Kirk Savage, University of Pittsburgh

On a scale unprecedented in US history, the Civil War led to a massive physical displacement of bodies in life and in death. Equally if not more troubling, however, the war caused a shocking metaphysical displacement of bodies from their names, creating legions of the “unknown” (bodies without names) and the “missing” (names without bodies). This lecture examines how art was invoked and deployed to come to terms with what Savage calls the “metadata crisis” of the war dead. One side of the story is the long postwar effort to reattach names to bodies, which had far-reaching impacts on the American landscape, generating a national cemetery system and revolutionizing the gravestone industry. The other side of the story is the deliberate detachment of names from bodies and the innovation of ever-longer lists of names in bronze and stone that would eventually culminate in the enigmatic abstraction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. At once material and immaterial, the art of the name provides a lens through which to plumb the transformations in personal and national identity wrought by the catastrophe of mass warfare.