Art+Design

An abandoned rock quarry is a ruined, emptied landscape. Although bearing witness to strenuous work, as a subject of representation it cannot summon the sort of national pride invested in fertile agricultural landscapes, industrious windmills and aqueducts; quarried land is an intervention better off forgotten. When depleted, it is typically abandoned; its remaining void remaining then fills with refuse and run off waters that “rise into ruin,” breeding miasma and social panic. Open quarries on the edge of Paris (whose material had built the city) became embarrassing eyesores and were often filled in and tidied up. The best known case is the wildly spectacular Buttes-Chaumont park, landscaped for the 1867 Universal Exposition to hide the former lime quarries, squatters’ camps and waste dumping grounds.

Robert Smithson, in his infamous essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic” [Artforum, 1967] suggests that the notion of what constitutes a “monument” is constructed by the spectator who alone determines its cultural value. This paper proposes to read paintings of quarries in the Paris region and in Provence that Van Gogh and Cézanne repeatedly painted through Smithson’s notion of the “entropic ruin”.

Throughout the nineteenth century, from the Isle-de-France to the arid plains of Provence, the French landscape was quarried to build cities, towns and roads. Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne were not the first French artists to represent abandoned quarries, but both painters exercised remarkable formal violence in the signature brushwork of their quarry paintings that effectively trashed the expectations of the Historical Landscape as formulated by academic theoretician Pierre-Henri Valenciennes in the early nineteenth century. Valenciennes had influentially promoted a mode of classical landscape whose status was elevated above other landscapes (in the hierarchy of genres) because of the inclusion of small-scale mythological narratives and the quotation of Greco-Roman ruins. Rather than ruined architecture, Van Gogh and Cézanne dwell on the feral remains of capitalist exploitation of natural resources: damaged nature fallen to ruin. Theirs was not, therefore, an entirely escapist construction of nature as the pristine, prelapsarian other to urban modernity but rather an engagement with the awkward, ugly remains of modern exploitation.

Writing in the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber found the modern world increasingly ‘disenchanted’: belief in the magical and sacred had receded to its uncolonized margins. In France, these margins on the Brittany coast drew a seasonal crowd of cultural tourists throughout the 19th century. Artists and writers who journeyed to the coast of Western Brittany were fascinated by the spectacle of local festive displays such as the yearly religious pardons at St. Anne de Palud. But instead of understanding ritual festivities on the Brittany coast as simply the encounter of an outsider and his or her rural other, we can read these events as collective experiences that provided many ways to be both spectacle and spectator. This essay departs from previous studies of art in Brittany in two significant ways: it considers the experience of local travel to coastal festivities (such as pardons) rather than taking tourism only to mean travel on a wider national or international scale. It also widens the focus of previous critical considerations of pardons in paintings to an expanded archive of visual and material culture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than equating rural life and representations of it with an outsider’s longings for an imaginary past, I employ methodologies drawn from feminist cultural criticism and the anthropology of material culture to view Breton pardons and their forms of visual culture as vibrant and ever changing performances and mediations of place and cultural identity. I consider these yearly public rituals as occasions that are marked as separate from ordinary daily routine yet that are also retrospectively integrated to everyday experience through their material and visual culture. Although paintings are central to my argument, this essay takes a short detour away from concerns with artistic representation in order to engage with the bodily experience of the pardon, and then makes a return to the visual. This shift attempts to move past a primary focus on the “tourist gaze” and toward an interest in the experiential, concrete poetics of the festive and its relationship to the “everyday”.

"How can material culture studies offer new
perspectives on the study of late-19th-century art
in France? How can the work of contemporary
artists animate a collection of historical and
locally specific objects? This paper takes up these
questions by a close reading of an installation
in St.-Brieuc, along with the collections of
two ecomuseums in Brittany and several other
historical sites in terms of a politics of display and
commemoration. It further engages the collections
in a dialogue about historical sites, photographs
and paintings of religious ritual in late-19th-century
Brittany that focus upon everyday rituals of memory
and mourning."

In the rural communities of coastal Brittany, women’s mourning rituals and objects dealt in particular and local ways with loss of life and social change. Grieving widows were insulated from unwanted gazes by heavy black cloaks clasped with silver buckles. Bodies lost at sea or buried abroad were mourned on the remote island of Ouessant via the ritual substitute of a waxen proella cross.  Material traces of lives, fragments of wedding costumes, locks of a dead child’s hair, and other loaded apotropaic and symbolic items were collected and displayed in marriage globes. Elaborate domestic altars in coastal homes were the meeting place of private loss and global travel: beside the marriage globes sat exotic colonial souvenirs and images of local saints. The dramatic, melancholic and seemingly archaic nature of these mourning practices was the subject of many literary and visual representations. In the wake of the Great War, the image of the grieving Breton widow became the subject of public memorials as an ideal secular icon of collective mourning and her ritual objects have come to stand for a lost pre-war local particularity of the experience of loss itself.

In its representation of death, Realism is at its most material, disturbing and ambiguous. Gustave Courbet’s massive and weird hunting painting Death of the Stag was on view at his Pavilion of Realism in 1867, at the same time that the spectacular taxidermy assemblage by Jules Verreaux, Arab Courier Attacked by Lions was awarded a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle. Painting and taxidermy were employed to do what photography could not yet accomplish: to assemble the effect of stilled action at the height of conflict, the moment of extinction. In order to better theorize the materially disconcerting qualities of these works (and to propose new approaches to the study of Realism), my talk takes its cues from social art history of Realism in the 1970s and fuses these fertile observations to concepts drawn from ecocriticism, critical animal studies and new materialism.

In “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earthworks” (1968), artist Robert Smithson wrote that “[w]hen a thing is seen through the consciousness of temporality, it is changed into something that is nothing.…The object gets to be less and less but exists as something clearer. Every object, if it is art, is charged with the rush of time.”
This talk began as a travelogue and a meditation on the idea of material discovery in nineteenth-century France. In the summer of 2014, I drove across France and encountered things from prehistoric objects, remains and caves (Niaux, Peche Merle, Font de Gaume, Aven d’Orgnac, Abri de la Madeleine) that were “discovered” as prehistoric monuments or natural wonders by archeologists and speleologists (although the locals had always known about them) to Romanesque marvels (like Conques) that had somehow been “forgotten” and then “found” in the French countryside (by Prosper Merimée), to the postman’s Cheval’s gigantic work of outsider architecture (made of rocks and cement) the Ideal Palace that was “discovered” and celebrated by the Surrealists. Objects discovered underground (included in this talk) are the seventeen Neanderthal skulls discovered in Aurignac in 1842 and “lost” after they were given a cemetery burial as ordered by the village mayor, and the Madeleine Mammoth engraved on the tusk of a mammoth that was the linchpin in the argument for prehistoric time. Using Smithson’s writings on time, John Berger’s observations on the politics of the term “primitive,” and New Materialist and ecocritical readings of the agency of objects, I will theorize the unearthing of these case studies and put them into dialogue with discussions of heritage and the French designation of a “Monument Historique.”

Looking outside canonical late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernist images of the French Atlantic coast, this essay examines usually discrete fields of landscape painting, botanical visual culture and nascent intertidal natural history to articulate an ecological realism of the ecotone. In a survey of peasant gleaning practices, popular natural science of the shore as well as amateur marine botany, the ecological visual literacy of viewers of this era is speculatively assembled. Works by artists such as Elodie La Villete, Charles Cottet, André Dauchez and Mathurin Méheut who lived long term on the coast are put into dialogue with the pressed images made by seaweed collectors and the industrial harvesting of geological and botanical resources of the shoreline.

Working close to home, Paul Géniaux (1873-1929), photographed a female paludier, or salt-pan worker, in Billiers, on the south coast of Brittany in about 1905. Grayscale contrast has material consequences: we cannot avoid the dirt on her apron or her tough, bare feet on the salted earth. Registered in the image’s silver salts is the difference between the light cotton kerchief on her head and the dark skin of her face, exposed to the same blazing summer sun and wind that crystalizes the salt she skims.

Saliculture is a materially intensive agricultural labor, working with sea, sun and wind, yet it shares qualities with fishing and quarrying to harvest salt, the only rock that we eat. In the marais salants of the French Atlantic coast, trapped ocean water increases in salinity as it is guided through grids of carefully maintained, clay-lined channels to ultimately crystalize into prized fleur de sel. Like the crystals skimmed from the briny pan, Géniaux’s photographic practice was a gathering up of the world around him on silver gelatin dry plates. Although allied with a realist approach to photography rather than nascent French pictorialism, Géniaux photographed a highly selective archive of his native Brittany that inventoried the specificity of locally particular gestures, types and trades. Salt workers and their insular, clannish culture had been mythologized by Honoré Balzac, and had been a staple of travel illustration in the 19th century. Géniaux’s photographs generally echoed established visual tropes of rural labor and locale from travel writing to Salon painting; they were widely reproduced as collographs --a photomechanical fusion of camera and printing press-- in journals and as postcards that were reprinted for several decades.
 
This essay is a reflection on material equivalence in fin de siècle realist photography. It puts into dialogue Susan Sontag’s descriptions of photography’s “relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing” literal qualities with Timothy Morton’s “weird essentialism” in which “things are partial, yet ‘organic.’ There are things, but they don’t come with a handy little dotted line that says Cut Here to separate the essence from the appearance.” Tim Ingold’s notion of landscapes as hybrid and dynamic “meshworks” is useful in getting away from “the sterile opposition between the naturalistic view of the landscape as a neutral, external backdrop to human activities, and the culturalistic view that every landscape is a particular cognitive or symbolic ordering of space.” Ingold has further called attention to the absence of materiality in studies of objects that have been “already crystallized out from the fluxes of materials and their transformations.” In addition to these theoretical approaches, I have found it fruitful to think about Géniaux’s photograph through the language of land art and collaborative artistic processes of working with the world’s materiality, especially Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), and his interests in salt’s crystalline properties.