Summer 1996
Volume 22, Number 4

Fig. 1--Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C. (1980-82). Photo: author. Fig 10.--Richard Serra, Pulitzer Piece: Stepped Elevation (1970-71). Photo/Source: Harry Shunk/Richard Serra/Sculpture.

Since the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the reception of Lin's monuments has been remarkably uniform in tone and content, mostly celebrating them as shrines of conciliation and always emphasizing their formal clarity, visual reflectiveness, and inviting tactility.2 My focus here is somewhat different. What interests me about Lin's monuments is, first, that they can be seen together as a suite of work representing three defining social phenomena of the 1960s: the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the women's movement. Secondly, in all three monuments, Lin chose to represent her subjects graphically in a format unprecedented in monumental commemorative art--that of the pure chronology or time line. What I hope to show through a combination of textual and formal analyses is that Lin's monuments constitute particular ideological representations of their subject matters. In each monument, a divisive and controversial struggle of the 1960s is, by its chronicling in monumental form, sublimated and integrated into American historical consciousness. One result of such an analysis is that the much debated politics of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial--is it pro- or antiwar, or some combination?--can be clarified by understanding the common politics of all three monuments. In the first part of the essay, brief descriptions and histories of the three monuments will begin the work of interpretation. In its later parts, the essay discusses how Lin's work popularized and mutated the formal vocabulary and ideology of 1960s minimalism, how it potentiates a new mode of critical monumentality, and how its graphical experimentation may redeem the monument in the age of information.

2. For the reception of Lin's monuments, see notes 8 and 9.

Daniel Abramson is assistant professor of art history and director of architectural studies at Connecticut College. He is writing a book on the Bank of England and its architecture.