“It was miserable,” Lin said when I first asked her about her year in Washington. “It was beyond miserable.” There is still indignation in her voice when she gets on the subject of the building of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. She hates Washington, and has rarely been back since her work was finished. “I think it is actually a miracle that the piece ever got built,” Lin wrote about the memorial in Boundaries. When art and politics collide, it is usually the art that gets totaled; that time, against all the odds, it didn't.
Still, beating the odds is not the same as a miracle. For a miracle, there is no explanation, and, except for one element, the Vietnam Memorial is explicable. There was a need to honor the soldiers who had gone to Vietnam; and there was a flourishing contemporary art movement, known as land art, that supplied the formal language for the piece that Lin designed. The people who planned the memorial—the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and the arts professionals it hired to run the design competition—had specified in advance many of the features for which Lin's work is admired. They envisioned a mostly horizontal, contemplative work that did not disrupt the landscape of Constitution Gardens, the area in the Mall designated as the site. The competition guidelines stipulated that the monument “make no political statement regarding war and its conduct,” and that it include the names of all 57,661 Americans who died in the war. (More names have been added since.) Lin's design was the unanimous choice of the competition jurors in part because it seemed so uncannily to fit the criteria the planners had in mind. What did seem to come out of the blue was the person behind Entry #1026 in the design competition, Maya Lin herself. Nobody had quite envisioned her.
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