The Bones Tell
Ancient hominids and contemporary artworks on view in art-meets-science exhibition at Origins Centre
The generative catalyst for the Life of bone exhibition is the presence of three skulls – that of the Taung child, the fragments from Border cave and a modern chimpanzee skull, while the work of the three artists – Joni Brenner, Gerhard Marx and Karel Nel – engage in a variety of ways with the thoughts which bones engender about death and life, about the past, the present and the future.
Life of bone, the exhibition and the book, are a reflection of numerous engagements amongst a small group of artists and fellow academics, for whom bones, far from being simply a dour reminder of the inevitability of death, are repositories of the life that was; evidence of life even if that life is no longer. Indeed, bones have the potential to draw to themselves all manner of meaning—we can connect with them as immediate kin, regard them as the evidence of the death of one’s foe, as the remnants of the violations of a genocide, as the continued presence of one’s ancestors, or part of an evolutionary puzzle. These meanings are multiple: personal, political, social, spiritual and scientific to name but a few.
There is nonetheless, something disruptive and unsettling about the presence of bones. In planning the exhibition, the project team had thought to include a modern human skull alongside the Taung baby skull and that of the chimpanzee. They soon found that on account of the Human Tissues Act, it would not be possible to publicly display human remains. The use of the Border Cave skull was an acceptable alternative because, as with the Taung skull, the bone has fossilized. There was however, not a moment’s demur about putting the chimpanzee skull on display. Even before Don Johanson submitted his essay for the book in which he makes an impassioned plea for the preservation of the African great apes, the oddity of what was acceptable for display, and what not, was matter for lively discussion. It seems that the stronger the possibility of identification, the stronger the taboos about what can or can’t be done with bones. In a sense, the Sarah Baartman political processes, which Himla Soodyall considers in her essay, were very much about changing perceptions of her as ‘other’ to her as being ‘the same as us’. Looking back we consider the treatment of Sarah Baartman’s remains entirely inappropriate. Different sensibilities at the time may have made her post-mortem dissection seem like a rare opportunity for science to know more. A very profound fault-line runs between the human desire for knowledge and our need to respect the integrity of the one who was. Our current practices—such as displaying the chimpanzee skull when these animals, so close to us genetically, are on the verge of extinction—may, to future generations, seem just as crass as the treatment of Baartman’s remains seems to us with hindsight.
From the project, it became apparent that, as Kopano Ratele observes, although we intuit that we can never fully grasp all about an event in the past, we still long to know everything about it. That is probably the central ontological dilemma of science. At the same time, it is also the inspiration for further inquiry. Ratele argues that we are above all driven to find out about our own lives and the world we live in because we do recognise that nothing can ever fully and elegantly answer the questions we have; that nothing can extinguish all of the uncertainty about why whatever happened took place—one’s own birth being a quintessential example here. The resolution of this discomfiting knowledge is to admit that bones do have a life. To realise that something remains after the last breath, after decomposition even. It’s an odd thing, but there is an untrappable energy in the past: there is, as it were, life in the Taung skull and other bones.
Ratele contends that this uncontainable energy – which he observes in Brenner’s skull works – is also to be glimpsed at work in that defining moment of recent South African history: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It may be that the South African TRC was about this very need to find reassurance in the face of what one senses can never be fully settled. The past refuses to be buried, constantly returning to haunt the present, changing it in multiple observable and unseen ways.
However, an unacknowledged wish of the TRC was the desire to bring, as René Descartes had it, ‘true and certain knowledge’ to a history of trauma. On the basis of such truth and certainty, it was hoped we South Africans would be able to reconcile ourselves with the past as much as with one another.
Part of the need to ‘know more about what happened’ was the longing to find out where the bones of one’s family or comrades were buried. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the TRC, recalls how at one of the hearings, a mother cried out plaintively, “Please can’t you bring back even just a bone of my child so that I can bury him.”
The Life of bone project grapples – in a uniquely South African way – with the complexity created by uncertainty in art and science. It weaves together strands as unexpected as the repatriation of Sarah Baartman’s remains, the juxtaposition of sites of struggle for democracy as in Nel’s work, Bastille/Soweto, the pursuit of some form of resolution after sustained political trauma, the processing of loss through art, the search for greater certainty through the use of DNA testing and the value of story-telling as a means of creating coherence and insight.
Dennis Dutton, the philosopher, argues that art-making is an evolutionary development and that humans are driven by the desire to record experiences in the service of being able to understand themselves and the world. The forms that representations take may be visual, narrative or scientific, but all are driven by the same desire, the need to understand our place in the world.
Life of bone has resulted from thinking and talking about the work of people for whom bones are the evidence of hominid evolution, of the genetic bifurcations which have resulted in global genetic variety, and of man’s oftentimes questionable ethical responses to others who are seen as not-the-same. These interactions, often prompted by the close looking and thinking that results from the art-making process, have given rise to questions about consciousness, the significance of the awareness of past and future, symbolic behavior and our role in the wholesale destruction of life on this planet.
For the Life of bone team, creating this exhibition and book has been an opportunity to grapple with understanding what it means to live and work in South Africa now.
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