes to the wall and the nearby chapel, obsessively reading the family names that repeat for several generations. In her daily, repetitive visits to this site of memory and mourning, the premonition seizes her that a new plaque will soon be added for her missing husband.

Today the commune of Ploubazlanec is full of summer homes by the sea. In 1939, the graveyard wall was rebuilt and the homemade memorials to the lost at sea were moved into the sheltered porch of the nearby eighteenth-century chapel of Perros-Hamon. The original plaques have been replaced on the stone wall by durable marble slabs and simple, painted wooden plaques. The commune’s website encourages visitors to make a tour of this open air heritage museum of the past, to wander the streets now renamed to even better resemble Loti’s novel, to follow trails from the high points of land where women scanned the horizon for returning fishing boats, to the rebuilt wall of the disappeared and the chapel that houses its older plaques, to the chapels by the sea dedicated to ‘Our Lady of the Shipwrecked.’

L’Illustration (1891)

In the 1890s and early 20^th century, Illustrated Journals frequently reproduced images of women mourning at this wall to coincide with the autumnal observation of Toussaint or “Day of the Dead” (All Souls and All Saints Days) commonly seen in Brittany’s churchyard cemeteries. At the end of October or first week of November (in the 1890s and early 20^th century), illustrated journals in Paris often featured these images  accompanied by descriptions or first person accounts of the ritual maintenance of the memory of the dead.  For instance, Swiss regionalist writer Adolphe Ribaux in 1901 echoes the melodrama of Loti as he describes being overwhelmed there by the spectacle of mass death : ‘To be lost at sea, this is surely the worst of deaths! … It is not necessary to be old to be in the middle of this funeral wall, covered in names, cruel symbol of the vanity of the dreams and the falsity of joy!’  

 Early twentieth-century post cards repeatedly depict the wall with and without mourners and popular journals such as the illustrated Parisian papers L’Illustration (1891) and Le Petit Journal (1924) feature the spectacle of collective grief at this wall on Le Jour des Morts (All Souls’ Day, November 2).

Paul Géniaux, c. 1905

To read more: see my article "Crosses, Cloaks and globes: women's material culture of mourning on the Brittany coast"

The falling away

Planning a trip to Northern France later this month, I thought of revisiting the cemetery of St. Hilaire at Marville (the oldest cemetery in France), where I had photographed a remarkable collection of nineteenth century skull boxes in January of 2012,

 

January 2012

 only to find that the ossuary had been vandalized a few months after I had visited.   The colossal ossuary at Douamont that holds bones of French and German dead from World War One had been vandalized only a few weeks before that, although there is no proof that these events are connected.

At Marville, the lock on the gate had been broken, skull boxes smashed, their painted fronts presumably stolen, along with some of the moss-covered skulls. The thousands of skulls that were left behind were now all equally anonymous:  thwarting past efforts to hold a few of these apart from the others.
 

March 2012

" Ces "horloges de la vie" sont des petites niches en bois qui permettent d’abriter des crânes. Elles peuvent se revendre entre 1000 et 1500 € chacune. La ou les personnes qui ont dérobé ces objets savaient ce qu’elles venaient chercher ici. » Datant des XVI ^e et XVII ^e siècle, ces niches en bois sont très prisées par les collectionneurs et les amateurs d’art funéraire." Le Républican Lorrain, 26 March, 2012

 My photos, taken in the fading light of a winter afternoon, which, until this news hit me, seemed incomplete, ill-composed or partial, now record something that will not be again. The video clips I shot between the bars, in marginal light, that I had hoped to redo, will have to do. Have the skull box-fronts become collectible items now? Or have they been destroyed? Detached from site, from their contents, they can no longer represent or mark their “relics.”

Skull Boxes in St Pol de Léon, Brittany, locked on shelves inside the church.

With this sad news in mind, I look differently at the photos from St Pol de Leon and other sites in Brittany whose skull boxes are under lock and key. They were once open to the air and the seasons in communal ossuaries as well as open to unseen hands and iconoclastic motives.

 

Skull boxes in one of nine open-air ossuaries that were built in the cemetery wall, detail of photo by Séraphim- Médéric Mieusement, c. 1875

 

But this is not new. As I have looked more closely at some of the boxes whose histories I can track down, many others have been part of processes of change, change of state, exhumation, profanation, de-individuation. In 1912, one priest in Brittany (according to writer and photographer Charles Géniaux) ordered that a group skull boxes be properly buried; they were put in a mass grave but many residents of the town claimed that they re-took their place in the ossuary the next night.

I remember an anecdote about a the lost skeletal remains of seventeen Neanderthals in Aurignac, in the South of France in 1842.  After they were discovered by a laborer, the village mayor, who was also a doctor, ordered that they be given a proper burial in the churchyard.  When the archeologist Édouard Lartet visited 18 years later and asked to see the prehistoric bones, they could not be found. Like any other recently buried body, they had gone to earth soon after having been brought out from their millenia spent in a cave.

The first skull box that I encountered, in 2008, is in the chapel of Kermaria an Iskuit, a site well known for its 15th century fresco of the Danse Macabre. In the apse, this unusual, rectangular skull box displays two skulls, with the phrase “Ceff de Lêzobre" crudely painted on it. These two skulls had come from a tomb that had been in the chapel until it was destroyed in the iconoclastic violence of the Revolution. The skulls are said to be those of the 17^th cent Baron de Les Aubrays (Lezobré) (Jean de Lannion ) and his daughter (Renée- Françoise?). Geslin de Bourgogne, the inspector of historic monuments, discovered the skulls in 1850, at a time when there was talk of demolishing the chapel. According to local legend, a “pious woman” then collected them and put them in this painted box. Fragments of the broken tomb can be seen re-used the wall of a neighboring house. The crude 19th century skull box is a pathetic compensation for a desecrated stone tomb-- a small act of pious resistance to revolutionary iconoclasm.

In his work on memory, archeologist Andrew Jones  discusses remembering and forgetting, not as polar opposites, but processes in play or tension. The skull boxes seem to participate in just this—in their temporary preservation and naming, in their weathering in the elements, in their gradual fragmentation and decay.  The Marville ossuary had been vandalized before-- but never quite so badly, I read in the French newspapers.

This relatively recent photograph shows the skulls at Marville orderly arranged on a altar-table; presumably the painting once depicted a last judgment before it was devoured by mildew and moss. Wooden memorials are no match to a damp climate that slowly removes their inscriptions as their bones green and crumble.  Decay reconfigures their substance,  reminding us once again of our ephemeral materiality.

 And this is what the altar table looked like in 1916.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/drakegoodman/10062893543/

Or this, also purportedly from 1916: 

Source: Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paranoid_womb/8295544730/

What did it mean to photograph these bones and boxes in 1916, the very year of the nearby Battle of Verdun?  In contrast to the hundreds of thousands of German and French men dying in muddy trenches that very year, what could this pile of bones that inventoried the material remains of Marville mean?

Writing primarily about prehistoric archaeology (but his ideas are very fertile) Jones writes that “context does not so much frame the meaning of the artefact; rather, meaning bleeds or flows beyond the context: it is carried with the artefact.” Reading this, I began to think about how the skull box is a conduit for memory—as a hybrid person/thing it connects people and memories together—and may equally foster repulsion and horror. 

This made me think of Seamus Heaney's writing on the power of the Danish Bog Bodies:  
 

 they…. “have a double force, a riddling power: on the one hand, they invite us to reverie and daydream, while on the other hand, they can tempt the intellect to its most strenuous exertions. And it has always seemed to me that this phenomenal potency derives from the fact that the bodies erase the boundary-line between culture and nature, between art and life, between vision and eyesight, as it were….. [He continues:] These bodies have been moved through a process, brought from one condition of existence to another. At one level, the process is chemical and the change of the condition is physical. They have been tanned as leather is tanned. Their skin has become leathery. But at another level,  the process is artistic and the change comes about in the very nature of their presence and In the nature of their function.

Tollund Man

Once upon a time, these heads and limbs existed in order to express and embody the needs and impulses of an individual human life. They were the vehicles of different biographies and they compelled singular attention, they proclaimed 'I am I'. Even when they were first dead, at the moment of sacrifice or atrocIty, their bodies and their limbs manifested biography and conserved vestiges of personal Identity: they were corpses. But when a corpse becomes a bog body, the personal identity drops away; the bog body does not proclaim ' I am I': Instead it says something like 'I am it' or ' I am you'. Like the work of art, the bog body asks to be contemplated; It eludes the biographical and enters the realm of the aesthetic. 

Grauballe Man, hand.

For some, indeed, It enters that realm where the religious and the aesthetic merge, because in the figure of the bog body, the atrocious and the beautiful often partake of one another’s reality, coexisting inextricably in the lineaments of the transformed human features. In other words, the idea of redeeming the violent and brutal facts of human existence by subsuming them into a different plane of understanding (an understanding founded upon the concept that beauty is redemptive in itself), this idea finds its emblem and equivalent in the bog body, which is at once an object of contemplation and the violated remains of human flesh and bone. In fact, its total adequacy as an object of contemplation balances out against its status as the remains of a mutilated or violated human being. It hangs in the scales -- as I say in one of the poems- 'between beauty and atrocity'.  (From "The Man and the Bog" a speech given by Heaney in Denmark, 1996)

 

Heaney’s comments have led me to ask: What does it mean when part of a body becomes a skull box?  When we have permission to look?  These things, unlike the bog bodies, are not anonymous body objects. They have names and dates that mark the duration of lifetimes.  When a body part becomes part of the memorial that is meant to represent the person…how does a skull become commemorative metaphor instead of forensic trace? Can it?

As I spend hours searching for vintage photographs of skull boxes being displayed in churches and ossuaries, and try to determine their dates and locations, it  occurs to me that of course there is no one true or superior configuration of them.   Like looking at a landscape with anthropologist Tim Ingold’s “dwelling perspective” we are always looking at a moment-- hoping to catch the "right" one-- in the flux of time.   In that way the boxes are really like memory itself—fresh, sharp and maybe painful when newly made and filled, then with age and decay, fuzzier, more erased, and finally crumbled away. They are a vain attempt to save—at least for a while, the body’s specific materiality—yet they attest to the near impossibility of retaining the named and remembered.

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Danse Macabre

For several years my research has concerned the culture of death in Brittany. I have long been interested in the reception of medieval visual culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This is a video that I edited in 2012 for a session at the Babel Working Group in Boston.

This project assembles bits of video that I have shot over the past three years on short trips to France that address these overlapping concerns.  Throughout the video, I made layers that act as effects from natural phenomena—sparkles of sunlight on a pond, moss on a huge boulder, a poppy waving in the wind, boiling water reflected on the ceiling, a reflection on a stream, a slow pan across a diamond-shaped window with snow outside. Nature dances across stony things that don’t move.


Danse Macabre: a video work in progress from maura coughlin on Vimeo.



 Here are my French sources:

La Martyr: one of the oldest enclos paroissiaux (parish closes) in Finistère (11th-17th cent.): stone steps lead up to the top of the 16th century triumphal gateway. Adam and Eve are on the building’s façade as is a “mermaid” that might signify the pre-CR notion in Brittany that hell is damp and cold.
Kermaria-an-Iskuit: a Breton church in Plouha (Côtes-d'Armor), (13th century) that has one of the most well-preserved Danse Macabre wall paintings with 47 figures (c. 1500) and a prominent 19th century skull box.
The sculpted figure of Ankou (death) at the church of Ploumilliau, (Côtes-d'Armor), 17th century.
Painted Skull Boxes in the Cathedral of St. Pol-de-Léon, Finistère: 32 boxes 17th-19th centuries.
Ossuary (15th century) at the cemetery of Saint-Hilaire Marville, (Lorraine) The Breton practice of preserving individual’s skulls in marked boxes was taken up here, in Northern France in the 19th century. Shot through the metal bars on the ossuary.
Joël Thépault,  Placard Mortuaire (2006-7), a cupboard of skulls and other things carved by hand into the rock face at “Les Lapidiales”: an exhausted limestone quarry that has since 2000 has been an open air, international artist residency program for young sculptors, Port d'Envaux (Charente-Maritime). I found this first by chance by looking for something entirely else.

Images from other places:




a mossy rock in Montague, MA, a sarong blowing in the wind, a poppy, a garage door, a sparkling pond, a reflection on a stream and boiling water in Wellfleet, Provincetown and Eastham MA.

Stone: Hard old granite from Brittany and the soft limestone of the Charente.

Sound sources:

a refrigerator in a 19th-century distillery in Cognac, samples from Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre, ambient sound in Kermaria including the ancient tour guide, bells at La Martyre.

First collaboration: Hard Times Project, inspired by naturalist and symbolist paintings.....

Inspired by paintings (some from Brittany), these photos are from an ongoing collaboration with Toby Everett. This first group was shot in the fall of 2010, some by us, others by Miah Nate Johnson, one November afternoon, in Wellfleet.  

This is an old dirt back road that has changed little since my childhood. One section of it has been abandoned by the town, so it is little traveled. I have very early memories of this place as my mother loved to go painting there and we would also go berry picking. Over many years of dog and other walking, I have returned to this place, thinking about how much it looks like Barbizon painting and many other sites favored by late 19th century French artists.

This first group was shot in the Herring River on both sides of High Toss bridge.  

 

To prepare, we assembled a group of images, culled from 19th century art and illustration and WPA posters and photography. Images of "vagabonds"  and people on the move-- on roads, clutching their possessions, looking for work, hoping for a chance, landless, homeless.  Thinking about the relevance for these images in times of economic crisis and escalating prices of land, how could we reference these images in our own landscape?

We gathered up some of our own clothing-- mostly wool-- and some evocative objects.

Jules-Alexis Muenier, Vagabonds (Les Chemineaux) 1896, Palais Bourbon, Paris

The painting by Muenier was a touchstone for the figures bending over the water: the winding stream, the reflections and the simple gesture of dipping a teacup -- such domestic object that says so much when used outside.

Landless, Labour Party poster, 1919

Hubert von Herkomer, Hard Times, 1885

This next group of images of figures by the roadside: drifters, the dispossessed, itinerant workers, vagabonds, highwaymen seemed to correspond so well to the old dirt road out at High Toss, with its blackberry thickets and winding sand path.

         

Miah shot these two images with these themes in mind.

        With his street photographer's sensibility, Miah saw more in the old white pitcher, producing two of our favorite images:

Corot's Woman at the Well comes to mind.

Corot, Young Woman at the Well, 1870

There is a field near the bridge that I have always been drawn to.  When I was a child, in the early 1970s, there was a short-lived communal garden there, but I believe that it failed-- perhaps too much salt in the soil.  The field has remained relatively open since then, a wasteland of grass hummocks and puddles, with thorny blackberry canes here and there.

We thought of setting this wayward couple out in the field with a few of their possessions, as if they were camping, squatting or resting in this forgotten place. Setting the almost faceless figures in the middle distance, under those wintry trees was, again, a choice that imitated the poses that Corot and many Barbizon painters favored.

In this field, I was also thinking of naturalist images (and Soviet Socialist Realist posters based on these prototypes of heroic peasant figures) set in open fields, like Jules Breton's iconic Song of the Lark (beloved in the US-- reproductions hung in countless parlors).

Jules Adolphe Breton,
The Song of the Lark, 1884. Art Institute of Chicago

This was one of the results:

And the scythe inevitably recalled images of death, the reaper:

Jean-François Millet, Death and the Woodcutter (La Mort et le bûcheron). Date: 1858-59

With the November afternoon light fading, we tried a few more overtly Symbolist scenarios, with Death in a black raincoat encountering a man in this field.