Observing Memories Issue 1 | Page 8

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 Geolog- ical Survey satellite image of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, taken April 26, 2002. Sir Edwin Lutyens’s “Memorial to the Missing of the Somme” (1924) in Thiepval, France 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. 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.” Carved into the ground, a black wound in the landscape and an explicit counter-point to Washington’s prevailing white, neo-classical obelisks and statuary, Maya Lin’s design articulated loss without redemption, and formalized a national ambivalence surrounding the memory of American soldiers sent to fight and die in a war the country now abhorred. In Maya Lin’s words, she “imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, an initial violence and pain that in time would heal” (Lin, 4:10). That is, she opened a space in the landscape that would open a space within us for memory. “I never looked at the memorial as a wall, an object,” Maya Lin has said, “but as an edge to the earth, an opened side.” Instead of a positive V-form (like a jutting elbow, or a spear-tip, or a flying-wedge military formation), she opened up the V’s obverse space, a negative-space to be filled by those who come to remember within its embrace. Moreover, as Maya Lin described it in her original proposal, “The memorial is composed not as an unchanging monument, but as a moving composition, to be understood as we move into and out of it” (Lin, 4:05). That is, as a “monument” is fixed and static, her memorial would be defined by our movement through its space, memory by means of perambulation and walking through. After the dedication of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in 1982, it was as if German artists had also found their own uniquely contrarian memorial vernacular for the expression Both are precursors to the “negative-form” realized of their own national shame, for their revulsion against traditionally authoritarian, so brilliantly by Maya Lin, both preoccupied with and complacent, and self-certain national shrines. Preoccupied with absence and irredeemable articulations of uncompensated loss and absence, loss, and with an irreparably broken world, German artists and architects would now arrive represented by carved-out pieces of landscape, at their own, counter-memorial architectural vernacular that could express the breach in as well as by the visitor’s descent downward (and their faith in civilization without mending it that might articulate the void of Europe’s lost inward) into memory (Lin, 4:09). Jews without filling it in. Observing Memories ISSUE 1 6 Observing Memories ISSUE 1 7