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Maya Lin emerges from the shadows
The artist who created the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is out with a book and a more outspoken profile
Thursday, October 19, 2000
By REGINA HACKETT
When Frieda Mock and Terry Saunders won an Academy Award for their 1995 documentary, "Maya Lin: A Strong, Clear Vision," nobody was more surprised than Lin's closest friends.
"They didn't know till they saw me on TV," she says with a guilty, self-effacing grin. "I told almost nobody that filmmakers were following me around for five years. Once I failed to mention it, the time to mention it never came. I felt as if I were leading a double life."
Only those who have something important to hide lead double lives.
What Lin was hiding makes her new book, "Boundaries," a personal breakthrough. After 20 years of glossing it over, she's finally willing to admit that she's famous, exactly the sort of artist who interests not only a film crew but a nation.
Lin was in Seattle on Tuesday as part of a quick reading tour in support of the book. She's on tour for a week, which is the longest she's willing to be away from her husband, photography dealer Daniel Wolf, and their two young daughters in New York City.
"I've always been seen through the eyes of others," she says, sliding gracefully into an overstuffed chair at the restaurant at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel. "I thought it was time to speak for myself."
Although she had been awake since 5 a.m. in order to catch Wolf and her daughters before they started their day, her eyes were clear and her manner lively.
At 41, she has a fresh, delicate beauty that belies her age. She could still be the youngster who patiently defended her design against waves of impassioned attackers, except that she has matured into a strong angularity and a clear confidence. If she were defending her work before Senate committees today, her voice wouldn't tremble and she wouldn't hide her face under the rim of an enormous hat.
She made her first model for the Veterans Memorial out of mashed potatoes in the Yale dining hall. Earlier that week she had seen the site in Washington and immediately envisioned a form cutting into the earth. The veterans sponsoring the memorial had asked only that the names of the 57,000 Americans killed in the war be carved into the memorial's face.
Lin's great vision was a polished black granite wedge that rises on an angle out of the earth, not a wall exactly but an edge to the earth opened up, a landscape created by the gravity of enormous loss. Seeking out names of loved ones, viewers see themselves mirrored there.
If the competition hadn't been a blind one, in which designs were submitted by number instead of name, "I never would have won," she says. Some vets saw the design as insulting and wanted the granite to be white and entirely above ground, accompanied by a giant American flag. "I would have taken my name off it," she says smiling, aware of how little that would have mattered at the time.
Finally, a compromise plan emerged, with a conventional grouping of bronze figures made to share the site. "Some people wanted the figures in front of the monument," she says, which would have turned it into a backdrop." Instead, the figures are off to the side, where they have proved irrelevant to all but a few.
"When it was over, I wanted to pretend it never happened," she says. "I went back to school and tried to forget it. I refused to talk about the memorial or do another one."
Her inspiration for the piece came from the image of water Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. evoked in his "I Have a Dream Speech," that "We are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Approaching her finished piece, few people focus on the 14 tons of stone used to make what amounts to a giant, rounded table top.
Instead, they see the words floating under a thin scrim of moving water on the stone's surface, a circular timeline beginning in 1954 with the Supreme Court decision to integrate American schools (Brown vs. the Board of Education) and ending with Dr. King's murder in 1968.
Trailing a finger across the letters breaks into the water's stream and makes the viewer a physical part of the history he or she is exploring.
At the dedication, Julian Bond praised it as a "monument majestic in its simplicity and overwhelming in its power."
On these two memorials, Lin's fame rests, at least outside the art world. Some people wonder if starting her career with a big bang at an early age didn't stop that career as well.
The truth is, Lin never stopped producing as both as artist and an architect, but the quiet, reductive clarity of her work doesn't seize the public's attention when a large social issue isn't at stake.
That's the reason she has avoided those large social issues whenever possible. In a celebrity-besotted culture, Lin's decision to avoid the limelight might seem odd, but only to those who haven't seen "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision" and don't know what the limelight cost her.
"Boundaries" beautifully describes the range of her production, from hilly mounds of broken glass at Ohio State University ("Groundswell," 1992-93) to the grassy swell of burial mounds at the University of Michigan ("Wave Field," 1993-95) and her radical subversion of a corporate building's lobby in Des Moines ("A Shift in the Stream," 1995-1997).
She has designed houses, most notably the Norton Residence in New York City, in 1996-1998, which uses the principle of origami to fold in on itself, and the Weber Residence in Williamstown, Mass., 1992-94, whose roof echoes the line of rolling hills in the background.
She has transformed a barn into a Frank Gehry-like marvel of colored light and air, "Langston Hughes Library," on Alex Haley Farm in Clinton, Tenn. And she created the perfect home for New York City's Museum of African Art in 1992-94.
In addition, she makes art in her studio out of glass, metal and beeswax, and is represented by New York's Gagosian Gallery.
"I disapprove of didactic art," she says. "I like art that creates a private moment for people to reflect on their own feelings and impressions." That's what the Vietnam Veterans Memorial provides, a private moment in a public place, a slate which vast numbers of people have used to envision their own stories.
Growing up in Athens, Ohio, with a father who was a ceramic artist and a mother who was a college English professor, Lin wasn't aware of the Vietnam War. "I never wanted to make a comment on the war," she said. "I knew only that grief needs to be faced in order to pass through it."
And yet, she herself wasn't willing to face the personal grief during the process of getting the memorial built. "Yes, that's a contradiction," she says.
Lin is full of contradictions. She's a detached observer whose work elicits the most intense personal feelings from the public. To this day, Vietnam vets, meeting her, cry when they shake her hand.
Maybe the description "detached observer" no longer describes her. "I agreed to do an artwork for Yellowstone National Park and decided to do something in reaction to the sea of cars surrounding natural wonders such as Old Faithful. I want it to be part of my final memorial about the waves of extinctions taking place across the earth. I'm calling it the 'Extinction Series' and have no idea what form it will take."
She considers herself apolitical but shudders at the thought of George Bush as president. "The environment can't afford him," she says. "Gore is so much better."
And she's no longer willing to tolerate slights that she used to brush off, such as the implication that she isn't really an American because her heritage is Chinese.
"People say, 'Where are you from?' If I say, 'Ohio,' they say, 'No, where are you
Politically engaged, environmentally active, decisively opinionated: Would her best friends even recognize her?
"I hope so," she says, laughing.
Architecture historian Vincent Scully found those same qualities in her when she was his student. "She's an absolutely clear-cutting blade," he told the filmmakers documenting her work. "The word for her is courage, courage and fiber. Nobody should make the mistake of thinking anything else."
P-I art critic Regina Hackett can be reached at 206-448-8332 or reginahackett@seattle-pi.com
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER ART CRITIC
As a senior studying at Yale's school of architecture, 20-year-old Lin created the design for what has proved to be the single most successful piece of public sculpture in the country: the 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
After 20 years of downplaying her celebrity, Maya Lin finally admits that she is of interest to a nation in her new book. Grant M. Haller/P-I
In 1988, she made an exception to her rule and agreed to design the "Civil Rights Memorial" at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. "There was no civil rights memorial," she says. "That's what interested me, the chance to provide a focal point for thinking about that crucial time in our history."
The name of fallen heroes are etched into Lin's civil rights memorial located in Montgomery, Ala. AP photo
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