A Memorial That Tells The Truth
In 1975, as the last helicopter frantically left the roof of the U.S.
Embassy in Saigon, it was virtually unthinkable that a memorial to the
nearly 60,000 American soldiers who had perished in the Vietnam War
would one day stand on the same spot on Washington's National Mall where
anti-war protest rallies had earlier gathered. Six years later, it was
equally unimaginable that the just-chosen design for the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial would, when built, turn out to rank as the greatest aesthetic
achievement in an American public monument in the 20th century.
How could it? Public monuments typically seek to represent--or create--a
picture of social consensus about historic events. This memorial faced
two enormous hurdles: America's war in Vietnam inspired anything but
broad agreement among the citizenry; and the individualist orientation
of successful modern art was mostly antithetical to the established
demands of public monuments. Yet unparalleled greatness is exactly what
sculptor and architect Maya Lin achieved with her design for the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial, a scheme plucked from a pool of more than 1,400 submissions
to an open competition in May 1981. This is one public monument that
also ranks as an extraordinary work of art. There was nothing like it
before, and there's been nothing like it since.
Other public monuments this century might claim equal fame or affection
in the public imagination--the Iwo Jima memorial from WWII, for example,
with its indelible photographic image of huddled soldiers straining
in unison to raise the American flag, or the fragile but eternal flame
that burns at the sober grave site of President Kennedy. However much
admired for what they represent, though, none garners the same respect
for artistic merit as does Lin's stark, elegant 450-foot wedge of polished
black granite that slices into the earth on the National Mall.
Alone among the many powerful monuments there, the Vietnam memorial
is distinctly modern in design. Its style doesn't nod toward antiquity,
with columns, obelisks, winged symbols of transcendence or other familiar
classical motifs that would conspire to anchor it within a heroic continuum
of human history.
Instead, this sculpture is abstract.
The radical fact of its abstraction was seized upon by opponents when
Lin's model was unveiled. Tom Wolfe, the novelist and artistic Luddite,
condemned the decision not to build a figurative monument. Like countless
other anti-Modernists in our past, he detected in the design a communist
plot, calling the decision to erect an abstract sculpture "symbolic
of a Red Guard-style Cultural Revolution'' that had supposedly taken
hold in the United States.
Wolfe was proved wrong--as were all the other illustrious Cold Warriors
who did their damnedest to stop Lin's design from being built. Patrick
J. Buchanan worked hard to derail the project, and so did William F.
Buckley Jr., Rep. Henry J. Hyde, R-Ill., Dallas businessman Ross Perot
and James Watt, Ronald Reagan's secretary of the Interior. Each had
his own reasons. However wrong they all were--and unrecorded is whether
any of them, in retrospect, has changed his mind in the face of an overwhelming
public embrace of the design--only Wolfe had put his inadvertent finger
on the source of the monument's power.
In retrospect it's clear that the Vietnam memorial is successful precisely
because it is modern, not in spite of that fact. A traditional, representational
statue in marble or bronze, along with the standard classical repertoire,
would have spelled disaster. There are two reasons, and they are intimately
related.
First, a traditional memorial would have instantly historicized the
Vietnam War. The bronze statues and classical motifs familiar to most
war memorials would have anchored the event being commemorated firmly
in the past. The soul- and body-shattering trauma of war often demands
just this sort of public response.
Imagery redolent of the past solemnly sanctifies the dead, who immediately
join a collective pantheon of ancestral authority. And the living, faced
with a familiar and comforting symbol of history, are reassured through
an implicit declaration: ``We have survived.''
But Vietnam was different. Emphatic historicity would not do.
No event since the Civil War has had such a profound and wrenching effect
on the national sense of self. America was torn in two, split into raw,
polarized and seemingly irreconcilable camps. The war had been over
for just six years when the competition for the memorial's design concluded,
and the wound in the American psyche remained fresh and deep. However
much we wanted to put the awful episode behind us, there was important
work left to do.
We needed a place to grieve. It had to be a public place, too, where
the personal expression of loss could be shared. During the divisive
war, while the body count was rising, shared loss had been impossible
to experience. With its black granite, carved names and path sloping
down into enveloping earth, Lin's stark design has distinctly funereal
overtones. They are appropriate to the task.
The abstract monument carved out a space to mourn our loss, collectively
and individually, each in his or her own way. Minimalist in form, and
more an environmental earthwork than a discrete sculptural object, the
memorial loosely recalls a powerful precedent. Actual battlefields where
soldiers' blood consecrated the soil now stand as the most moving public
monuments to the Civil War, that epic event that was a defining episode
in America's 19th century.
The modern design of Lin's monument acknowledges that Vietnam is an
episode still operative (if submerged) in the present life of the nation.
The war's meaning remains open-ended. One may regard it as a hugely
tragic misdeed, while another may still champion its aim; but both can
stand side by side in harmony within the sheltering space of this memorial.
Eventually the memorial's sleek Minimalist geometry will recede into
the realm of a period style, which will locate the Vietnam War as an
episode in U.S. history. But the withdrawal into the past will come
slowly, through the actual, incremental accretions of real time, rather
than instantly, with the visual aid of an ersatz classicism.
And that's the second, related quality that makes the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial uniquely important. The monument is honest. It doesn't dissemble
or look away. Its funereal abstraction is truthful about the awful predicament.
A classical figurative style of memorial sculpture, which would inevitably
carry with it a claim of unitary public consensus about the Vietnam
War and its place in American history, would correctly have been perceived
to be a fraud.
Public monuments face a critical problem in our time. For the modern
world, the rise of mass media has transformed the ceremonial performance
of authentic public life into the shifting phantom of public relations.
We don't expect the truth to be spoken in public.
On the rare occasion that it is, we do a double, even triple, take.
We can't take our eyes off it.
That's what made Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial so startling
and uniquely powerful. And with a depth and profundity that can break
your heart and move your soul, the citizenry responds. The fact that
they do, that veteran and anti-war activist alike have gathered the
memorial into their embrace, tells us something crucial about art and
about our experience in the world. It's the hallmark of an authentic
masterpiece--which is remarkable in any case, but doubly so for a 20th-century
public monument.
(c) 2000, Los Angeles Times
