A park within a park: Maya Lin conceived her project as a quiet protected place unto itself
Pictures: 1. Mariordo; 2. Maya Lin, Library of Congress CALL NUMBER: ADE- UNIT 2228, no. 1( E size) [ P & P ]; 3. United States Geological Survey satellite image of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, taken April 26, 2002. As I continued to mull my answer, I began to imagine an arc of memorial forms over the last eighty years or so and how, in fact, post-World War I and World War II memorials had evolved along a very discernible path, all with visual and conceptual echoes of their predecessors. Here I recalled that counter-memorial artists and architects such as Horst Hoheisel, Jochen Gerz, Esther Shalev, and Daniel Libeskind( among many others) all told me that Maya Lin’ s design for the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial( 1982) broke the mold that made their own counter-memorial work possible. And here I remembered that Maya Lin had also openly acknowledged her own debt to both Sir Edwin Lutyens’ s“ Memorial to the Missing of the Somme”( 1924) in Thiepval, France; and later to George- Henri Pingusson’ s“ Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation”( 1962) on the Ile de la Cite in Paris. Both are precursors to the“ negative-form” realized so brilliantly by Maya Lin, both preoccupied with and articulations of uncompensated loss and absence, represented by carved-out pieces of landscape, as well as by the visitor’ s descent downward( and inward) into memory( Lin, 4:09).
Unlike the utopian, revolutionary forms with which modernists hoped to redeem art and literature after World War I, the post- Holocaust memory artist, in particular, would say,“ Not only is art not the answer, but after the Holocaust, there can be no more final solutions.”
Observing Memories ISSUE 1
6