Maya Lin

El Memorial de los Veteranos de Vietnam fue el primer monumento realmente abstracto de Estados Unidos. Es una obra que se resiste a clasificaciones convencionales; estuvo marginada de los debates arquitectónicos del momento y, además, fue diseñada por una mujer de veintiún años de edad, estudiante, y de origen asiático. Todos estos componentes singulares se conjugaron para desatar una de las mayores controversias que se han tejido alrededor de una obra de carácter público.

What does it mean to speak of public art? To what extent does it make sense to speak of a 'publicity' in art world? The challenges and contradictions of public art in contemporary culture situation have never been greater. For the fields of art and culture global capitalism more and more demands becoming industrialize and commercialize, public art also confronts same situation. In this moments, I will argue about public art's identity and social function.
  In western culture, since the end of the 19th century, traditional monuments began to lose their visual-symbolic effectiveness. Then artists have invented new ways of creating effective participations or interventions in public space while also attempting to address a wide array of public audience. For example, S. Lacy who suggested the concept of 'New Genre Public art' in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art(1995) encouraged more contemporary artists to work their creation or activity for social community.
  The first section of this essay will be considered to the problem of defining a public art in relation to community that are, by their nature, "exposed"―inhabiting spaces that are deemed public or common. Especially I will discuss the possibility of art for community's sake beyond 'art for art's sake', by making reference to the Walter Benjamin's late art theory that he examined the new identity and function of modern art under the social condition of modern era.
  The second section might be the crucial part of this essay. Because my debate as a kind of case study on the success or failure of some artists's art works or activities in the public sphere. First, I will investigate the matter of process that art works gain in the popularity and publicity, by discussing between the A. Warhol's <Disaster painting> and F. Gonzalez-Torres's <Untitled> installation series. Second, my argument is deal with the problem of artistic methodology that public art works can be functioning as the productive medium for the collective memory and experience. In this part, I will focus on two well-documented examples of public art: M. Lin's <Vietnam Veterans Memorial> and A. Gormley's <Angel of the North>. Both examples proved exceptionally controversial, and the nature of these controversies will serve to illuminate a number of the main issues raised in this essay.

The tense debates of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) sparked my curiosity to research the subject. As a young female Asian American, Maya Lin who dealt with the tremendous pressure of the political debate and the backlash from the public eye due to her architectural design. This circumstance captivated me, making me feel connected, and sympathetic. I could relate Lin’s single-minded devotion to follow what was right as Maya Lin puts it, “Bless Youth”  to defend and speak out in relations to her artistic vision struck a chord to believe in myself and many others. The ambiguous structure gives the public the freedom to interpret and build a sense of personal attachment. To understand the subject, I propose that we must understand the background, the artist, and the VVM’s controversies in order to grasp how this memorial healed the nation with its minimalist architectural style. 
This essay will analyze the controversies surrounding which was VVM designed by Maya Lin, located in the heart of the Washington Mall, and was completed November 13, 1982.  I will begin with background about the VVM, exploring remarks regarding the hardships, and the nationwide effort to approve the vision of the VVM. Section two will discuss several controversies surrounding the memorial utilizing scholarly methodologies. Section three will analyze VVM as a liminal space performing a place to heal. In conclusion, I will identify a few understudied propositions that may reinforce my theoretical arguments or provoke future research. As historian Kristin Haas states, "the important thing to know about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is that it made memorials matter again."

The conception, execution and reproduction processes in art and architecture, which use several media at the same time, lead to the emergence of interaction and dialogues between and within media. From the interdisciplinary perspective, the nature of the relations between two media is the subject of intermedia studies. Intermedial relations draw attention to the convergence of different forms and the production of new meanings in this process, simultaneously. In this sense, the present study focuses on the forms, concepts and practices of intermediality through American architect and artist Maya Lin’s works and creative process. Having placed her own works on the dualities such as science and art, art and architecture, public and private, east and west, and the dividing line between them, Maya Lin's works and design process, in this context, are productive and worth examining. The nature of intermedial creations has been investigated through different media forms such as text, sketch, model, drawing and book; and the epistemology of intermedial practices has been examined through the concepts and practices of reading and writing. As a result of this study, it is showed that intermediality as a tool can be used in constructing new meanings and uncovering new research questions in art and architecture studies, as well as the emergence of different art forms.

This book explores the nature of artistic and literary imagination, creativity, aesthetic experience, and genius, while offering a critique of the post-structuralist assault on transcendent values.  This involves distinguishing between the aesthetics of art and the sociology of art, a subject addressed in Part 1.  In Part 2, the principal arguments by major thinkers, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Norman Bryson, Jacques Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Stanley Fish, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, Edward Said, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Hayden White, are subjected to an analytical critique.

Artist/Architect Maya Lin is a committed environmentalist known for memorials, her first was the Vietnam Memorial (1982). Awareness of excess consumer materials provoked recent sculptures shown in "Recycled Landscapes" (2009) some were
made of toys.

There are three works in Lin’s Wavefield series: in Recycled Landscapes, the virtual looking Wavefield (2008) cast in recycled green glass is a poem that encapsulates the prose of two earlier Wavefield earthworks. The last of this series is Lin’s largest: Storm King Wavefield (2009) is as beautifully integrated into the mountains of upstate New York as Ohio’s Native American mounds are (where Lin grew up). The origin of Lin’s waveform may be Groundswell (1993) a permanent installation at
the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Athens, Ohio.

"Portraits of the Artist" is a Fall 2018 Swarthmore College English Literature seminar of mine for first-year undergraduate students introducing them to literary and cultural studies—and analytical writing skills—at the college level.  For potential majors in all fields, including humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences.