History Recaptured Through Monument and Art Term Paper

Visual Arts - Communicate

Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial

A description of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) (which features 58,272 names; the letters spelling out the names are 0.53 inches high and are carved 0.015 inches deep into the walls) should include the fact that it is made up of two gabbro walls (gabbro is an igneous rock, chemically the same as plutonic basalt, which is black) that are each 246 feet 9 inches long. The two walls are built into the ground, there is an earthen embankment behind the walls, and the two walls meet at an apex which is 10.1 feet high at the point where the walls join. At the ends of the walls, the height is just eight inches (www.bvvinc.org).

The angle at which the two walls come together is 125° 12' and the walls are built on top of 140 concrete pilings that have been driven about 35 feet down into bedrock. The one wall points directly to the Washington Monument, and the other wall points to the Lincoln Memorial. There is symbolism in the direction in which the walls point; Lin said that linking those "two strong symbols" created a "unity between the past and present" (Lin, 2000).

What was Maya Lin's purpose in the design she came up with? Lin wrote an article in The New York Review of Books in 2000, and in that piece she explained that she chose black granite "to make the surface reflective and peaceful." When she first visited the potential site, she imagined taking a knife "and cutting into the earth, opening it up, an initial violence and pain that in time would heal" because the grass would grow back (which it did, at the back of the memorial) (Lin, p. 3). So the two walls, once they were joined at an apex, would not be a wall, per se, but rather as "an edge to the earth, an opened side."

What does the work say about our society's response to national events? It should be acknowledged that this national event was a bitterly hated war, and the post-war tensions reflected that deep divisions in the U.S. still existed. During the design process there was "a considerable amount of ill will and mistrust between the veterans and myself," she wrote (p. 4). Later, Lin was criticized because she was an Asian creating a memorial for an Asian war. "It wasn't so much an artistic dispute" over the design, "as a political one," she wrote (p. 7).

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