Observing Memories Issue 1 | Page 14

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
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