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AP®︎/College Art History
Course: AP®︎/College Art History > Unit 12
Lesson 1: 20th century- Ringgold, Dancing at the Louvre
- Mariko Mori, Pure Land
- Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao
- Bill Viola, The Crossing
- Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii
- Osorio, En la barberia no se llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop)
- Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence, Women of Allah series
- Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Earth’s Creation
- Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People)
- Cindy Sherman, Untitled #228 from the History Portraits series
- Jeff Koons, Pink Panther
- Xu Bing, Book from the Sky
- Magdalena Abakanowicz, Androgyne III
- Song Su-Nam, Summer Trees
- Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial
- Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Gates
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Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982, granite, 2 acres within Constitution Gardens, (National Mall, Washington, D.C.), speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Was this the first memorial to feature engraved names on such a large scale? In other words, was there any sort of precedent for this sort of design?(16 votes)
- If you ever have the opportunity to visit Honolulu, Hawaii, I highly recommend that you visit the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, otherwise known as "The Punchbowl Cemetery". It was established in 1949 and not only is it one of the most spectacular places to look out over Honolulu, Pearl Harbor, and southern Oahu, but seeing the tens of thousands of names of WWII casualties inscribed on row after row of high white walls has always been a very emotional experience each time we have visited there.(7 votes)
- If the names are listed in Chronological order according to death... how are they able to add new names later? I didn't see any spaces left for more names to be added....(7 votes)
- What was the controversy surrounding the fact that she, Maya Lin, had Asian heritage but was the winning architect of the competition that allowed her make this monument?(2 votes)
- The design of the work has strong influenced from the Japanese gardens (Minimalism) and native American works. Unfortunately, a possible answer could be a rise in nativism as a response to her influences. Even though Ms. Lin was Ohio born, she received much negative feedback, particularly from war veterans.(2 votes)
- Why was there such backlash about her race once it was revealed she was Asian American?(1 vote)
- Some white Americans didn't want an Asian's name on something to remind people of America's defeat in a war in Asia.(4 votes)
- How long has it taken so far to make?(2 votes)
- so where did you find the info from- 2:44? 3:03(1 vote)
- There are many interviews with Maya Lin about the memorial. I imagine that Beth Harris took the part about which you ask from one of them. I just searched for "maya lin interview vietnam memorial" and was directed to three videos. You might try the same thing, and find the source of Beth's comments.(2 votes)
- where is a metaphor being used(1 vote)
- The sculpture itself symbolizes many features of what is being remembered. Its placement, shape, color and "skyline" (if it can be said to have one) are all metaphors for how that war and those who unnecessarily died in it are being remembered.(2 votes)
- How were the names carved? Was it done by hand or was some computer-aided manufacturing technique used?(1 vote)
- They were certainly done by machine (rather than by hand). This was constructed in the early 1980s, so the degree of computerization in the process was cruder than it would have been had the project been a product of the 2020s.(1 vote)
- What was her main reason that she built this monument?(1 vote)
- She didn't build it, she designed it.
As a young designer, she responded to an invitation to submit a design.
Her design was chosen, and she became famed for it.
Many invitations are issued each year to artists and writers to submit ideas. I recently began submitting proposals to contests asking for song lyrics. None of mine have been selected... yet!(1 vote)
- Was is it 1,400 or 14,000 submitted for the Vietnam Memorial? I am taking Art Appreciation and the book stated that there was 14,000.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(music) ("In The Sky With
Diamonds" by Scalding Lucy) Steven: We're in
Washington D.C. on the mall at the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial. Beth: Which is situated right between the Washington Monument
and the Lincoln Memorial. Maya Lin, the architect of the memorial sought about uniting the
memorial to the nation's past, bringing together the
past and the present. Steven: It's this very long series of slabs of stone, this
highly-reflective black granite that actually points to
both of those monuments. Beth: Although the
architect didn't like to refer to these as walls,
in a way they are walls, but it's very thin, sunk into the ground and inscribed with the names of the servicemen who died
in the Vietnam War. Steven: Now there are
more than 58,000 names and in fact, more names are being added. It is overwhelming in
the density of names. What happens as you walk down this path, you sink into the earth. The earth opens up and
reveals these names. Because the surface of the
stone is so reflective, it becomes a mirror and really all that seems to have substance is the rougher surface of
the names themselves. Beth: Maya Lin's idea
was that it was the names that were the reality, the
substance of the monument and that the reflectivity of the granite opened up into another world
that we could not enter, but which was there for us to see. Steven: She describes when
she first visited the site that she wanted to reveal that edge. Beth: In fact, she said,
"I had a simple impulse to cut into the earth. I
imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up and initial violence and pain
that in time would heal." She writes,"That the
experience of the monument would help people to come to terms with the death of their loved ones." Steven: There is a real
journey involved here. You walk down in, you find the name of your loved one embedded within the chronological sequence of the death of all of these soldiers,
and then you walk back out. Beth: That's right. In the center, the chronology begins and
goes down toward the right as we're facing the wall
and then picks up again on the low edge of the left side and then towards the center again. As we move down the
center, the path widens and the granite rises more
than 10 feet above us. Steven: The names become a symbol of this person multiplied
more than 58,000 times, but even though you've
got that abstraction, you also have this very concrete reality. You have this place for family to come, to gather, to reflect on that name. Beth: Maya Lin talks about the name as an abstraction that in fact, means more to family and loved ones than a picture. The picture represents someone at a particular time and a particular place as one moment in their
lives whereas a name might recall everything about that person. Steven: There is this
powerful accumulation of all of the names. As you descend, as you walk
into the densest middle of the monument, it becomes
absolutely overwhelming. Beth: It's a very
different experience than most previous war memorials. When we think about the
history of war memorials, we often think about memorials
to military heroes like the monument to Lord
Nelson in Trafalgar Square or we might think about
the Shaw memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens
in the National Gallery where you have a hero leading an anonymous army with an allegorical figure representing peace and death, this combination of allegory and heroism that's usually in memorials, it's completely absent here. Steven: How can one create
a meaningful monument in the late 20th century? What does it mean to strip away all of the representational form? What does it mean to create something so subconsciously abstract and yet also so powerful and so meaningful? Beth: Evidently the
committee that judged this decided that this
abstraction would be best. It's interesting to think
about how the committee didn't know who was Maya Lin was. There were 1,400 entries,
completely anonymous. Maya Lin at that point, was
an undergraduate at Yale, she was an architecture student,
she's an Asian American. It's interesting to think about what might have happened had they known who this application was from. Steven: Once her identity
had been revealed, there was real backlash and racism. There was backlash also
about the abstraction. Ultimately that was resolved by a much more naturalistic sculpture adjacent to the main memorial. Beth: One that shows soldiers in a very naturalistic way,
three-dimensionally, which is also powerful, but in a way that feels much more public
and far less intimate. Steven: Maya Lin was brilliant in creating a public space and yet
tremendous intimacy. We can feel those names inscribed. The active reading is to come close, to internalize those names. Maya Lin's Vietnam
Memorial is one of the most successful memorials in the nation. Beth: And apparently
one of the most visited monuments in Washington D.C. In an article that was
published much later, writing about her ideas for the monument, Maya Lin said, "It would
be an interface between our world and the quieter, darker, more peaceful world beyond. I chose black granite in order to make the surface reflective and peaceful. I never looked at the memorial as a wall, an object, but as an edge to the earth, an opened side. The mirrored sect would double the size of the
park creating two worlds; one we are part of and
one we cannot enter." Steven: Even that black
granite created controversy. She also talked about how she couldn't expect granite that came from Canada or from Sweden, two countries that had really good quality black granite because there was too much
political baggage because draft dodgers had gone to
both of those countries. Beth: One opponent of her design said, "One needs no artistic education to see this memorial designed for what it is, a black scar and a hole
hidden, as if out of shame." No, I think this is
very different than what Maya Lin intended for the wall. She specifically took
an apolitical approach and wanted the design to
be about those veterans who had sacrificed their
lives and not about the political controversy at all; not about whether if the was was something shameful or something honorable. Steven: The country had
not only fought the war, but then fought itself over
the meaning of the war. Maya Lin was very wise
in sidestepping that and putting to the fore simply the names, the numerical power of all those fallen. Beth: And she wrote,
"The wall dematerializes of the form and allows the names to become the object. Pure and reflective surfaces that would allow visitors the chance to see
themselves with the name." (music) ("In The Sky With
Diamonds" by Scalding Lucy)