Maya Lin Vietnam Veterans Memorial Analysis

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Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial is so seductive, and now so much a part of the Washington landscape, that it's hard not to think of her as a local hero. A quarter of a century ago, she fought the good fight, arguing for a less-is-more monument design, proving herself, fresh out college, a formidable force against the crass manipulations and demagoguery that so often attend the design and use of public space in the Federal City. She endured a lot of shabby treatment in the process, from people who wanted to scuttle her design because it lacked bombast, and from others who simply couldn't take seriously the ideas and vision of a woman, an Asian American, a young person, a Washington outsider. The battle she began in 1981 -- to build her simple, dignified stone wedge -- was one of the opening battles of the culture wars that would define public life in this country over the next two decades. Lin emerged both a hero, because she won, and a martyr, because she endured a…show more content…
And when it was all done, when she had ducked the interesting questions (What do you think of the World War II Memorial?) and declared herself uninterested in talking about monuments, and a reluctant architect who isn't looking for commissions, and tried to focus attention on her low-key environmental art, a subtle shift took place in the meaning of the project that made her famous. She has sealed it off, and declines to be drawn into the subject. The Vietnam Memorial used to be the First Great Work of Maya Lin. But that Lin is gone, transformed into Lin the Artist, who, despite having served on the panel that chose a design for the memorial at the World Trade Center site, wants to project an image of disengagement from the huge civic issues she raised. When she speaks as an artist, she's so determined to be out of the fight that it's not clear she has any fight left in

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