Skull boxes

Skull boxes that both memorialized a dead individual and displayed the deceased person’s skull were made in Brittany from the eighteenth century to about 1900. In Breton churchyards, prior to the First World War, the ossuary, or charnel house (located in the churchyard or attached to the church), was the receptacle of bones of the dead taken from graves in the crowded churchyard. Because of very limited consecrated ground, this might happen as soon as five years after the initial burial. After a grave was exhumed, the skull was separated from the other bones and put in a wooden box shaped like a peaked-roof house; this was painted (by travelling artisans or cemetery workers) with the name of the dead and dates of life and age at death. The contained skull remained partially visible through a heart-shaped opening. The box was then placed in the church or in an ossuary niche where it functioned as a miniature tomb that both memorialized the departed individual and displayed the material remains of the deceased..

The Spectacle of Piety on the Brittany Coast

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 article 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 19th and early 20th 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 article 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

“Biotopes and Ecotones: Slippery images on the edge of the French Atlantic”

Several images of the French Atlantic shoreline that I discuss in this essay imaginatively engage with the ecology of the edge of the sea, including its human and non human biological communities. Coming from a visual studies perspective, I am interested in articulating an ecological realism of the French Atlantic coast: looking at the intersections of landscape painting, ecological visual culture and the rise of intertidal natural history. Because my research extends far beyond the usual range of art history, I am looking to marine science for vocabulary and metaphors in my descriptions of seaside communities and ecologies

"Narratives, Images and Objects of Piety and Loss in Brittany"

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 Saint-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. Comment les études en culture matérielle peuventelles offrir de nouvelles perspectives sur l’étude de l’art de la fin du XIXe siècle en France ? Comment le travail d’artistes contemporains peut-il animer une collection d’objets historiques et particuliers à un lieu donné ? Cet article s’attaque à ces questions au moyen d’une lecture attentive d’une installation à Saint-Brieuc, de pair avec les collections de deux écomusées en Bretagne et de plusieurs autres sites historiques, sous l’angle des politiques de la présentation et de la commémoration. Il fait entrer plus intensément ces collections dans un dialogue au sujet des sites historiques, des photographies et des peintures des rituels religieux de la fin du XIXe siècle en Bretagne, qui se concentrent sur les rituels quotidiens de la mémoire et du deuil

Representing heritage and loss on the Brittany coast: sites, things and absence

This is an essay about the interplay of objects, art and visual culture in several community museums and historical sites dedicated to local social history in coastal Brittany. There, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Breton maritime culture invented a range of compensatory ritual objects, sites and practices to account for loss of life at sea. The presentation of this material culture of mourning in small museums, regional museums and ecomuseums on the Breton North Coast and the islands of Sein and Ouessant are examined in this essay. These material objects once bore material witness to crucial moments in the life of the family and today serve to represent the community’s collective memories and to narrate the community’s heritage to the outside world. In several cases examined in this essay, literary representations, art and visual culture are compared to heritage sites and museums. Methodologies are drawn from social art history, studies of tourism and collecting, museum studies, material culture studies and feminist interests in the politics of the everyday

“Spectacle, Maintenance and Materiality: Women and Death in Modern Brittany”

Both remarkable and everyday, women’s ritual maintenance of the memory of the dead was often the subject of paintings, sculpture, photography and popular illustration produced in late 19th and early 20th century Brittany. Breton popular beliefs put the dead and living in close proximity and this was expressed in a range of visual culture that clustered around the holiday of Toussaint (All Soul’s Day and Day of the Dead). Why was the spectacle of women in the cemetery, praying upon the grave or laying wreaths upon it, so compelling for visitors to Brittany? This paper examines the visual and material culture of death rituals in Brittany (and their representations), including the seemingly anachronistic practice of reburial of the body, several years after its interment, the ritual function of the ossuary in the churchyard, the display of individual skull boxes in the church and ossuary, and the hybrid Celtic-Christian culture of death lore in Brittany. While examining a range of artistic topographies written onto the Breton landscape, this essay also maps out an ecology of place, as local politics of cemetery placement in rural Breton life came into conflict with official pressures to modernize and sanitize public space. With the great losses suffered in Brittany from the World Wars, cemeteries, memorials that featured mourning widows, and images of women’s mourning and memory rituals take on entirely new meanings in French visual culture

“Inevitable Grottoes”: Modern Paintings and Wasted Space

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”

Heterogeneous Choice Sets and Preferences

We propose a robust method of discrete choice analysis when agents' choice sets are unobserved. Our core model assumes nothing about agents' choice sets apart from their minimum size. Importantly, it leaves unrestricted the dependence, conditional on observables, between choice sets and preferences. We first characterize the sharp identification region of the model's parameters by a finite set of conditional moment inequalities. We then apply our theoretical findings to learn about households' risk preferences and choice sets from data on their deductible choices in auto collision insurance. We find that the data can be explained by expected utility theory with low levels of risk aversion and heterogeneous non-singleton choice sets, and that more than three in four households require limited choice sets to explain their deductible choices. We also provide simulation evidence on the computational tractability of our method in applications with larger feasible sets or higher-dimensional unobserved heterogeneity