Fumer nuit gravement a votre santé

Cemeteries classify, preserve and display things. Famous cemeteries also have a strict collections policy: not just anyone is allowed in. Hence, famous cemeteries have a lot in common with famous museums. The Montparnasse cemetery in Paris contains many famous dead Parisians, their tombstones, and a type of object I am particularly interested in: the mementos, relics and messages left on the graves of the famous by fans and admirers. To push the analogy between museums and cemeteries, I’d like to consider the objects left on graves firstly as labels for the graves, and secondly as unsolicited objects accessed to the collection.
A museum label describes and interprets an object. It is included because the curator feels that the object cannot speak for itself, and must be interpreted and contextualised. As many of the objects left on graves are textual, viewing them as labels seems particularly appropriate. For example, on the sociologist Emile Durkheim’s (1858-1917) grave has been placed a copy of last Friday’s L’Humanité, the communist newspaper. This label interprets Durkheim and his legacy, now as a communist, just a museum label does. Of course, this reminds us that the very fact of calling Durkheim ‘the sociologist’ is an interpretive and arguable gesture: he may have preferred to be called something different, and we may wish to call him something different. On another grave, that of the libertine chanteur Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991), a packet of Gauloises cigarettes has been left. Fumer nuit gravement à votre santé, the packet tells us. This seems one of the most accurate and succinct labels for an object I have ever seen.
A museum chooses carefully what objects to collect. Often it turns down offers of objects from institutions and individuals because of issues of storage space, duplication and relevance. The cemetery has no such ability to control what is left on graves, what is accessed to its collection. Once placed on a grave, objects cannot be touched or removed, it seems, without transgressing some serious social code which says that these ordinary objects have become sacred. For instance, on the grave of the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara (1896 – 1963) is an upturned flowerpot. Divorced from its function of holding flowers, the cheap plastic pot takes has new aesthetic and absurdist qualities. Additionally, by being inverted, it contains not flowers, but Tzara’s body. Unlike the cigarette packet left on Gainsbourg’s grave, it matters very much how the offering is spatially oriented. Removing it, or even turning it the right way up, returns it from a poignant gesture to just another plastic flowerpot. On the French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincare’s (1854 -1912) grave is a simple piece of lined paper, torn from an exercise book. It may have held a personal message, or perhaps a favourite equation. Now it is blank, the rain having washed away any ink that might have once been there. As the gardeners pick out the weeds and preserve the graves, should such scraps of paper, newspapers, metro tickets and flower pots be thrown away? Certainly they have no value once removed from the grave. Perhaps, whilst the objects left on graves have much in common with objects in a museum, part of their poignancy is in their lack of permanence. Wind and rain soon destroy them. The labels and left objects may become sacred, but they need not be permanent. The graves remain, more or less, but the labels change: the cemetery is a radically democratised museum where anyone can label and interpret the objects, and these labels change frequently.