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Patron Name: Ho, Tienfong Lib ID#: u 915089328 Patron#: p12947027 Spec Inst.: Journal Article Request Telephone#: 610-613-2071 Home Lib: Paley Library Address: 721 Coventry Lane, Phoenixville, PA 19460 BIB#: bl5776153 Pickup Loe: k TITLE: Art in America; an illustrated magazine. SELECTED:

Library Depository ARTICLE: Hess, Elizabeth. A Tale of Two Memorials. v.71

(Apr. 1983), p.120-27.

Nl .A47 v.71(Jan-May1983)

Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 12:28 PM

erica ; /

Cover: Fri with Monkeys," 1943 Vietnam War Memorial/Louise Bourgeois/Neil Welliver/Morton Scharnberg

Tina Modotti & Frida Kahlo/Robert Longo/Larry Bell in Santa Fe/Josef Hoffmann Report from Paris: Photography Month/Books/Review of Exhibitions

Artin • er1ca APRIL 1983

·-----·----------·

A Tale of Two Memorials Elizabeth Hess 120 The history of the newly unveiled Vietnam Veterans Memorial is chronicled in the context of the intense controversy it has generated.

Louise Bourgeois: Gender & Possession Robert Storr 128 A traveling retrospective surveys Bourgeois's long career as avant-gardist and iconoclast.

Terrestrial Truth: Neil Welliver Welliver' s special brand of painterly literalism presents a nature that outdoes art.

Dona.Id B. Kuspit 138

The Art of Spectacle Hal Foster 144 Robert Longo deploys public images and slick surfaces in seductive simulations of reality.

Carrie Rickey 150 Six-Sided Constructions Larry Bell's '60s work, permutations on the theme of the cube, are given a then-and-now reading.

Venus and the Stocking Machines Julia Ballerini 154 The first Morton Scharnberg show in 20 years suggests a fresh interpretation of the early 20th-century ''machinist esthetic.''

The Ribbon around the Bomb Michael Newman 160 The politjcally sensitive and strongly feminist works of Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti are juxtaposed in a current exhibition.

RethinkingJosef Hoffinann A recent museum show emphasized the formal beauty ofHoffrnann's designs.

DEPARTMENTS Rejoinder: Tired Criticism, Tired "Radicalism" Donald B. Kuspit 11

Review of Books 19 Report from Paris: Photo-Fever on the Seine AllenEllenzweig 35

REVIEW OF EXHIBITIONS New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Fort Worth Artworld

177 224

Editor: Elizabeth C. Baker

MarciaE. Vetrocq 170

Cover: Detail of Frida Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Monkeys (entire work at left), 1943, oil on canvas, 32 by 24¥.. inches (collection Mr. and Mrs. Jacques Gelman, Mexico City). The painting appears in the exhibition "Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti" at New York U Diversity's Grey Art Gallery, through April 16. Photo Robert E. Mates.

Managing Editor: Joan Simon/ Executive Editor: Nancy Manner I Senior Editors: Ted Mooney, Craig Owens I Associate Editors: Prudence Carlson, Hal Foster I Assistant Managing Editor: Kathryn Howarth/ Assistant Editor: Robert Fisher/ Designer: Alberto P. Gavasci I Associate Designer: Louis D'Esposito /Directory Manager: Amy Slaton I Consultant: John Peter / Contributing Editors: Donald B. Kuspit, Lucy Lippard, Sarah McFadden, Linda Nocblin, Carter Ratcliff, Bryan Robertson, Irving Sandler, Peter Schjeldahl, Roberta Smith, Charles F. Stuckey/ Corresponding Editors: Chicago, Franz Schulze; San Francisco, Peter Selz; Washington D.C., David Tannous; London, Suzi Gablik; Rome, Milton

Publisher: Paul Shanley Director of Advertising: Susan B. Anthony /Advertising Sales: Susan McCall, Karen Niedzielski, Ruth Rotbseid I Advertising Services: Susanne Vorster, Mary Baez I Production: Mary Jontry /Production Assistant: Sarah King/ Promotion Director: Valerie Green/ Circulation Director: Barbara Gutman I Circulation Manager: Susan Blattman /Marketing Services Director: Karen Tubrldy /Art in America, 850Third Ave., N.Y.C., 10022, Tel. (212) 715-2600 Director for International Development: John H. Liesveld Jr., Art in America, 39 Quai des Grands Augustins, 75006 Paris, France. Tel. (I) 325.26.55.

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Vol. 71, No. 4 (April) Arlin America is published 11 limes a year (monthly except July) by Art in America, Inc., 850 Third Avenue, New York, NY. 10022. Telephone (area code 212)715-2600. Cable address: AMAATMAG. A member of the Magazine Division of Whitney Communications Corporation. Contents 1983 by Art in America, Inc., and may not be reproduced in any manner or form without permission. lSSN: 0004-3214. The opinions expressed in "Issues and Commentary," apart from the editor's comments, are those of the writers themselves and not necessarily those of this magazine. Nol responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or photographs. Art in America is indexed in the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature and the Art Index. Back volumes ol Art in America are available in microfiche from Bell & Howell, Att. Periodical Department, Old Mansfield Road, Wooster, Ohio 44691. Microfilm copies are available through Xerox University Microfilm, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. Articles appearing in this magazine are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and/or America: History and Life and RILA. Circulation is verified by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Controlled circulation postage paid at Concord, N.H. and New York, N.Y. BACK ISSUES AND COMPLETE VOLUMES: Lawrence McGilvery, P.O. Box 852, LaJolla, Calif., 92038. SUBSCRIPTIONS: U.S. 11 issues $34.95, 22 issues $59.95, 33 issues $79.95. Possessions & Canada add $8.00 per year. All others add $15.00 per year. Domestic single copy $3.50 prepaid. Outside North America $5.00. Single copy August/Annual $7A5 prepaid (includes $1.50 postage and handling). SUBSCRIPTION OFFICE: Art In Amel1ca, 542 Paclftc Ave., Manon, Ohio 43302. Telephone (area code 614) 383-3141. FOR CHANGE OF ADDRESS send o/dand new addresses and label from a recent issue. POSTMASTER Send Form No. 3579 lo Art in America, 542 Pacific Avenue, Marion, Ohio 43302.

Member of the Aucilf Bureau of Circulations APRIL 1983 3

Two riews of Maya Ying Lin's Vietnam Vetei'ans Memorial, 1982, Constitution Gardens, Washington, D.C. Above, risitors and the winter landscape reflected in the monument's polished black granite surfBfe. Below, the dedication ceremony, Veterans Day, 1982. Photos Dolores Neuman.

A Tale qf Two Memorials Angry debate over the design for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial has finally ended with an uneasy, two-part solution Was the long fight an art war or a predictable replay of hawks vs. doves? Here, the four-year history of Washington's controversial new monument for Americans who died in Vietnam.

BY EilZABETII HFS5 War memorials may be too important to leave simply to artists and architects.

-Congressman Henry J. Hyde

cates of modernism and real- m often have difficulty appre- iating each other. As old as our century, the conflict be-

tween these two points of view has recently been elevated to a new stage- the nation's capital-where two memo- rials for Vietnam veterans, one abstract and the other realistic, will soon be per- manently at war with each other. The bitter Washington debate surrounding the erection of these two monuments has itself been warlike. What began as a clearly defined project to memorialize Americans who died in Vietnam has become, during the past two years, a battlefield echoing with the same rheto- ric once heard at Kent State. So far there have been no casualties in this art war, only compromises.

Original plans had called for a single memorial to be built on Washington's prestigious mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monu- ment. Its design was to be selected by a jury of specialists from participants in a nation-wide competition. In May of 1981 the judges unanimously chose as their $20,000 prize-winner the entry of

1 Maya Ying Lin, then a 21-year-old Yale undergraduate. But soon after Lin's modernist design for an austerely simple, V-shaped wall was made pub- lic, extremely vocal protests began to be heard in Washington, and within a short time a small group of influential men-some in government and some private citizens-launched a noisy, fi- nally unsuccessful campaign to block construction of Lin's memorial. In spite

of their efforts, ground was broken in March of 1982 and seven months later the memorial was on its site.

But the opponents of Lin's design did not admit defeat; though they could not prevent the erection of her monument, they did manage to arrange for the addition of a second memorial. A larg- er-than-life-size realistic statue of three Gls in battle dress, designed by Freder- ick Hart, a figurative sculptor from Washington, D.C., is presently under construction. Accompanied by a 50- foot flagpole, Hart's statue (which has thus far only been seen in maquette form) will be placed on the memorial site by Veterans Day, 1983.

T: he story of the two memorials begins with Jan Scruggs, who as born in Washington, D.C., graduated from high school and went straight to Vietnam. Half of his company, the U.S. Army Light Infan- try Brigade, . was killed or wounded between 1969 and 1970, and Scruggs himself landed in the hospital for two months. Upon his return to the U.S., Scruggs enrolled at American Univer- sity and became deeply involved in the problems of the demobilized Vietnam troops. Eventually attending graduate school, he completed a study on the psychological adjustments facing Viet- nam veterans, and in 1976 presented his findings to a Senate subcommittee. Scruggs's sincere if somewhat naive as- piration was to replace the veteran's nightmare with the American Dream.

In 1979, Scruggs incorporated the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF) of which he remains presi- dent. Its specific and only purpose was

to erect a national monument honoring those who had died in the war. Accord- ing to a press release issued by the Fund, the monument was to be .. with- out political content," and it was to be funded by contributions from private sources. That year legislation was intro- duced in Congress to allocate land for the planned memorial and the project was eventually signed into law by Pres- ident Carter in 1980. As is usual in such matters, all considerations for the memorial--design, landscape, plan- ning, esthetics-would have to be ap- proved by the National Capital Plan- ning Commission (NCPC), the Com- mission of Fine Arts (CFA) and the Department of the Interior. (Those fa- miliar with the process of trying to get anything built in the District of Colum- bia know that it is at best an extremely arduous procedure.)

The VVMF members decided to se- lect a design by holding a juried compe- tition open to all American citizens over 18, even though the Fund would there- by lose control over the final result. Advised by landscape architect Paul Spreiregen, the VVMF placed the deci- sion in the hands of eight men: land- scape architects Hideo Sasaki and Gar- rett Eckbo; architects Harry Weese and Pietro Belluschi; sculptors Costan- tino Nivola, James Rosati and Richard H. Hunt; and Grady Clay, editor of Landscape Architecture. The seed money to launch the contest was pro- vided by Texas computer millionaire H. Ross Perot. (Ironically, Perot would later be among those who would at- tempt to dismantle the entire competi- tion process.)

There were two design requirements APRIL 1983 121

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and its Constitution Gardens site. Photo Arthur Grace, Sygma.

stipulated by the VVMF that severely limited all entries. First, the names of the 57 ,939 Americans who died, or are still missing, in Vietnam had to be engraved somewhere on the memorial. Second, contestants were required to be sensitive to the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, which would bracket the site. Constitution Gardens, as the area is called, is the President's backyard-it's sacred terrj- tory. These considerations pretty much ruled out a vertical monument, and a wall of some sort would obviously be necessary for the names.

The competition, which was an- nounced in October, 1980, received 1,421 entries, a surprisingly large re- sponse. In accord with contest rules, no names were attached to any of the pro- posals. Thus, when Maya Lin's design was selected in May of the following year, everyone WC1S astonished to find that the winner was female, Chinese- American and an undergraduate. Lin's competition-winning design was a com- bination Minimalist sculpture-earth- work. It consisted of two walls-each 250 feet long and made of 140 panels- which met at a 125-degree angle; be- ginning at ground level at each ex- treme, both walls gradually rose to a height of 10 feet at the monument's center, or the apex of the angle. Work- ing within and taking full advantage of the Fund's guidelines, Lin made some innovational decisions: she chose pol- ished black granite as her material, thus turning the walls into mirrors; and she decided to list the 57 ,939 Vietnam casualties not alphabetically, as is cus- tomary, but in the order in which they were killed. ("I wanted to return the 122 ART IN AMERICA

vets to the time-frame of the war," Lin explains, "and in the process, I wanted them to see their own reflection in the names.") Furthermore, rather than simply setting the two walls on top of the ground, Lin's design proposed to build them into a rise in the landscape, with only their inscribed sides visible. The spectator, walking downward along the length of either wall, would thus have the dramatic sensation of descending into the earth. In view of the response that Lin's walls would lat- er provoke, it is amusing to speculate that initially her design was probably chosen because of its utter modesty- its simple, straight lines, its unobtrusive character. The jurors may well have thought that Lin's proposal was least likely to make waves in the ultrasensi- tive District of Columbia.

On Oct. 13, 1981, Lin attended one of the regular monthly meetings of the Board of Directors of the CF A, pre- pared to discuss granite samples. The CFA's chairman, J. Carter Brown, who has been called Washington's "arbiter of excellence," is also the director of the National Gallery. This commission, originally established by Congress in 1910, was created to give expert advice on works of art or architecture acquired or commissioned by the government. At an earlier meeting, Brown had already echoed the jurors' unanimous approval of Lin's design, and the October meet- ing included on its agenda various details of a largely site-specific charac- ter. As are all CF A monthly meetings, the Oct. 13 session was open to the pub- lic and transcripts were made of the proceedings for the record. There was an unexpected guest at this meeting-

Tom Carhart, a member of the VVMF and a former infantry platoon leader with two Purple Hearts. Carhart had helped raise funds for the memorial and, in his enthusiasm for the project, had even entered a design in the compe- tition himself-the first art work he had ever attempted.

Carhart was not happy with Lin's design. He characterized it as "the most insulting and demeaning memo- rial to our experience that was possi- ble." He passionately argued that it was a memorial to "the war at home" rather than to the one in Southeast Asia: "When I came home from Viet- nam in 1968," he said, "I was literally spat upon as I walked through the Chi- cago airport in my uniform by some girl in a band of hippies. That spit hurt." Carhart charged that Lin's design was geared to "those who would still spit," and he called the proposed monument a "degrading ditch." He was the first to publicly attack the color of the stone: "Black," he said, is "the universal color of shame, sorrow and degradation in all races, all societies worldwide." Carhart demanded a white memorial.

Ross Perot in Texas was also unhap- py with Lin's design. A legendary and somewhat enigmatic figure, even in a state known for its cowboy capitalists, Perot is notorious for such expensive ventures as his unsuccessful hiring of a group of mercenaries to bring home POWs from North Vietnam and his financing of a surveillance mission into Iran during the hostage crisis. No one in Washington has been anxious to arti- culate Perot's exact role in the memo- rial controversy. Off the record, howev- er, many people have targeted him as the organizer of the opposition to Lin's design. ("When powerful people are against you," Scruggs whispered to me over the phone, "it may not be in your interest to answer questions.") Perot, himself, was more than willing to talk to me about his side of the story in a telephone interview. To him, Lin's memorial was "a slap in the face." But he says he wasn't surprised that the memorial looked like a "tombstone" since "Maya did design it in a class on funereal architecture at Yale."

Rumor has it that when Perot's mon- ey talks, people listen. After contribut- ing $160,000 towards funding the memorial, Perot may have expected to have some say in its final disposition. His strategy for overturning the deci- sion of the jurors was to create the impression that the veterans themselves had rejected Lin's design. Scruggs be- lieves that Perot flew in veterans from

winners." He insists that the poll was sent to POWs only as a test mailing.

M eanwhile in Washington during the fall of 1981, Maya Lin was beginning to be viewed as something of a ra- dical. Her work, which had initially

around the country to lobby against the jurors' choice. The Texan flatly denies this and says that all he did was "try to get the Fund off their ego trip long enough to remember their constituency of two million To do so, he per- sonally financed poll of 587 POWs. According to Perot's poll, 67 percent of those polled disliked the original de- sign; 70 percent thought the color of the memorial should be white; 96 percent thought the American flag should be prominently displayed on the memorial site. Though on the basis of Perot's sta- tistics it seemed as if the majority of veterans were against the design, the memorial's SU;pporters have charged that, since POWs are probably a good deal more conservative than the aver- age veteran, the survey was skewed. Moreover, Scruggs claims that when he had the poll checked by an expert, he

Maya Ying Lin.·Photo John McDonnell, courtesy The Washington Post.

been praised by the CF A because it was "apolitical," was now labeled subver- sive. James Webb, for example, a high- ly decorated marine and author of a Vietnam novel titled Fields of Fire, called it a "wailing wall for anti-draft demonstrators." In some quarters, the monument's V-shape was being inter- preted as the symbol of the antiwar movement. Carhart had already re- ferred to the black stone as a "black spot in American history." Though one critic honorifically described the listing of names in nonalphabetical order as

was told that it wasn't worth the paper it was written on. Perot, on the other hand, brushes aside these objections, saying, "Losers always discredit the

An Interview with Maya Lin

Q. Certain people are outraged by your memorial. They read it as a statement against the Vietnam war.

A. The worst thing in the world would have been indifference to my piece. The monument may lack an American flag, but you're sur- rounded by America, by the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. I don't design pure objects like those. I work with the land- scape, and I hope that the object and the land .are equal players.

Q. Is your piece political? A. The piece itself is apolitical in I.he sense that it doesn't comment

directly on the war-only on the men that died. For some people- especially right-wing politicians-that's political enough. It's like the emperor's new clothes: What people see, or don't see is their own projection.

Q. Were you involved in the antiwar movement? A. No. But I think any war is pretty sad. People killing each other

because they can't resolve their differences. I don't make judgments about the Vietnam war though, because I don't know enough about it.

a. Why do you think veterans like Tom Carhart dislike your memo- rial?

A. I haven't gotten one negative letter from a veteran. Most of them are not as conservative as Carhart. It's the administration that would like to remember Vietnam the same way it remembers other wars- through the heroes. Well, one of the things that made this war different is the fact that the veterans got screwed. They came back and their country called them "murderers." Nothing can make up for that. You can't pretend that this war was the same as others.

Q. What do you think about the decision to add Hart's piece? A. It was a coup. It was a power play. It had nothing to do with how

many veterans liked or disliked my piece. Ross Perot has powerful friends who managed to get a compromise through. Even Jan Scruggs said, "We've been ambushed." The vice president of the Fund called what happened a "rape" of my decision. I didn't even find out that they had made a "few modifications" until I saw it announced on TV! Perot flew in 50 people who hated the design from all over the country and they spread rumors in the White House that the designer was a leftist, that the jurors were all communists, and people believed it.

Q. How ha9 the memorial fund treated you? A. The fund has always seen me as female-as a child. I went in

there when I first won and their attitude was-0.K. you did a good job, but now we're going to hire some big boys-boys-to take care of it. I said no! I wanted to help put together a team that knew about land- scape, granite. Their basic attitude was I gave them the design and they could do what they wanted with it. They expected me to take the money ($20,000) and run.

Q. How has the fund treated the veterans? A. The fund has really gone show biz and it's upsetting a lot of vets.

My attitude is that you shouldn't spend tons of money on the memo- rial- 7 million has been spent so far. The money should be given to the vets who need it-like Agent Orange victims-because it's obvious that the government isn't going to help them out.

Q. You haven't sat down with .Hart to work something out? A. No. But from what I gather, Hart thought a long time before

accepting the commission. It wasn't necessarily going to be good for his reputation, but the price was right. They seem to be paying him 20 times what they paid me, He goes on and on about working with my piece rather than against it. But you can't really work with a piece if you don't have a dialogue with it. He claims that my memorial is "rude in its neglect of the human element." How can someone like that work with my design?

0. What do you think of Hart's sculpture? A. Three men standing there before the world-it's trite. It's a gen-

eralization, a simplification. Hart gives you an image-he's illustrating a book.

Q. But do you think the veterans will have an easier time relating to Hart's work?

A. No! I don't think the veterans are as unintelligent as some people would like to judge them.

Q. Why did you choose black for the color of the stone? A. Classical Greek temples were never white. They were highly

colored. At some point much later, someone decided that white signi- fied classical architecture. Black for me is a lot more peaceful and gentle than white. White marble may be very beautiful, but you can't read anything on it. I wanted something that would be soft on the eyes, and turn into a mirror if you polished it. The point is to see yourself reflected in the names. Also the mirror image doubles and triples the space. I thought black was a beautiful color and appropriate for the design.

a. Has this situation radicalized you in any way? A. There were certain things I was aware of intellectually that I had

never seen before, In the academic world where I grew up, my female- ness, the fact that I was Oriental, was never important. You didn't see prejudice. People treated you first as a human being. When I first came to Washington my biggest shock was that no one would listen to me because I had no power-no masculinity.

Q. Do you think the memorial has a female sensibility? A. In a world of phallic memorials that rise upwards, it certainly does.

I didn't set out to conquer the earth, or overpower it, the way Western man usually does. I don't thi!lk I've made a passive piece, but neither is it a memorial to the idea of war.

APRIL 1983 123

Frederick Hart.

Hart's maquette for a figural addition to the memorial, on view last Norember at the dedication ceremonies for Lin's monument. Photo D. Neuman.

"a profoundly metaphoric twist with universal implications," Carhart called it a "random scattering ·. . . such that neither brother nor father nor lover nor friend could ever be found." The fact

An Interview with Frederick Hart

Q. Can you describe your original submission to the competition? A. Originally I had a circular wall with the names on it. There were

two groups of soldiers on either side reaching out to each other. That was the whole idea-to reach back across a huge gap. I wasn't happy with it In fact, I was astonished when I won third prize.

Q. At what point did you get back in the running? A. People think I have been negotiating behind the SCElnes-that I've

been wined and dined by Ross Perot-it's not true. When they lthe FundJ eventually came back to me it made sense. Because I had entered the contest, I had already put a good deal of thought into the project. I was also the only figurative sculptor that had a won a prize.

Q. Certain critics think your sculpture portrays a stereotype. A. I honestly thought that once people saw it, they would understand

that what I was doing wasn't trite. The average age of the Vietnam combatant was 19 years old and it was an excruciating kind of combat situation. What a burden to place on a 19-year-old child. I wanted to make people aware of these indignities. I wanted to use realism to give some sense of the youth and innocence of these kids. The figures do relate to the wall. I thought it was a good solution and that people would give me credit, but the situation was too politicized.

Q. How did it get so politicized? How did Maya Lin come to represent the antiwar movement and Fredrick Harl the military establish.ment?

A. Well I don't know how conscious Lin was about using the black stone lo turn the memorial into a funeral piece, but unconsciously it appealed to many liberals as appropriate for a black moment in his- tory. If the monument was meant as a Vietnam War Memorial-then even I couldn't argue with it because the war was a tragedy. But that wasn't what the memorial was supposed to be. II was supposed to give a little dignity to the people who fought the war-the 19-year-olds, not the generals. The piece rubbed them absolutely raw.

Q. Is realism the only way to reach them? A. No, not necessarily. All they wanted was for the memorial to be

while! They didn't need a statue or anything else. The statue is just an awkward solution we came up with to save Lin's design. I think this whole thing is an art war. It takes a tremendous amount of egocentric- ity and arrogance for artists to feel that no one should interfere with their work-when it's for the public.

a. You mean Lin's memorial is purely art for art's sake? A. I don't like blank canvases. Lin's memorial is intentionally not

meaningful. II doesn't relate to ordinary people and I don't like art that is contemptous of life. This event is a kind of Gettysburg for contem- porary art-art that has isolated itself into a corner.

Q. If Lin's piece is political, isn't yours political also? A. Yes, but it's different. My position is humanist, not militaristic. I'm

not trying to say there was anything good or bad about the war. I researched for three years-read everything. I became close friends with many vets, drank with them in the bars. Lin's piece is a serene exercise in contemporary art done in a vacuum with no knowledge of the subject. It's nihilistic-that's its appeal.

Q. Were you involved in the antiwar movement? A. I got gassed with everyone else, mostly out of peer pressure. Q. Weren't the competition's laws broken by your addition? A. The Fund did what everybody does today. They relinquished their

autonomy and handed ii over to the so-called experts-the art mafia. Senator John Warner, James Watt-all those people who intervened didn't do ii out of whimsy. They did ii because their constituencies asked them to. Letters of protest went to the While House and they were handed over to Walt because the memorial is in his legal juris- diction. It's his job. II was democracy in action, not totalitarianism, Stal- inism or fascism. Watt didn't simply say: I don't like this newfangled modern stuff and I'm gonna get rid of it.

Q. Does the fact that Lin is a young Oriental woman have anything to do with this uproar?

A. There is nothing more powerful than an ingenue. If she had been a professional the design would have been sacked. That's what hap- pened with the Roosevelt memorial; the design went through. All the professionals and everybody else loved it-except for the Roosevelt family. They said no thanks, and that was it. Everybody is worked up about this poor little girl who is getting kicked around by the Secretary of the Interior. The press has turned her into a Cinderella.

Q. Is there a war between the two monuments? A. The collision is all about the fact that Maya Lin's design is elitist

and mine is populist. People say you can bring what you want to Lin's memorial. But I call that brown bag esthetics. I mean you better bring something, because there ain't nothing being served.

that it was possible from one vantage point to see the monument as sinking into the earth was interpreted by some commentators as an admission of guilt-an acknowledgment that we had committed crimes i'n Vietnam.

The VVMF, too, was under attack. In Scrugg's view, "The memorial's en- emies were mostly members of the New Right" and they were pressuring the Fund to compromise their original plan. According to The Washington Post, it was Senator Jeremiah Denton who led the fight against Lin's memorial on Capitol Hill, and the campaign picked up considerable steam on its way to the White House. Even Phyllis Schlafly became an art-critic-for-a-day, calling the memorial a "tribute to Jane Fonda" in the pages of the Washington Inquir- er, the Moral Majority's weekly news- paper. As the flak got heavier, Jan Scruggs admits that he began to suffer from battle fatigue. It seemed to him that if he wanted to dedicate the mem- orial by Veterans Day, 1982-then less than a year away-a compromise was the only way out.

It was clear to most observers that the battle over the memorial was being fought entirely with political ammuni- tion. Attempting, as one Senator put it, "to neutralize this apolitical state- ment," the opponents of Lin's memorial could at most hope for additions to the site. They could not block construction completely nor even censor Lin's design without angering the press and the art world. It was also evident that James Watt, the Secretary of the Interior, held the final card, since his authoriza- tion was required before the VVMF could break ground. Watt, who would subsequently make his position clear in a carefully worded letter to the CF A, was refusing to grant permission until suitable additions to the memorial were agreed upon by the Fund, the CF A and the National, Capital Planning Com- mission.

By January '82, the debate suddenly moved behind closed doors. A loosely organized committee, chaired by Sena- tor John Warner and including, among other conservatives, Milton Copulas-a Vietnam veteran and currently an ener- gy expert with the Heritage Foundation (a well-known right-wing think- tank)-was formed and Scruggs was invited to meet with them in face-to- face combat in order to settle the dis- pute. The press was not invited to this kangaroo court and no public record of proceedings exists. But according to a statement issued by the VVMF more than a year later, the group, which had

convened on Jan. 27, 1982, agreed, after a nasty fight, to support the addi- tion to the memorial site of a sculpture and a flag, but "with no location speci- fied." The opponents of Lin's memorial also agreed "to cease their political effort to block approval of the design and to allow the planned March groundbreaking to occur on schedule." A second meeting was planned to "con- sider various alternative designs for the sculpture."

Now that the opponents of Lin's memorial had won their first major bat- tle, they turned their attention to the strategic placement of the statue and the flag. According to members of the Fund, when Senator Warner's group reconvened in March of '82 to discuss designs for the sculpture, it was Ross Perot who changed the committee's agenda. Realizing that placement of the sculpture would be a crucial issue,

In February, 1983, after bitter arguments, it was

finally decided that Hart's statue and a flagpole would be placed near the entrance

to the memorial site.

he urged the group to agree about it at once. When a vote was taken, the majority of those present wanted the flag placed on top of the memorial, at the vertex of the walls, and the sculp- ture placed on the ground below, at the middle of the V. According to the Fund's printed statement, this majority opinion was not surprising: "As at the prior meeting, the handful of VVMF representatives were far outnumbered by the group of opponents which Mr. Perot and others had organized to attend the meeting." But the votes tak- en at this meeting were not final. All decisions still had to go through Watt, the CFA and the NCPC.

W hat was most significant about these meetings was hat the VVMF had been nvinced to sponsor the ad- ditional sculpture and flag. Realizing that it was the only way to get Lin's piece built, Scruggs presented the VVMF's new proposal to the proper authorities, and in March work on the monument finally began. In April, without Maya Lin's knowledge, a

sculpture panel was chosen by the VVMF to select an artist for the second memorial; it was comprised entirely of Vietnam veterans who had been in- volved in the dispute and included two people who supported Lin's memo- rial-Arthur Mosley and William Jayne-and two who opposed it- James Webb and Milton Copulas. In July, Frederick Hart was commissioned by the VVMF (for a fee neither party will make public) to design another Vietnam memorial, and by September Hart's maquette for the statue was unveiled.

The conservatives had wanted a sta- tue in the tradition of the Iwo Jima memorial, which was based on an actual photograph. But Hart knew that there were few heroic moments in the Vietnam War. (After all, one of the most memorable photographs in the entire Vietnam debacle was of the shot taken at point-blank range into a guer- rilla's head by Nguyen Ngoc Loan, then chief of police in Saigon.) Hart's model is a competent homage to an abstraction called "vets"-as tradition- al as a Hallmark card. Three young men, one of whom is black, stand on a small base. All three look to their right, perhaps (depending on their final sit- ing) towards Lin's walls. There is noth- ing to identify these soldiers specifically with Vietnam other than their uni- forms; the realism lies in the details of their military garb, in the gun thrown over a shoulder, the ammunition around a waist. The facial expressions of these soldiers are somewhat peculiar; they look stunned-more bewildered than heroic-but, of course, their fea- tures may change when the statue is executed at the projected scale of 8 feet.

When the maquette was made public last fall, its placement was still a matter of dispute. The members of Warner's committee who wanted the statue in the center of Lin's walls-in effect, pene- trating her V-now began to fight an extended battle over the location of the second memorial. The issue was not set- tled until February, 1983, when after a great deal of acrimonious debate, it was finally decided that both Hart's statue and the flag would be placed 120 feet from Lin's walls, near the entrance to the memorial site. Hart himself sup- ported this decision, understanding quite well that the two works of art would clash if placed too close to- gether.

The decision to add a second memo- rial to the site has not been popular everywhere in Washington. Some of

the negative feelings were expressed at last October's meeting of the CF A, when many witnesses testified against acceptance of Hart's model. Among them was Paul Spreiregen, the Wash- ington landscape architect who was ad- visor to the original contest. "Imagine Arlington Cemetery," Spreiregen said, "with groups of larger-than-life sol- diers, in various combat outfits, wind- ing their way through the trees, coming up on headstones." Robert Lawrence, president of the American Institute of Architects, called the compromise a "concerted effort ... by a few indi- viduals unhappy with the design," even though Lin's design had been "ap- plauded almost unanimously."

As many at the CFA meeting pointed out, the battle went beyond the memo- rial's design to the Vietnam war itself. Indeed, what the rhetoric of the memo- rial controversy reflected was the im- possibility of separating the issue of Lin's design from opinions concerning the war; the controversy also revealed the naivete of those members of the VVMF who had thought the memorial could be isolated from the war, and who had mandated the impossible-a "neu- tral" memorial.

T: hroughout this period, the VVMF and Lin's supporters ied to prove that there was othing radical about her design, but Lin's enemies continued to see red reflected in the memorial's slick black walls. It was not simply the fact that the monument was abstract and black that angered them. Lin's memorial ran counter to tradition in several other important ways: it appeared to be sink- ing into the ground rather than tower- ing above the site; it had an unconven- tional system of listing names; it was completely unheroic, totally nonaggres- sive. It could, in fact, be read as a pacif- ist piece. To add insult to injury, the eight male jurors had chosen a memo- rial with a distinctly female character, placing at the base of Washington's giant phallus a wide V-shape sur- rounded by a grassy mound. The mem- orial was hardly a "black gash of shame," but it could indeed be read as a radical statement about the war, and even as the expression of a female sen- sibility. The vast number of names inscribed on the wall comes across as a powerful antiwar statement. As a wom- an standing in front of the memorial remarked, "What an unbelievable waste."

And facing the myriad names, it is difficult for anyone not to question the 126 ART IN AMERICA

purpose of the war. The reawakening of old conflicts about Vietnam has inevita- bly disturbed members of the Reagan administration; such reopened battle scars are too likely to suggest parallels with our current involvements in, for example, El Salvador. Lin's memorial functions as a powerful reminder of the potential consequences of our current foreign policy.

Towards the end of the memorial battle, Benajmin Forgey in The Wash- ington Post underlined the essentially nonesthetic nature of the conflict. "Ad- ding the sculpture and the flag," he wrote, "clearly was a political not an

In view of the response that Lin's walls would provoke, it is amusing to speculate that

her design was probably chosen for its unobtrusive-

ness, its utter modesty.

esthetic necessity." Even those cntics who argued that Lin's memorial was too abstract for popular taste were attacking it from a political perspec- tive. Tom Wolfe, who published a well- timed article in The Washington Post on the same day that the CF A heard testimony on the proposed additions, is a case in point. Calling Lin's memorial "non-bourgeois art," or art "that baf- fled the general public," Wolfe com- pared Lin's experience to that of Carl Andre in Hartford and Richard Serra in downtown Manhattan. He concluded that her memorial, too, was abstract and elitist. Yet no one, including Wolfe, has actually been baffled by the memo- rial. While Wolfe predictably lam- basted the "Mullahs of Modernism," he also used this occasion to add the antiwar movement to his enemy list. Having to the memorial as a "perverse prank," he ended his vituper- ative piece with the already familiar phrase, "A tribute to Jane Fonda!"

If Lin's memorial is a tribute to Fon- da, then Hart's is a tribute to John Wayne. It salutes the military estab-

representatives of the American Legion, the Marine Corps League, the Naval Association and the Military Order of the Purple Heart- all of whom demanded an alternative to Lin's piece. What Hart's statue is not, however, is a tribute to the troops. In fact, no one has been anxious to hear

from them. It is no secret that returning veterans were not welcomed home with open arms. There were no ticker-tape parades for an army that now has the highest suicide rate of any population of ex-Gls. "A few moments of honest conversation with any [veteran]," wrote critic Peter Marin in The Nation, "put to shame the versions of the war produced by our filmmakers, novelists and many journalists." The veterans are as divided as the rest of the popula- tion about Vietnam-and about the memorial. "I can't imagine anyone be- ing proud of what we did over there," commented John VanZwieten, who re- turned home and joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Although he now lives in Washington, VanZwiet- en doesn't even want to see the memo- rial-not because it's a tribute to Jane, but in fact for quite the opposite reason. As one veteran put it in About Face, a newspaper handed out at the dedication ceremony, "Buttering up Vietnam ve- terans as 'forgotten heroes' is a slap in the face directed at millions in this country who resisted the war."

Thanks to the battle over the Viet- nam memorial, Constitution Gardens will present two very different interpre- tations of the war. Though initially Lin's memorial may have had a certain political ambiguity, its juxtaposition with Hart's conservative statue will clearly emphasize its radical edge. Scruggs's original contention that America owed the veterans was neither radical nor conservative. It was a cen- trist position shared by millions of Americans including the families of those who came home in body bags. These are the thousands who flooded Washington for last year's dedication: one monument was more than enough for them. Veterans have been weeping in front of Lin's black walls. Their fam- ilies have been eager to touch a name or take a rubbing. Visitors have left flow- ers, clothes, snapshots and personal treasures belonging to the dead. The reception to this cold, black, abstract object has in fact been overwhelmingly warm. As The Washington Post noted in its editorial column, "The argument over the memorial dissolves the mo- ment you get there." When Hart's sta- tue is in place, the two memorials will inevitably challenge each other with contrary points of view. But this is one confrontation that Maya Lin should easily win. D

Author: Elizabeth Hess is a free-lance writer /ir- ing in Washington, D.C. She is currently co- authoring a book on feminist art.

Above, Mementos and other objec_ts left in front of Lin's walls by risitors during dedication week ceremonies. Below, crowds of riewers examine the memorial. Photos Dolores Neuman.