a temple and a cemetery: a religious space because a set of rituals is constantly taking place there, rituals…of a quasi-magical nature, and a cemetery in the sense that the fragments of lives and pieces of time are interred there, their shadows and footprints inscribed on paper and preserved like so many relics. (19)
Seen in this way, the archive raises question of resurrection and redemption:
Following tracks, putting back together scraps and debris, and reassembling remains, is to be implicated in a ritual which results in the resuscitation of life, in bringing the dead back to life by reintegrating them in the cycle of time, in such a way that they find, in a text, in an artefact or in a monument, a place to inhabit it, from where they may continue to express themselves. (25)
Like Lloyd's archive, this exhibition too attempts to create a protean place from which those in the past can continue to 'express' themselves. This 'expression' has been realised by an act of curatorship in which objects have been configured in unexpected juxtapositions. In this configuration, these objects and their relationships have been transformed and we consequently think of them differently. This set of curatorial procedures offers advice and instruction both for those who use archives and for those who compile and administer them.
This emphasis on art and curatorship as transformation points to a second issue to emerge from the exhibition's engagement with the Bleek and Lloyd archive, namely the theme of translation. As theorists like Apter (2001) and Liu (1999) have reminded us, this issue is being increasingly identified as critical to theorisations of Empire and transnationality. These recent debates have moved away from traditional approaches to translation which have defined their business as examining factors internal to translated texts and speculating on what orders of understanding their linguistic and stylistic choices do or do not enable. Instead, the issues are now generally posed in terms of translatability, understood as a repertoire of social and political questions: under what circumstances can texts, or indeed other objects, concepts or social groups, be seen as equivalent and translatable or incommensurate and untranslatable. How, and why are such climates of intelligibility (or non-intelligibility) created?
As with discussions of the archive, a consideration of translatability directs our attention to themes of the sociology and politics of knowledge. How do intellectuals, institutions, public opinion and popular taste interact to produce climates where texts, objects, or social groups are regarded as equivalent or otherwise? The exhibition dramatises these themes of translatability by presenting us with /Xam texts which no-one can read but none the less declaring its intention to make them translatable and equivalent. This theme is further complicated in the repeated figures of the priest that dominate the First World War landscapes. Several of these hold out a Eucharist wafer and so, invoke the medieval debates on this topic, extracts of which are inscribed on one of the horses. In consecrating the host, a priest is of course performing an audacious act of translatability, declaring the host and the body of Christ to be the same thing.
The priest-figures in the images are all friends, family, colleagues and students of Skotnes and, as such, represent the intellectual classes, involved, like the priests, in attempting acts of translatability and commensurability. The exhibition itself is of course an extended experiment in translatability. Its grammar has equipped us with a set of instructions and from this we learn that if we extend our imaginations, all things have the capacity for equivalence and translatability. In her inaugural lecture, "Real Presence", Skotnes explored these ideas. Like the Eucharist, which makes wafer into flesh and vice versa, so too art has the capacity to make different things similar: "The art object [is] capable of being precisely what it [does] not appear to be, it [has], like the flesh in the wafer, what Catholics, call, Real Presence" (5). Elsewhere in the same lecture she notes: "[Art] insists on our simultaneous experience of [multiple] identities - and through this process, an experience of Real Presence" (14).
In conclusion, let us turn to a medieval observation from Peter the Venerable who lived in the mid-twelfth century. Preaching to his monks, Peter became devil's advocate and asked: "…what does it profit us to frequent with hymns and praises bones lacking in sense?" (quoted in Bynum 264). Peter then went on to rebut his own question by demonstrating the importance of venerating the bones of the holy since the souls of their erstwhile owners now resided with God and their bones would in due course be resurrected. Peter's message is plain: we continue to believe in dry bones because we prize life over death.
Turning from a religious age to a secular one, we might still pose the same question, but in different terms: "What does it profit us to venerate and embellish the bones of carthorses?" Having experienced this exhibition, we will all have our own answers to this question but our responses will surely concur that the carthorses have taught us to read a miraculous book, and that we will, for ever after, be able to see life, narrative and new possibilities in bone where we saw none before.
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