Modern Art as National Healing

In 1975, as the last helicopter frantically left the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, it was virtually unthinkable that a memorial to the nearly 60,000 American soldiers who had perished in the Vietnam War would one day stand on the same spot on Washington’s National Mall where antiwar protest rallies had earlier gathered. Six years later, it was equally unimaginable that the just-chosen design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial would, when built, turn out to rank as the greatest aesthetic achievement in an American public monument in the 20th century.

How could it? Public monuments typically seek to represent--or create--a picture of social consensus about historic events. This memorial faced two enormous hurdles: America’s war in Vietnam inspired anything but broad agreement among the citizenry; and the individualist orientation of successful modern art was mostly antithetical to the established demands of public monuments.

Yet unparalleled greatness is exactly what sculptor and architect Maya Lin achieved with her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a scheme plucked from a pool of more than 1,400 submissions to an open competition in May 1981. This is one public monument that also ranks as an extraordinary work of art. There was nothing like it before, and there’s been nothing like it since.

Other public monuments this century might claim equal fame or affection in the public imagination--the Iwo Jima memorial from World War II, for example, with its indelible photographic image of huddled soldiers straining in unison to raise the American flag, or the fragile but eternal flame that burns at the sober grave site of President Kennedy. However much admired for what they represent, though, none garners the same respect for artistic merit as does Lin’s stark, elegant 450-foot wedge of polished black granite that slices into the earth on the National Mall.

Alone among the many powerful monuments there, the Vietnam memorial is distinctly modern in design. Its style doesn’t nod toward antiquity, with columns, obelisks, winged symbols of transcendence or other familiar classical motifs that would conspire to anchor it within a heroic continuum of human history. Instead, this sculpture is abstract.

The radical fact of its abstraction was seized upon by opponents when Lin’s model was unveiled. Tom Wolfe, the novelist and artistic Luddite, condemned the decision not to build a figurative monument. Like countless other anti-Modernists in our past, he detected in the design a Communist plot, calling the decision to erect an abstract sculpture “symbolic of a Red Guard-style Cultural Revolution” that had supposedly taken hold in the United States.

Wolfe was proven wrong--as were all the other illustrious Cold Warriors who did their damnedest to stop Lin’s design from being built. Patrick J. Buchanan worked hard to derail the project, and so did William F. Buckley Jr., Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), Dallas businessman Ross Perot and James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior. Each had his own reasons. However wrong they all were--and unrecorded is whether any of them, in retrospect, has changed his mind in the face of an overwhelming public embrace of the design--only Wolfe had put his inadvertent finger on the source of the monument’s power.

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In retrospect it’s clear that the Vietnam memorial is successful precisely because it’s modern, not in spite of it. A traditional, representational statue in marble or bronze, complete with the standard classical repertoire, would have spelled disaster. There are two reasons, and they are intimately related.

First, a traditional memorial would have instantly historicized the Vietnam War. The bronze statues and classical motifs familiar to most war memorials would have anchored the event being commemorated firmly in the past. The soul- and body-shattering trauma of war often demands just this sort of public response. Imagery redolent of the past solemnly sanctifies the dead, who immediately join a collective pantheon of ancestral authority. And the living, faced with a familiar and comforting symbol of history, are reassured through an implicit declaration: “We have survived.”

But Vietnam was different. Emphatic historicity would not do.

No event since the Civil War has had such a profound and wrenching effect on the national sense of self. America was literally torn in two, split into raw, polarized and seemingly irreconcilable camps. The war had been over for just six years when the competition for the memorial’s design concluded, and the wound in the American psyche remained fresh and deep. However much we wanted to put the awful episode behind us, there was important work left to do.

We needed a place to grieve. It had to be a public place, too, where the personal expression of loss could be shared. During the divisive war, while the body count was rising, shared loss had been impossible to experience. With its black granite, carved names and path sloping down into enveloping earth, Lin’s stark design has distinctly funereal overtones. They are appropriate to the task.

The abstract monument carved out a space to mourn our loss, collectively and individually, each in his or her own way. Minimalist in form, and more an environmental earthwork than a discrete sculptural object, the memorial loosely recalls a powerful precedent. Actual battlefields where soldiers’ blood had consecrated the soil today stand as the most moving public monuments to the Civil War, that epic event that was a defining episode in America’s 19th century.

The modern design of Lin’s monument acknowledges that Vietnam is an episode still operative (if submerged) in the present life of the nation. The war’s meaning remains open-ended. I might regard it as a hugely tragic misdeed, while Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) might still champion its aim; but both of us can stand side by side in harmony within the sheltering space of this memorial.

Eventually the memorial’s sleek Minimalist geometry will recede into the realm of a period style, which will locate the Vietnam War as an episode in U.S. history. But the withdrawal into the past will come slowly, through the actual, incremental accretions of real time, rather than instantly, with the visual aid of an ersatz classicism.

And that’s the second, related quality that makes the Vietnam Veterans Memorial uniquely important. The monument is honest. It doesn’t dissemble or look away. Its funereal abstraction is truthful about the awful predicament. A classical figurative style of memorial sculpture, which would inevitably carry with it a claim of unitary public consensus about the Vietnam War and its place in American history, would correctly have been perceived to be a fraud. More lies, deceptions and false rhetoric on this particular subject were not needed at all.

Public monuments face a critical problem in our time. For the modern world, the rise of mass media has transformed the ceremonial performance of authentic public life into the shifting phantom of public relations. We don’t expect the truth to be spoken in public. On the rare occasion that it is, we do a double, even triple, take. We can’t take our eyes off it.

That’s what made Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial so startling and uniquely powerful. And with a depth and profundity that can break your heart and move your soul, the citizenry responds. The fact that they do, that veteran and antiwar activist alike have gathered the memorial into their embrace, tells us something crucial to know about art and about our experience in the world. It’s the hallmark of an authentic masterpiece--which is remarkable in any case, but doubly so for a 20th century public monument.