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Phantom Bodies: The Human Aura in Art, Frist Center for the Visual Arts/Vanderbilt University Press, 2015. Edited by Mark V. Scala.
Saltzman鈥檚 essay, 鈥淵ou May Have the Body or You May Not: Habeas Corpus in the Museum,鈥 pursues the following questions: How might the writ of habeas corpus help us to think about art that at once conjures and commemorates atrocious acts and their aftermath, heinous crimes and their consequences? More broadly, how might juridical categories -- witness, testimony, evidence 鈥 help us to think about aesthetic representation? How might questions of justice inflect practices of remembrance? Attending to the simultaneous evocation and evacuation of the body in the works of Christian Boltanski, Ana Mendieta, Doris Salcedo, Janet Cardiff and George Miller and Ken Gonzalez-Day, among others, the essay pursues a reading of contemporary art that weds ethics and aesthetics in an attempt to think through representation and remembrance, and, ultimately, history and its inheritance.
Saltzman鈥檚 essay was commissioned for the catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition Phantom Bodies: The Human Aura in Art, the third in a series of exhibitions organized by curator Mark Scala for the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, Tennessee and devoted to the theme of the body as a vehicle for making social meaning. The first, Paint Made Flesh (2009), featured artists from Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud to Jenny Saville, Wangechi Mutu and Daniel Richter for whom painting functions as a material equivalent of the body as a conduit between inner conditions and the outer world (catalogue essays by Mark Scala, Emily Braun and Richard Shiff). This was followed by Fairy Tales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination (2012), connecting the symbolism of combinatory beings in mythology, folklore, and science fiction to the real hybrid bodies that might soon be generated through genetic manipulation. Fairy Tales included works by Kiki Smith, Paula Rego, Patricia Piccinini, Inka Essenhigh, Marcel Dzama, and many others (catalogue essays by Mark Scala, Marina Warner, Suzanne Anker, and Jack Zipes). Phantom Bodies, with its emphasis on the traces, hauntings and sublimation of the body, completes the trilogy of exhibitions. Featuring work by Christian Boltanski, Janet Cardiff, Ken Gonzalez-Day, Sally Mann, Doris Salcedo and many others, Phantom Bodies (with catalogue essays by Mark Scale, Lisa Saltzman, Martha Buskirk and Eleanor Heartney) was on view at the Frist from October 30, 2015鈥 February 14, 2016 and will travel to the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, where it will be on view from June 17 鈥 September 11, 2016.