Finkelpearl Maya Lin
EK17
Finkelpearl_Int_Maya_Lin1.pdf
Interview: Maya Lin: Landscapes and Memorials
Finkelpearl, T., & Acconci, V. (2001). Dialogues in public art. MIT Press. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2022-01-10 20:49:45.
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111Introduction
Any discussion of contemporary memorial art in the United States begins with Maya
Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. However, a fuller understanding of the memorial
is only possible in the context of Maya Lin’s work as a whole. Lin’s sources are uncon-
ventional for a public artist in the United States; she is trained as an architect, had
little knowledge of contemporary earth-oriented art at the time of the Vietnam com-
mission, and looks to Eastern sources as much as Western art history.
As most people know, the twenty-one-year-old Maya Ying Lin entered her
design in a national competition for a Vietnam memorial when she was a senior at
Yale in 1980. Her design was selected and the memorial was completed in 1982. Like
much Minimalist sculpture, the simplicity of the memorial is offset by its environ-
mental and participatory nature. The architectural structure of the space draws you
down and in to the center, and then leads you up and out. The Vietnam memorial
manages to be both more personal and more abstract than the traditional memorial.
On the one hand, it does not include an image of the dead, but by naming all of the
dead it gives visitors the opportunity to pay homage to the specific person they have
come to mourn. While there is a tradition of monuments that include long lists of
names, this is unusual for a national monument. Casualties in the Vietnam War were
small compared to the numbers killed in wars like World War II, where a list would be
overwhelmingly long. When I have visited the memorial and read the list of the dead,
I have been reminded of the 1960s antiwar protests that I attended that included
lengthy and moving readings of names of the dead from the Congressional Record.
Somehow, for the Vietnam War, simply naming the dead became an act of defiance
against the forces who supported the war effort. In recent years this tactic has been
adopted in the fight against AIDS.
As discussed in the following interview, a realist sculpture by Frederick Hart
was added to the site as a compromise with conservatives who threatened to block
the installation of the memorial. This group of figures fulfills the traditional function
of the memorial. The figures are generic and heroic as opposed to Lin’s memorial,
which has the aura of fact. In describing his sculptures, Hart has said, “There is about
them the physical contact and sense of unity that bespeaks the bonds of love and sac-
rifice that is the nature of men at war.”1 It is clear that Hart has a very specific agenda
in his design. His sentimentality, as clear in his sculpture as in his prose, tends to ex-
Finkelpearl, T., & Acconci, V. (2001). Dialogues in public art. MIT Press. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2022-01-10 20:49:45.
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clude those who do not subscribe to the notion that “love” characterizes “men at
war.”
With the success of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Lin was invited to cre-
ate a series of other memorials. She created the Civil Rights Memorial at the South-
ern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama (completed 1989) and the Women’s
Table at Yale University (completed 1992). Lin has turned down all subsequent offers
to design memorials, refusing to be pigeonholed as an artist of memory. It is inter-
esting to see how Lin describes her Civil Rights Memorial. Like the Vietnam memor-
ial, the work is striking for its lack of sentimentality. Her prose style in the following
project description is exceptionally dry for a memorial that deals with such emotional
subject matter, and an interesting contrast to Frederick Hart’s description of his Viet-
nam memorial sculptures:
Civil Rights Memorial
Black Granite water table (11’-6” dia. × 31” h) inscribed with names and events of the civil
rights era, listed chronologically, from 1954—Brown vs. Board of Education thru 1968—
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Placed in front of black granite water wall (9’ h
× 39’ l × 18” d). Memorial is situated in a white granite plaza, consisting of an upper and
lower level, which separates the entry into the Law Center from the memorial and its plaza
(2800 sq. ft.) 2
Like the Vietnam memorial, the Civil Rights Memorial mentions specific
names, individualizing the movement. However, instead of naming all of the dead,
Lin chose to focus on a shorter list, and to create a time line. Again, the work is very
informational. Here is a sample of the entries inscribed in the black granite:
7 May 1955
Rev. George Lee. Killed for leading
voter registration drive. Belzoni, MS
13 Nov. 1956
Supreme Court bans segregated
seating on Montgomery buses
Finkelpearl, T., & Acconci, V. (2001). Dialogues in public art. MIT Press. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2022-01-10 20:49:45.
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30 Sep. 1962
Riots erupt when James Meredith,
A black student, enrolls at Ole Miss
20 Aug. 1967
Jonathan Daniels. Seminary student
killed by deputy. Hayneville, AL
As Lin says in the following interview, she takes a rather distanced position in these
memorials. As the artist, she tries not to impose a reading on the viewer. However, in
a very physical way, she includes the viewer in the works. In both memorials, the
viewer is invited to touch the work, to have a direct connection with the dead person
who is named. Because of this interactive nature, both memorials are usually pho-
tographed with people in them.
Maya Lin, Civil Rights Memorial, 1989–1990, Southern Poverty Law Center, Mont-
gomery, Alabama.
Finkelpearl, T., & Acconci, V. (2001). Dialogues in public art. MIT Press. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2022-01-10 20:49:45.
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The following interview was conducted at Maya Lin’s loft on the Bowery in
New York City, March 1996. While much discussion has centered on her memorials, it
is misleading to isolate them from the rest of her work. This interview ranges from a
discussion of her landscape-oriented projects to her memorials, and this broader con-
text reveals her complex approach to art and architecture practice.
In recent years, Lin has concentrated on her sculpture, architecture, land-
scape-oriented public projects, and design. In 1998, an exhibition of Lin’s sculpture
was organized at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, and a line of furniture she
designed was produced by Knoll. In the furniture and the sculpture, her interest in
minimal abstract form was clearly evident. But, far from the machine aesthetic of
Ronald Bladen or Tony Smith, Lin’s work has a delicately handmade quality. The
nearly perfect curves are hand drawn, not quite symmetrical, asking the viewer for a
second look. This same quality is evident in Lin’s architectural work, including the
Museum for African Art in New York, where Lin insisted upon working directly on cer-
tain spaces, drawing the curves herself. This hands-on quality is unusual in contem-
porary architecture, evidence of Lin’s unique status at the juncture of art and
architecture.
The following interview was originally published in Public Art Review,
Fall/Winter 1996, pp. 5–9.
Tom Finkelpearl: How do you think people see your work?
Maya Lin: I realize that the memorials that I designed will be my best-known works,
and that’s fine. When you do something like the Vietnam Veterans Memor-
ial at the age of twenty, there is the danger that you will be forever hitting
your head against the wall trying to outdo it. I never tried. I was happy with
the closure that the civil rights and the Vietnam memorials created for me.
They referred to two wars fought by the United States as I was a child grow-
ing up: one domestic, one international. By having the two paired, I was able
to close a chapter. Though my working process started there, I have really
been much more involved in other issues since that time. I have concentrated
on the differences and similarities between the making of art and architec-
ture in this public realm, which I would call public art.
My initial gesture has been toward landscape. In urban projects, I’ve cre-
ated works that respond to the hard, urban site, while fighting to get back
Finkelpearl, T., & Acconci, V. (2001). Dialogues in public art. MIT Press. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2022-01-10 20:49:45.
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to the land itself. I admire and love the earth artists of the 1970’s, but they
went out to the middle of nowhere to escape the gallery system. I have
worked in what I would call a suburban context. By the time I was doing the
piece at the Wexner Center and then the Wavefield that I just completed at
the University of Michigan, I felt a certain voice was emerging: considering
landscape and nature based on scientific analysis and 20th Century tech-
nologies. That’s what really interests me.
TF: It seems to me that there is a generation of artists currently in their 30’s and 40’s who
are admirers of the artists of the 1970’s like Richard Serra and Robert Smithson.
As you say, they have learned from the earth artists, but transposed this sort of
art back into more accessible sites. In some cases they are infusing the aesthetic
with a more recognizable narrative or social content. Someone like Mel Chin is an
example. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has formal similarities to a minimalist
work, but it has historical and interactive characteristics, as does the Civil Rights
Memorial.
Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982, Washington, D.C. Photograph: © Peter
Aaron/Esto.
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ML: It is important to remember that I don’t come from an art background. I didn’t
know who Smithson or Serra were when I designed the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial. I wasn’t even aware how much the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
had in common with the earth artists when I designed it. I can remember
walking into the Whitney Museum and seeing one of Smithson’s Non-sites in
1982, and I was speechless. I’m much more tied into that aesthetic than a lot
of the artists working today that are trying to push other boundaries.
I think a lot of the interactivity in my work relates to my background as
an architect. My reasons for going into architecture were never based on the-
oretical approaches or learned responses to what architecture is supposed to
be. Some say that architecture is a certain language that you need to learn.
My approach starts with a psychological understanding. I am only interested
in the human response to works. I choose to be much less aware of what ei-
ther the art or architecture “world” is doing.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial may look minimalist, but it is really
very different. The ideology behind Western minimalist art denies “refer-
ence.” My piece is coming from a type of simplicity that you can trace back
to Shintoism, to Zen. Now, I was never trained in Eastern philosophy or reli-
gion, but I always had a real problem with the way that Western European
architecture was set up as the end-all. The Western ordering where man is at
the center of the universe, where we are able to order our world, is a kind of
egotism. I do not find Versailles as engaging as, say, a Shinto temple. Though
I grew up in Athens, Ohio, it happens that my parents come from China, and
they are both educators. There was a different sensibility. In our home, every-
thing was handmade, crafted, including a lot of my father’s ceramic work.
I have a fundamental belief, probably Eastern, that deals with the no-
tion of teaching. There is a proverb that says, “Make a well of knowledge,
and allow people to drink from that well.” This may seem passive from a
Western perspective. I am trying to pose facts and let others interpret them,
trusting the viewer to think. Obviously I’ve been focusing on certain infor-
mation, but at the same time I’m just asking you to look at facts. The
Women’s Table at Yale is nothing but numbers.
TF: Is this approach to information a consistent element in your work?
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ML: Yes. But I’ve allowed it to be more of an open exploration, looking back to real-
ize the path I’ve taken. Again I would argue that there is something Eastern
about this: You will have found something at the end of your life though you
never posed the question as to what you were seeking. Again, I was never
trained in Zen or Confucianism, so it is not clear to me where these ideas
came from.
TF: The history of public art is full of overpowering monuments which are so authoritar-
ian—vertical, phallic. Do you think that being a woman contributes to the less au-
thoritarian nature of your work?
ML: Of course there are gender and cultural issues. Though I have a sense, I would
rather have someone else decipher that. In a hundred years, when more
women have designed buildings, I’d like a psychiatrist to study the way we
build, and see how it has changed. In Washington, where there was already
Maya Lin, Women’s Table, 1993, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Photograph:
Norman McGrath.
Finkelpearl, T., & Acconci, V. (2001). Dialogues in public art. MIT Press. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2022-01-10 20:49:45.
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lot of controversy around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, things just ex-
ploded after an article in the Washington Post. The headline read, “An Asian
Memorial for an Asian War.” The author followed Buddhist tradition. In writ-
ing about my background, he pegged it in a narrow and specific way. When
I looked at the title of his article, I thought, “We’re in trouble now.” Of
course the veterans were already hearing that I was going to give them a
“ditch,” and now all of a sudden the race issue came right into play. They
didn’t see the memorial in terms of the inward-looking nature of my works.
I stayed very quiet about my political beliefs through the whole public dis-
cussion of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Obviously I built a memorial that
asked us to accept death as the primary cost of war. Having studied countless
other memorials, I found that this is rarely addressed at a national level,
though sometimes it is dealt with at a local level.
I have become much more aware of the mix, of the balance between my
Eastern and my Western heritage, and this has come forward particularly
through my work. As a child growing up, you want to assimilate into your
surroundings. But through my 20’s into my 30’s I became very aware of an-
other voice that is so much a part of my aesthetic. It is a dual voice. It is won-
derful to see a balanced mix of two cultures emerge.
TF: You live at the northern edge of Chinatown. For your commission at the Federal Cour-
thouse you were presented with a site at the southern edge of Chinatown. How
did you relate to the site?
ML: I love the idea that this area is my neighborhood, that I can do a work, for once,
in my backyard. Aside from being a peculiarly narrow site, I saw it as a bound-
ary. It is an interface point between Chinatown and the (solidly Western) re-
gional headquarters of the federal court system. It really is right on the
border. In the morning before the judges arrive, the Chinese community uses
Federal Courthouse Plaza to do Tai Chi.
The sculpture I designed for the site consists of four stones, each with a
pool of water on the top. Sound is an important element. At first, I wanted
wind to whistle through the stones, but I could never get any acoustician to
guarantee it was going to work, so I decided to make them into fountains. I
think it comes back to this notion of the well. I’ve built four cisterns, each one
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its own independent water fountain. In Chinese culture, certain intricately
carved stones have been very sacred. Of course the ones I have designed are
minimalist blocks. I turned the fountain inside out. The pool of water disap-
pears into itself, but you hear it. These stones are different heights so the
pitch and the echoes will vary.
I don’t think I would have done a piece like this if I weren’t presented
with a site on the border of Chinatown. When I was teaching at Berkeley, I
talked to a lot of musicologists and anthropologists. I learned that the only
people who have used stone as a musical instrument were the Chinese, with
their “sounding stones.” In public art my site becomes not just the physical
site, but the cultural or anthropological site. Knowledge of the specific
people who are going to be around a work always comes into play. My hunch
is a lot of other public artists do not work this way.
TF: It is interesting to consider the different sorts of relationships public artists have to the
various groups they work with. At Yale, you could speak as a graduate. At the
Federal Courthouse, you can speak as a Chinese-American “community resident.”
This is quite different from the civil rights or Vietnam memorial. Was there a big
difference in being an insider versus an outsider?
ML: It really depends upon the group. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Civil
Rights Memorial presented opposite working environments. At the South-
ern Poverty Law Center, we were all working as a team with the same goal in
mind. The Vietnam experience was the exact opposite. When I started, I was
met with an incredible amount of suspicion. My process was the same: go in,
immerse yourself in study. For the Vietnam, I chose to study memorials, not
the Vietnam War. I was recently having dinner with a journalist who had cov-
ered the Vietnam War. He was shocked because his whole approach is that of
a reporter: What are the specifics? Get in there and do the research. Find out
about the history of the war. I did the exact opposite. I deliberately remained
uninformed about the specific politics of the war because I did not think this
knowledge would help me do the piece. I felt that these politics might get in
the way of looking at the sacrifices made by individual veterans. With the
civil rights, I felt that I had to know the history. I grew up through the civil
rights movement, but it was not taught in schools. I was really shocked at
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how little I knew about that time period. It scared me that we can choose not
to deal with history, and it will be forgotten. When I began working on the
commission, I think the people at the Southern Poverty Law Center were as-
suming I would choose to commemorate one or two martyrs, even though it
was a people’s movement. This is where the creative process gets fascinating.
What are you going to commemorate? What should the piece be about?
What is your intention? How can you catch a person’s attention in an instant
and begin to open a matter up? Some monuments act as markers. My pieces
tend to be much more educational in nature. For the Southern Poverty Law
Center, I chose to create a table inscribed with events and people’s deaths,
some information about why they died. All of this was intertwined, because
there is a causal effect. A riot led to someone’s death, which led to legisla-
tion. This is how people changed history. By focusing on this, you are subtly
saying to the next generation, you can make a difference.
I made the decision to mention a fairly large number of people in the
form of a time line, but I told the people I was working with, “I am not a his-
torian. I am not going to be the one to choose which people to commemo-
rate.” While I was working on the logistics of building the sculpture for a year
and a half, they got together a crew of advisors, experts, historians. The 43
people who are identified on the memorial all died violently. It was horrible.
I came back in at the stage of editing the information, and said, “We need
to present the facts, but not in a way that sensationalizes these people’s
deaths.” We needed to present facts which spoke for themselves.
TF: So it was a tone issue.
ML: Yes.
TF: Which relates to what you were saying before about how you present information, al-
lowing people to come to their own conclusions as opposed to giving them an-
swers.
ML: I’ve made all these pieces that deal with very difficult issues, and yet I have led a
sheltered life. I would argue that it is my weird objectivity that has allowed
Finkelpearl, T., & Acconci, V. (2001). Dialogues in public art. MIT Press. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2022-01-10 20:49:45.
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me to do these pieces. I did not really come across racism until my junior year
in college when I went to Denmark and people thought I was an Eskimo. The
Danes had the same tension towards the Greenland Eskimos that people in
the United States have for the Native Americans. There is this huge prejudice
against Eskimos. The skinheads would get on a bus and be really nasty, and
no one would sit next to me. I finally had to ask someone. If I get a suntan, I
can look like a Native American or an Eskimo. It’s very strange, because I can
cross over and change race. It happened to me in Mexico. When I first got
there, the Mexican children were all coming around trying to touch me be-
cause I was Chinese, but given two weeks in the sun, I blended right in be-
cause my skin goes red. I can relate to the book Black Like Me. If you are
white you will probably never know the feeling that a non-white person
feels in a crowd when you are looked at, standing out as being different in a
negative way. To be able to go from being perceived as being one race and
then switching over into another race is very strange.
TF: Are you saying that this sort of identity-switching led to your “weird objectivity?”
ML: I think what happens is that you are brought up not quite fitting in. And because
you feel, as a child, somewhat isolated, you distance yourself. Once that has
happened, it’s both a benefit and a detriment. I think you can really stand
back and look and see a different story. You know the phrase, “You are far
enough away from it to get a good picture.” I was raised not fitting in. I prob-
ably have treated life somewhat as a distanced observer.
TF: Would you call your work anti-heroic?
ML: I wouldn’t say it is anti-heroic. I would say it is anti-monumental, intimate. No
matter how public my work gets, it remains intimate, one-on-one with the
individual. Even though I use text, I never use text like a billboard, which a
hundred people can read collectively. The way you read a book is a very inti-
mate experience and my works are like books in public areas. I think that is
what has always made people respond to my work in a very quiet way. Again,
I think gender and my Asian-American heritage play a role.
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TF: But this quiet experience at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was almost dislocated
with the installation of the heroic bronzes on the site. Were you consulted as to
where it would be placed?
ML: They wanted to place the sculptures at the apex, with the flagpole right on top,
and we were lucky to get them out. It would have been horrible. But if I had
gone to the press right away, the whole process would have stopped. So I
gambled. I felt that we needed to get construction started so I kept quiet for
four months, which got us to the ground breaking. I knew that if I couldn’t
effectively get those realist sculptures moved from the site that was being
proposed, I would have had to walk from the piece, or sue. If I had been a
strict idealist I would have said from the start, “I will not threaten the aes-
thetic integrity of the piece,” but we would have gotten the heroic sculpture
and the monument genre would not have changed at all. I remember a com-
mittee hearing where only one person got up to support my design, while
Maya Lin, Wavefield, 1995, Aerospace Engineering Department, University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor. Photograph: Tim Thayer.
Finkelpearl, T., & Acconci, V. (2001). Dialogues in public art. MIT Press. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2022-01-10 20:49:45.
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countless other people got up to say that they felt I was deliberately trying
to hurt the veterans.
TF: Some people say that when the realist sculptures were installed, they gave your
memorial time to be accepted . . .
ML: No, false myth. The main person who was behind the compromise was the Sec-
retary of the Interior, James Watt. He had to give final approval in order to
start construction. He wasn’t going to do that. He held us back from ground
breaking until a compromise was meted out. Apparently, what the veterans
had been told was that I was giving them a “black ditch,” and that the
memorial was a negative comment about the war. I kept arguing that we
should give it a chance. Let people experience it. Well, the minute the piece
was opened to the public, the controversy ceased, and I started getting the
most amazing letters from veterans. Even though everyone was responding
favorably when the memorial was opened, the sculptures were a done deal.
The politicians had already committed. They were put up a year later.
TF: It is interesting to me that abstract public art seems to be at both extremes—the eas-
iest and the most difficult sort of art for the public to accept.
ML: I taught an introduction to public art at Yale. Some of my students researched
this, and found that, statistically, figurative works got into far more trouble
than abstraction in the long run, because they are specific. If a work is spe-
cific, someone is going to have a problem with it these days.
So much of it isn’t even the physical presence of the work, but how the
work is introduced to the community. The political process needs to give the
community respect. At the very early stages, it’s about territory, about psy-
chology. I am uneasy with some of the one-man-one-vote approaches that
have been tried, but my attitude is to respect the public. And in the end, you
should get some controversy, because if you are pushing any limits, people
will be surprised.
TF: Topo [Charlotte, North Carolina, 1991] represents the side of your work that deals
more with nature than history. It was a collaboration with a landscape architect?
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ML: Yes, with Henry Arnold who was the same landscape architect from Vietnam. He
and I kept in touch. Arnold was the original landscape architect for Consti-
tution Gardens, the site for Topo. I was very conscious of working in some-
one else’s space. In redesigning the space, I figured I should defer to him, call
him in on it. It was the right thing to do. We applied as a team to a competi-
tion for art at a sports stadium. This is when I was working on the Civil Rights
Memorial, and I was becoming acutely aware of getting typecast as someone
who only works with the dead. So we decided to do something playful. Also
civil rights was a suburban site, and I was trying to get back to working di-
rectly with the landscape, like the Vietnam piece. I think they expected an
object right at the front entrance to their stadium. But I definitely seek out
situations that involve the entire environment. We decided that we would
do a completely green sculpture. There was this grassy median strip, 60-feet
wide and 1,600-feet long that dropped 75 feet from top to bottom. Henry
and I just looked at each other and said, “How can we resist?” Here is a space
Maya Lin, in collaboration with Henry Arnold, Topo,
1991, Charlotte Coliseum, Charlotte, North Carolina.
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that nobody pays attention to. So we threw in a game. We designed “balls”
that seem to roll down the hill on that central grassy strip. To this day I think
they worry that we were making fun of them, but we were just having fun
with the commission. In Topo, we tripled the number of Willow Oaks that
had been planned for the site. I do not try to compete with the landscape,
but really work with it. This reflects a belief system which I think will color my
whole life, wanting to work with the environment. I want to examine the re-
lationship man has to nature, promoting sensitivity.
TF: Do you think you will ever do a memorial again?
ML: Yes, one more.
TF: Do you know what it is?
ML: It will be about extinction, about the environment.
TF: So that will put the two parts of your public art together: memorials and landscape.
ML: I really care about the environment. It has been my love since I was a child. This
work will probably take my lifetime to do, and it won’t be a monument in a
traditional sense. We are the one species that has rapidly caused the extinc-
tion of so many other species, and that is unique. We have to stop. We have
to begin to understand that we cannot continue to overuse. Again, for me it
is about teaching. I don’t know how it will manifest itself but this is my
dream.
Notes
1. This quotation is from one of the 2,335 sites my search engine found on the Internet under the cate- gory “Vietnam + memorial,” a number that far outstripped the number of sites under the name of any other public artwork or memorial that I could think of. The specific site was: www.newsday.com/The Viet- nam Memorial, September 1998.
2. From a project description provided by Maya Lin in 1996.
Finkelpearl, T., & Acconci, V. (2001). Dialogues in public art. MIT Press. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2022-01-10 20:49:45.
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