The object that surround us here in this Beautiful Museum are lovingly and superbly conserved as if they were all made yesterday or teleported a regular from every age of the past into our present. Even in the greatest rural cemeteries like this one, the Allegheny Cemetery in pittsburgh, the passage and pressure of time are everywhere visible. The residues of past eras coat the graves and factory smoke and coal dust. The stone and metal erode. Slabs tilt and sometimes fall into the ground. By the way, this is not what every grade in the elegant what every grave in the Allegheny Cemetery looks like. Images dissolve before our eyes and the names of the dead, the whole reason for this above ground apparatus, even these often disappear. As Oliver Wendell holmes wrote about his local graveyard in cambridge, massachusetts it slowly disappears. The mosses creek, the gravestones the mosses creep, the gravestones lean. The decaying gravestones have age value. Triggering metaphysical ruminations. The cemetery, the age value comes with a conflict of a need to remember and preserve and keep the name alive as the ancient egyptians used to say. This imperative to preserve the name is the foundation of mortuary culture. In the midst of this rural cemetery, and its picturesque decay, is a radically different landscape. A field occupied by nearly identical clean white headstones set of right to uniform height and perfectly in perfectly aligned rows. The cemetery around to around it seems haphazard. This is in the flats. It is a more regulated and uniform landscape. The gleaming marble stones catch is rounding like an throw into sharp relief the raised letters of the name which as it soon becomes apparent is the defining focus of this installation. In the center of the plot of 300 graves is an eroding sandstone were memorial from the 1870s. A monument to the union debt complete with standing soldiers overseen by a female allegory looking at only and dictate even though it post date the layout of the plot and most of the graves within it. After the civil war, soldier monuments and cemetery sprung up for the first time in the United States and even in the euro american worlds. Even though there was no shortage of earlier war dead from the always violent american past. As holmes wrote about his own church wrote in the 1830s the sabres thirsting edge, the hot shell falling. Here is scattered death. They need it not to leave their children free. Despite that amazing image of the ground beneath him. Bodies punctured and shattered by war, the traces of that violence had become invisible and even unwanted in the relatively brief time of peace in which he wrote. The true monument to the war dead he got resided invisibly in that state of freedom that the war dead had supposedly secured. This antimonumental sentiment fell on deaf years deaf years after the civil war when monuments spread across the land from battlefield to hometowns. When i rediscovered Allegheny Cemetery and its soldier plot, i was struck anew by the disparity between the monument and the graves. Their design and arrangement appearing so much at odds with the edge of a good memorial in with the antiquated memorial in the center and with the aging tombs from various eras scattered nearby. I learned that the monument was a homegrown undertaking sponsored by a local Ladies Memorial Association. The plot itself was a federally owned soldiers lots. A federal cemetery within a municipal one. It is one of 22 such soldiers lots in the National Cemetery system. Of course, there are soldier cemeteries like antietam and so on. These particular soldier lots are smaller lots within a larger cemetery and usually with any municipal cemetery. It is one of 22 lots of the National Cemetery system that was born in the civil war. The first instance in the modern world of a nation systematically assuming responsibility for its soldier dead. While there were president s for this system in the ancient world, the bestknown being the cemetery in athens where the cremated remains of soldiers who had died abroad were brought back for collective burial. The american system promised its war dead individual burial of intact bodies although intact bodies. A logistical goal of profound proportions. The federal soldier lot in Allegheny Cemetery is about 50 yards away from another soldier lot often confused with it. This second lot once belonged to the most powerful Civic Association and the united the Union VeteransOrganization Called the grand army of the republic. In its heyday, this Burial Ground here was larger and far more popular and prestigious than the government locked. It also is arrayed in the straight rows but the headstones, originally upright have been pushed over into the ground. The stone turned gray. The names in most cases unreadable. The first plot looked almost magically untouched by time. The second, so degraded by time that it has lost even its age value and is now a near wreck, disappearing into the crowd with the bodies it is supposed to commemorate. These striking disparities are systematic of a much larger problem, i will call it a metadata crisis of the war dead. Metadeta in the broadest sense is they about data. More specifically, metadata as it turned that librarians and catalogers used to refer to various categories of information such as name, title, more specifically, metadata is a term that librarians and catalogers use to refer to various categories of information such as name, title, and date. They describe and identify objects like books and artworks that are rich in information. Metadata is the foundation of our history. Without all of the elaborate procedures devised to date artworks, art history would be impossible. Metadata must be attached to its objects in some way, typically in the form of a label or a barcode or a mark stamped or cast were written directly on the object. Anyone who has gone through a collection of old family photographs of long dead ancestors has probably had the experience of turning over an unknown image hoping to find some sort of metadata handwritten on the back. A mere surname or set of initials can not only identify a face, but unlock an entire life story. In this case, by turning over the back, my wife and i were able to discover that this photo was taken by one of the most famous postwar photographers in gettysburg. Grave markers, headstones, headboards inscribed rocks are among the most ancient culturally significant forms of metadata. Both the National Cemetery system and the proliferation of War Memorials were responses to a metadata crisis, not unlike the tamil of the forgotten amalie rotorcraft. But intensified at a shocking scale. The vast crisis was quite simply the separation of names from bodies. Repeated endlessly and everywhere. It was not merely a logistical crisis, but an identity crisis that rippled through families and communities and polities alike. Keeping the name alive or keeping the name in place, a slightly different formulations that what that i will explain a just a moment was a cultural problem, a technological problem and an artistic problem all wrapped in one of enormous undertaking. Our art history i hope to show offers some unique insights into this multifaceted undertaking that reshaped the nation in ways we have not yet fully grasped. During the civil war itself, the names of the dead seemed ever essence. By telegraph and news media, into homes everywhere. The test from their bodies and from the horrible realities of warfare, these names settled into alphabetized list arrayed in columns like the passenger manifest from ships in port or the dead letter list from the post office. Quote, we see the list in the morning paper at breakfast but dismissed its recollection with a copy commented the New York Times after a horrific battle of antietam in 1862. I will go on to quote this at length. There is a confused mass of names that they are all strangers. We forget the horrible significant that dwells amid the jumble of type. Each of these little names of the printer has struck off so lightly last night whistling over his work and that we speak with a clip of the tongue, represents a bleeding, mangled corpse. It will fall upon some heart straining it to breaking. There is nothing very terrible to us in the list although our sensations might be different if the Newspaper Carrier left the names on the battlefield and the bodies at our door instead. We could spend the entire evening talking about this one paragraph. With his modernist recognition of the numbing affect of mass media. And with this strange juxtaposition of the remorseless weight of debt with a lighthearted routine of the printer who strikes off the name of deaths latest victim. His alienated labor so different from the elaborate ritual of a funeral or the arduous craft of carving the same letters into a tombstone. And then, and even more striking is this junction. The detachment of names from bodies. Our sensations might be different if this Newspaper Carrier left of the bodies at our doorstep instead. What a remarkable idea. They came to the writer because she or he had experienced for the first time the new technology of battlefield photography. Particularly, an exhibition of the grizzly corpses taken on the battlefield of antietam and displayed in Matthew Bradys gallery in new york. If we understand all that is implied, the junctions multiply in a dizzying sequence. The names of these corpses passed through the fingers of this printer. Meanwhile, the bodies themselves were dumped in a massive trench on a farm in maryland. Names, images, and bodies all moved in Different Directions and mostly amongst strangers. During the civil war, these new print an image technologies combined with concentrated mass warfare to exacerbate an already be will during metadata crisis. Life in the 19th century was not supposed to end this way. In a disrupted burial far from family and community. For slaves, poppers, and criminals, such disruptions were commonplace. White citizens and their families expected the privilege of a socalled good depth at home and a properly marked grave registered in a cemetery. For these more privileged members of society, the civil war came as a profound shock. As scholars such as through griffin has taught us. The Christian Doctrine of resurrection did offer real consolation by promising the bodies return no matter what displacement it had indoor in life and death. This promise of return in the hereafter did not by any means of eliminating the overwhelming need of families, communities, and the nation itself to stay connected in the here and now to the bodies and names and identities of the dead. As one grieving woman wrote in early 1865, oh would what could i say, from the bottom of my soul, and will be done but i fear i never can. She was talking about her beloved who had died and been buried by her. This precisely in this gap between gods Perfect World and the future and the tragic world of the here and now that art and technology work. Meeting the pressing needs of the wars survivors. The problem posed by the warden was a problem of displacement, of death out of waste. On a scale unprecedented in u. S. History, the civil war led to a massive physical displacement of bodies in lifeanddeath. A soldier off of a farm in the middle of the country might die on a battlefield in virginia or a prison camp in georgia or a hospital here in washington. As shattering as the circumstances were, they were often compounded by a second displacement. A metaphysical displacement of the body from its name. In literally hundreds of thousands of cases, soldiers became unknown or missing. The unknown were bodies that had lost their names. The missing were names that had lost their bodies. In both cases, the metadata, the name had become attached from its object, the body. These at legions of the unknown and the same coin. The metadata crisis created by protracted mass warfare between armies totally unprepared for human disaster on this scale. The signs of this crisis were dealt with in sermons, editorials, and graveyards. Families, contractors, and philanthropic agencies all made unprecedented efforts to find bodies and reconnect them with names. In the weeks and months after gettysburg, for example, the battlefield was overrun with people searching through gravesites, sometimes opening up graves and rummaging through personal effects that had already been picked over by enemy soldiers or civilian passengers. They were in search of any object that might yield identifying information, a letter, a small bible, or a family photograph tucked into a pocket. You have to remember this was long before dogtags a dogtags system that was in place that could guarantee the identity of the dead. After the war, the federal army set in motion a vast enterprise to scour the theater of war for bodies. While the legendary nurse, clara barton established an office of correspondence with the friends of the missing men of the United States army, and received over 63,000 letters in wiring after loss to men. 63,000 letters inquiring after loss to men. Lossed men. Charitable organization such as the Christian Commission financed trips to makeshift cemeteries in prison camps and battlefield where they copied metadata from wooden headboards and published it in long list of names and books given in the order in which they live. All of these people and agencies were racing against the destructive effects of time. When graves were marked, the fragile wooden headboards weekly decayed and the marks on them often and pencil faded away. In other cases, the headboards disappeared were found somewhere else attached from their graves and a label without an object. In the cemetery for Union Soldiers who died at richmonds prison, less than one in 20 were marked. The remaining headboards had been taken by poor people in the neighborhood and incinerated to heat their homes. Headboards like the bodies which they marked decomposed and were lost. For this reason, samuel weaver, a contractor hired to identify and three buried bodies in the gettysburg area several months after the battle, made a point of mailing headboards at once as he said to their new coffins so that headboard and body would never be separated again. This was not enough. He also wrote the name, regiment, and company of the soldier on the coffin itself and numbered the coffin. He recorded all of that data in a book that he kept with them. You can see him holding it in his hands. He later copied the names and numbers to a master register. There is very little imagery of this Massive National campaign to synchronize the word that with their names understandably, because the process was so abstract, and so monday, metaphysical in its reach and grizzly in its details, Timothy Osullivans photo of disrupted confederate burial at gettysburg are some of the few images that open insight into this process. These are among a handful of photographs produced during the war that show the wooden headboards made by soldiers, sharply enough to read the lettering under magnification. In this case, the glass plate negatives which survived enables us to identify the soldier on the far left with either characters of metadata. T, w, s on the top line. It is amazing first of all the dead soldiers comrades took the time, on the second day of the battle before the battle had concluded, that they took the time during the deadliest battle of the civil war, while the outcome was still undecided to do their best to imitate tombstone parking by carefully in sizing and beveling the honorific fonts into the board. They did not have the time to carve the holding that they did not need to because the three initials and the military shorthand were just enough data to point to an actual individual. Thomas w sligh of the third South CarolinaInfantry Company e. Perhaps most remarkable of all, we have a memoir written by a fellow soldier where this individual body identified by five here cares comes back to life in a flood of words. He resurfaces in the memoir is a bright, Young College student who left a school and became a favorite with the troops. Wiki and always kind. But rather girlish in appearance for physically, he was not strong. To quote from the memoir. Or this reason, the memoir explains, the officers took pity on him and assigned him to duties in the rear, away from combat. And he got to gettysburg, he burst into tears and that to be allowed to prove his manhood in battle. On july 2, 1863, this witty, kind, tearyeyed relish young man, marched through a Peach Orchard into a hail of bullets died defending the confederate nations cause. That cause being the right of property and negroes slaves. The metadata on the headboard survived several exclamations and removals and ended up in revised form on an elaborately carved gravestone in Magnolia Cemetery in charleston, South Carolina. Where his body was relocated in 1871 through the efforts of the Ladies Memorial Association of charleston. The Charleston Group was one of the bestknown among many elite white women associations organized to care for confederate graves and bring back the bodies of confederate soldiers to southern soil. His body is in a collective grave of some nine bodies, no doubt because the remains of the men became intermingled during reburial by a farmer at gettysburg. On the magnolia tombstone, he becomes an officer, a sergeant which he never was in reality. And ironically, due to a miss trends this transcription, his name acquires a t becoming slights. A relief sculpture by an unknown stone carver relies on a traditional pictorial of resurrection with a winged fem