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