Lin's Memorial to Loss, Of Hope
In the current issue of Hyperallergic, Maya Lin is being criticized for creating a work entitled, “Disappearing Bodies of Water: Arctic Ice” (2013), a sculpture of an ice flow carved out of pure white Vermont Danby marble. While her Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1980) is still praised for endowing two simple granite walls with sorrowful historic poignancy and healing power, this sculpure is being criticized as too literal and too slick.
By choosing marble as her medium, the new work utilizes a material identified with durability and longevity to represent a substance that is equally associated with fragility and brevity. This powerful juxtaposition utilizes a traditional art material in a traditional art manner to memorialize a very contemporary tragedy – a melting ice floe . Can this strategy raise the public’s consternation regarding the catastrophe of global warming? Can it convey the dismal fate of the planet?
I believe it can. Like Alan Sonfist, Lin exploits a popular concept to introduce a radical concept. Sonfist’s “Tree Museums” immediately convey the fact that old-growth trees are so threatened and they are becoming so rare, they will need the protection we lavish on precious museum artifacts. Likewise, Lin assigns the associations of marble with preserving the revered classic past to Arctic ice.
As in other aspects of her ambitious, multi-faceted project entitled “What Is Missing?”, this work registers the memory of what is disappearing on Earth. Lin conveys that Arctic ice is disappearing, as is oxygen in the oceans, bird songs, mountain tops, etc. In each instance, Lin provides a focus for our communal mourning. These works are alarms warning of dire losses. For the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, young soldiers have been brutally slaughtered. For “What is Missing?, precious irreplaceable resources are being mindlessly destroyed.
The author of this critique of Lin, Thomas Micchelli, states an obvious truth when he reminds us, “…our current state of entropy proves that, for good or ill, nothing is carved in stone. Sinkholes happen, monuments collapse, and history, as Thomas Jefferson knew, can change in an instant.” But that does not disqualify artists from creating enduring markers culled from these ever-evolving conditions.
He goes on to state, “Historically, to mourn in marble is to recognize that what is lost is truly lost. It is the definitive measure of hopelessness, which I doubt is what Lin meant to create. ….My discomfort with the marble is its immutability, implying — unintentionally — that things will remain as they are.”[1]
Neither stasis nor hopelessness is implied by this work. As Lin states very clearly, “The goal of What is Missing? is to not just make us aware of these losses but to give us direction and hope for what can be done to help. What is Missing? will provide an overview of what is being done throughout the world in terms of conservation and habitat protection. It will give viewers a glimpse of our global environment, taking people to different places, highlighting specific groups and showing the progress that is being made in the critical areas in which they work.”