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.

Back in France-- June 2013

I saw a whole lot of crazy stuff today at the Musée d'Orsay.   And I was prepared, having read up on it here.  Many images also here and here.

 

Bouguereau's 1850 painting of Dante and Virgil witnessing a homoerotic wrestling match that ends in  cannibalism is pretty dark. I wonder what the wealthy and influential neo-conservative promoters of his painting (and a lot of pretty awful academic naturalism) think about this?  

But Sleeping Monsters, shown at the Salon of 1906 by the Russia Sculptor Soudbinine  might be at the top of the nightmarish list. I'm not sure that any contemporary artists have anywhere left to go with babies and mounds of breasts.


 There were a lot of Fuseli paintings (not so good up close). Mad Kate is rather funny:

This lovely Redon was quite enchanting with its cold and presumably mildewed Gothic interior and the lit up stained glass.

I saw two young guys with cute punk haircuts staring at this Friedrich:

As expected, there were several Medusas, but Dardé's Eternal Sorrow (1913) was quite horrid and lovely.

 

Lévy-Dhurmer's Medusa / The Furious Wave has  snakes that have turned  into colorful seaweed (looking familiar and rather Atlantic in origin), lashing about in the water.

Because the show was ending with Surrealism, this was a really good set up for Hans Bellmer.  Charles Jeandel made these bondage cyanotypes in the 1890s, but they were "discovered" in the 1980s. 

There were many images of  DEATH and Femmes Fatales, like Gauguin's Madame La Mort and Jean Delville's Idol of Perversity.

But nothing really prepared me for this quite amazing Léon Frédéric (one of my favorite Symbolist / Naturalist Belgians). This is Vanity (1893). She has it all.  See through black blouse, red hair, skull AND hourglass and she is in a cemetery.

   

 So, I guess you know where my head was at when I saw this a few minutes later as I walked to the Trocadero.  I suppose that this could have been a fashion shoot on the top of a tourist bus, with the base of the Eiffel Tower in view, but they had a microphone and she was shaking her head around in a disturbing way.  Maybe there was a monster, or better yet, DEATH that was going to be CGI'd into the scene.