Vents

Salzmann’s theater of the nude emerged fully blown in a series of experimental images made over steam vents in west Philadelphia between 1983 and 1985. Salzmann himself says that some part of the idea for the vents series came from seeing homeless people sitting in winter on top of the city’s steam-releasing iron sidewalk grates, and one might say that there was some kind of loose artistic algorithm in Salzmann’s mind that interpolated the lithe, glistening and beautiful, full of a kind of vital impulse that governs their motions with an ease that intuitively knows itself. And from within a heightened sensual aliveness they are also sexual—not sexualized, but freely and openly allowing arousal as it comes. We see virtually every kind of sexual coupling and all manner of pleasures, subtle and demonstrative alike. It does not seem that any type of sexuality belongs to anyone. Rather, it seems that a more omnipresent state of attraction and desire shapes and reshapes itself within the figures, and between them. The steam itself could be called the strangely thick and vaporous spirit of that all-over openness, through which Salzmann’s figures move as feels right.