Provocative and though-provoking comparisons between the US National WWI memorial now being designed and Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial.
To me, this memorial is a memorial for a culture which is beginning to heal from the wounds of the annihilating modernist and postmodernist ethos, a culture which is beginning its uncertain return to the human need to look at human beings, to tell stories about human beings, to share memories and find insight and comfort around the campfire. - Daniel Maidman
I like the movement of the WWI memorial, the story it tells from left to right.
I agree with the sentiment of the article. Perhaps human figures glamorize war in a way, but it also humanizes the victims in a way that a big, modern slab of stone doesn’t.
I was mostly turned off by the article by the criticism of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial. I don’t see what purpose it serves other than to piss a lot of people off.
Art is in the eye of the beholder, and I’ll have to reserve judgement until I see this new piece in person.
I didn’t read it as a criticism of the Lin memorial itself. I got from it that Vietnam wasn’t a war worthy of the treatment; only global nuclear war (or WWI) would’ve been horrific enough to be worthy of the Lin treatment.
I am a bit disturbed by the left side of the wall. It felt a bit revisionnist to what is my understanding of this horror.
I found the right side beautiful, though.
The article was a bit complicated for me. I guess this is saying that it tells more about us than about WWI?
Well, it certainly is open to a lot of interpretation. I think your takeaway is the most succinct and prescient. It think the article opines that the works tell us more about the state of art at the time when the pieces were created rather than the conflicts themselves; so I think that absolutely jives with what your takeaway is.
I am going to join the chorus here and question the articles use of the Vietnam memorial. I think a memorial can be aimed at a specific audience, and while many originally opposed it’s design I think it has won over the majority.
As for the proposed WW1 design, seems terribly busy to me. And the far right panel doesn’t seem to represent what the war eventually led to. If fact the panel seems to intimate hope, rather the mess it truly was.
But then to me a clock in a Picasso painting is just a clock.
The author’s take on the Vietnam memorial is interesting and thoughtful, although I don’t agree with it.
His praise of the WW1 sculpture, on the other hand, strikes me as awfully naive (as does the sculpture itself). WW1 was a terrifying, grinding, and filthy war that laid the foundation for an even bigger war two decades later. Yet the author believes that the war’s fundamental lesson is one of hope – embodied in the sculpture by a handsome, strapping young lad who returns home with no sign of trauma or injury.
Also, when he starts talking about the WW1 work, his prose turns to banal mush:
Sabin Howard is eccentric and irregular. He is good at some things and bad at others. He does not conceal himself behind his work. All his strengths and weaknesses magnify in his work, and when it is finally rendered and installed at its intended over-life-size scale, his virtues and vices will be fixed in superhuman form. He has done his best, but the best, even of the greatest artists, will never be enough. This lends their work its organic quality, its pathos.
Ugh.
Agree. I was already intellectually intrigued by his stance of the monument moving past Post-Modernism, and then he started gushing…
Aesthetically, I like them both, as banal as that sounds.
I rather liked that bit. I agree with the author that art, or at least what I look for in art, is now looking beyond or behind postmodernism and the hyper modern for something new.
Earnest pathos without a hint of irony is fine as a starting place for me.
I would go a step further and say that with everyone who fought in it now dead, WW1 is as much of a legend or myth of western culture as the peloponnesian war, so this work which hearkens back to it works for me on that level as well.
Also I love modern and postmodern art, don’t get me wrong. But I want more variety these days.
I like the concept of the Vietnam Memorial, but actually seeing it I was less impressed, mainly because it’s fairly small.
The Art Deco style of the WWII Memorial also feels out of place and is kind of kitshy.
I guess you just can’t beat the clean classical lines of the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, Capitol Building, etc.
Only semi-related, but I was in NYC for the first time this week and I walked to the 9/11 memorial. I know they were controversial, but I found standing near one of the pools with water pouring down around the edges to be really moving. I feel like they definitely owe a bit to Maya Lin.