Monuments are curious hybrids of art and architecture, public and private space, singular vision and official style. They are not really about themselves as objects in the Modernist tradition, but are often shrouded in monumentality as they codify social rhetoric and mystify the history they pretend to report. To its lasting credit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by Maya Ying Lin, is a reserved, site-specific object that allows the sad narrative of Vietnam—as echoed in the names of the dead—to tell itself.
A slight fissure in a gentle green knoll, the memorial is a place of refuge for an orphaned history. Cut into the site like a giant V, the memorial is composed of two black, polished granite walls which seem both to rise from and recede into the earth. Chronologically inscribed in the granite are the names of 57, 939 dead and missing, beginning, in the vertex of the V, with the year 1959 and ending, in the same spot, with 1975. While each wall points toward a national monument (those of Washington and Lincoln), the memorial as a whole seems to burrow away from the “testimonial to power” profile of much Washington architecture. Often one finds people kneeling in the soft grass along its length, looking for names.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is America’s wailing wall—not so much a thing as a place. It does not try to chisel one’s ambivalence about war—about this war—into some marbleized monumentality; it is low-key, apolitical, and does not aggrandize or denigrate the experience of Vietnam. There are no heroic social realist devices here, only the social realism etched in one’s cathartic act of locating a place, and thus one’s private moment, within a continuum of history. For if the history of a war can be told simply, it is in the recitation of the names of the dead. In this way the memorial becomes an elegant ritual site, a setting neutral enough to invoke the passions of savage experience without political comment.
Against the heated current of neoExpressionist painting, a Minimalist site-object may seem too dispassionate and serialized a response to the Vietnam experience. But the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not about art. Instead it coopts art—in this case, the reserved, serial logic of ’60s sculpture (the Vietnam era)—in order to create pause, and a sense of national place, in the torrent of unresolved emotions about the war.
Yet for many the memorial represents the worst in high-art elitism, a Modernist conspiracy of language that mystifies the public and keeps history in the hands of the fluent. While some see the dark granite wall as an anti-Vietnam commentary, others see in its abstraction nothing at all. Consequently; within a year, a bronze statue of three dazed and bewildered footsoldiers will be located near the memorial’s entrance to provide, according to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, “a realistic depiction of Vietnam fighting men and a symbol of their devotion to country.” Yet while the statue, by Frederick Hart, earnestly represents the kind of tragic youth peculiar to the Vietnam war, it is not realistic, nor is it even historical. It is social realist statuary and is thus merely political. In time, when the echo of the war has faded, the statue will come to represent more of a tortured response to Modernism—and its fearful silence—than the politics of the moment. The timeless symbols of devotion, it seems to me, are already etched in the granite wall.
—Jeff Kelley
