History Recaptured Through Monument and Art

Visual Arts - Communicate Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial A description of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) (which features 58,272 names; the letters spelling out the names are 0.53 inches high and are carved 0.015 inches deep into the walls) should include the fact that it is made up of two gabbro walls (gabbro is an igneous rock, chemically the same as plutonic basalt, which is black) that are each 246 feet 9 inches long.

The two walls are built into the ground, there is an earthen embankment behind the walls, and the two walls meet at an apex which is 10.1 feet high at the point where the walls join. At the ends of the walls, the height is just eight inches (www.bvvinc.org). The angle at which the two walls come together is 125° 12' and the walls are built on top of 140 concrete pilings that have been driven about 35 feet down into bedrock.

The one wall points directly to the Washington Monument, and the other wall points to the Lincoln Memorial. There is symbolism in the direction in which the walls point; Lin said that linking those "two strong symbols" created a "unity between the past and present" (Lin, 2000).

What was Maya Lin's purpose in the design she came up with? Lin wrote an article in The New York Review of Books in 2000, and in that piece she explained that she chose black granite "to make the surface reflective and peaceful." When she first visited the potential site, she imagined taking a knife "and cutting into the earth, opening it up, an initial violence and pain that in time would heal" because the grass would grow back (which it did, at the back of the memorial) (Lin, p. 3).

So the two walls, once they were joined at an apex, would not be a wall, per se, but rather as "an edge to the earth, an opened side." What does the work say about our society's response to national events? It should be acknowledged that this national event was a bitterly hated war, and the post-war tensions reflected that deep divisions in the U.S. still existed. During the design process there was "a considerable amount of ill will and mistrust between the veterans and myself," she wrote (p. 4).

Later, Lin was criticized because she was an Asian creating a memorial for an Asian war. "It wasn't so much an artistic dispute" over the design, "as a political one," she wrote (p. 7). The Raft of the Medusa This massive painting by Theodore Gericault is 16 feet by 23 feet, and is found in the Louvre, in Paris, France.

Without going into the history of how this raft was set afloat off the coast of Africa in July of 1816, and why cannibalism was carried out by some of the 147 people on that ill-fated raft, the painting reflects realism in the genre of the actual color of the skin of the dying and of the dead. It is a romantic painting, following fairly closely the "Neoclassical and Romantic movement" which was part of the creative scene in nineteenth century France, according to Steve Durbin, writing in Art & Perception (2007).

The style that Gericault used was "strongly influenced by Michelangelo," and relies on the "drama and fluidity of the Baroque movement" by using "loose brushstrokes, a strong palette," and a dramatic juxtaposition of "light and dark" (Durbin, p. 2).

The bodies of the dead and dying on the raft certainly were not, in reality, very attractive, given that they were without food and water for many days; but the painting (which reflected "idealized, muscular bodies") stayed true to the Neoclassical / Romantic work of Michelangelo and showed musculature on the bodies (Durbin, p. 2).

One quite interesting feature of the painting is the "interlocking triangles"; also, the person waving a flag of some kind to a distant ship, is African, which is curious given that Africans were seen as slaves at that time (Durbin, p. 2). There are four distinct groups in the painting, Durbin explains. There are the dead and dying in the center; those "struggling to stand up"; three are huddled together by the mast; and the fourth.