Is the Art and Technique of Always Landing on Your Feet

"I am e'er trying to find a balance ... the identify where opposites meet."

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"A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is almost time. I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time."

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"Sometimes I call back creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an thought, but assuasive the thought to notice y'all."

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"Fine art is very tricky because it'due south what you do for yourself. It'south much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the compages."

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"For the most part things never become built the style they were fatigued."

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"To fly nosotros have to have resistance."

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"I feel I exist on the boundaries. Somewhere between science and fine art, fine art and compages, public and private, east and west. I am always trying to discover a balance between those opposing forces, finding the place where opposites see."

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Summary of Maya Lin

Fifty-fifty if she had designed aught else, Maya Lin's first commission would brand her 1 of the about innovative artists of the twenty^th century. Her Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., a urban center known for its imposing monuments, is now one of the most iconic sights. Her use of a spare, depression-slung wall to trace the line of the natural landscape became her trademark. Her minimalist approach to public art is to add something that looks similar it was not originally in that location, but somehow belongs. Swells of earth interrupt the grassy terrain always and so slightly in her outdoor installations, so that if one is non viewing the work from loftier above or far abroad, one might non fifty-fifty detect them. The indoor sculptures on which she has focused recently maintain an implicit environmental focus, ideologically and visually evoking the rolling contours of remote geographic locations. In a career that began with controversy, Lin's 35-year record of public and individual art successfully merges the conceptual and natural world.

Accomplishments

While still a higher educatee, Lin transformed one of the oldest and near conservative art forms in America. Gone are the men on horseback, obelisks and allegorical nudes that in one case defined the monument. Her spare, linear aesthetic uses blank space equally a metaphor for thought. Her work invites us to reflect on what cannot be summarized in a single representation, a truly revolutionary idea.
Lin brought an unprecedented degree of humanity to Minimalism. The older, generally male minimalists to whom she is visibly indebted (Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra) steered articulate of references to history, even in their big-scale public works. Lin's piece of work, withal, harnesses the power of this austere aesthetic to steer us toward grasping the touch of historic events in a personal way.
Lin'southward ideas were so far ahead of her time it took most of the earth a little while to catch up with her. Critics initially misinterpreted her style as a literal effort to minimize the importance of a celebrated event and the individuals who served their country. Far from diminishing the memory of these individuals, notwithstanding, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is now the most visited monument in Washington, D.C. Over 10,000 people a day visit it. Among them are some skeptics, including hardened veterans, who oft find themselves moved to tears.
Equally an artist, Lin strikes an unusual rest between open-concluded concepts, and scientific precision. Her stated aim is for her piece of work to go a individual conversation for each person who views it. In her obsessive planning, scientific adding, investigation, and measurement in grooming for each work, however, she is a throwback to the Italian Renaissance, when science and art were of a piece.
Despite the radicalism of her ideas, they did not emerge from a vacuum. In placing greater emphasis on the viewer, and giving more power to the audience, Lin'south work rests on the shoulders of a long line of conceptual artists from Marcel Duchamp to Yoko Ono, and is role of a widespread transformation taking place in public fine art at the terminate of the 20^th century.

Biography of Maya Lin

Maya Lin was born to Chinese intellectuals who had fled People's republic of china in 1948, just every bit the Communist takeover was occurring. Her hometown of Athens, Ohio, known for its manufacturing and agriculture, is also the home of Ohio University, an institution that played a major role in her youth. Her female parent Julia Chang Lin, a poet, was a literature professor at the university and her male parent, Henry Huan Lin, was a ceramicist and likewise the Dean of the School of Art. Lin was in her father's studio, "making art as long equally she can remember." A precocious student, Lin was fascinated with the natural world and with science, and read constantly. She wanted to exist a veterinarian or an beast behaviorist, and her parents allowed her to have a pet parakeet. As she was growing up through the seventies, environmentalism was on the rise and it remained an important part of her sensibility. In high school, Lin did not conform to the stereotype of the Midwestern teenage daughter. She steered clear of the prom, football games, and make-up, and grew her hair down to her waist. While all the same in high school, she took fine art courses at university level and began experimenting with bronze casting at the foundry. In her spare fourth dimension, she took walks in the woods, letting her imagination roam, or played chess with her older brother, to whom she looked up. Fueled past the traditional Chinese aesthetic of her childhood dwelling and the surroundings of rural Ohio, Lin's sensibilities as an architect began to blossom. Elements of this background would return in her later work, specially in college.

Important Art by Maya Lin

Progression of Art

1982

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, ane of the most controversial works of the 1980s, lies on the northwest corner of the National Mall in Washington D.C. Ii uncomplicated walls of polished granite fall x anxiety beneath class and run into at a 130-caste angle in a V-shape. Its ends indicate towards the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, respectively. The names of over 58,000 soldiers who were killed or pronounced missing in action are listed, in the social club of death or disappearance, rather than alphabetically because Lin wanted it to be read "like an ballsy Greek poem." A Vietnam veteran can go to Maya Lin's memorial and search for the names of his fallen comrades. In the process, he sees his own face up reflected in the polished stone.

A unique pull abroad from the traditional memorial pattern with realistic forms, her design assorted with all other memorials in Washington D.C. Information technology echoes the sentiments of Vietnam veteran Jan Scruggs, who raised the coin for the projection, and stated in his open call for submissions: "Nosotros practice non seek to make any statement almost the correctness of the state of war. Rather, by honoring those who sacrificed, nosotros hope to provide a symbol of national unity and reconciliation." In relation to a war that was wildly unpopular both at home and abroad, Lin's memorial was a barometer of these sentiments. It presents us with an invitation to reflect and answer. It accounts for the fact that anti-war demonstrators and ex-military men both lost relatives and friends. It acknowledges that each individual will reply differently, and gathers visitors together in mourning, without telling them how to make sense of the military conflict.

This made many viewers uncomfortable. When the projection was accepted, the backlash was swift and violent. Those who had supported U.Southward. military involvement in Vietnam detected a note of potential criticism in the absence of heroic figures and other obvious symbols of honor and cede, and dismissed it equally a "blackness gash of shame." While its conceptual open-endedness was function of the controversy, and so was Lin's ethnicity as an Asian American (her parents were from China), which, remarkably, likewise came under scrutiny as a possible reason to disqualify her. The design caused such intense debate that Lin had to suspend her career equally a college educatee to defend information technology, and she was not entirely successful. Equally a concession to conservative critics, three realistic figures with an American flag were constructed across the National Mall near Lin'due south monument in a much smaller, more conventional statuary by Frederick Hartt. Hartt's work is visited far less ofttimes, all the same, than Lin'southward historic structure, unveiled on Veterans Twenty-four hour period in 1982. In addition to remaining a place of historic honor and reflection, it is at present accepted as a major milestone in twenty^th-century fine art.

Etched granite - Constitution Gardens, Washington DC

1993

Groundswell

This slice, Lin's commencement major large-scale artwork, is a permanent installation consisting of 43 tons of shattered automobile safety drinking glass. Lin had previously experimented with this material in smaller-scale works. This is a site-specific installation designed to call attention to the "throwaway" (as the creative person called them) spaces of the building, filling them with recycled safety glass broken into small bits. The formations, although fabricated from such a harsh medium, evoked a sense of at-home much like a landscape or seascape. Lin used two types of recycled drinking glass, which mimicked the color of h2o when mixed together. She besides utilized cultural influences as inspiration for the piece of work, looking both to her eastern and western backgrounds; to the Japanese gardens of Kyoto and to the Native American burying mounds of Athens, Ohio.

Post-obit the success (and elevated expectations) of her early on career, Lin sought to become more spontaneous. She fabricated only a few sketches before beginning this installation, invoking a '70s attitude inspired by Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse, and other artists to whom her work is linked, and who based their finished outcome on process, every bit opposed to a preconceived thought of what the work would look like. Lin and her team dropped bucket subsequently saucepan of cleaved drinking glass onto the rooftop areas with a boom crane, filling the pockets of the building until the work was complete. In an approach that was absolutely consequent with her earlier projects, too as her background as an builder, Lin incorporated the entire building into her design, applying her comprehensive vision to all areas of the Wexner Center. This work bears the authentication of her approach as an architect and creative person, regardless of space, nature, fabric, and application. Her vision remains holistic, compassionate, all-encompassing, and ever highly belittling.

Tempered Safety Glass - Wexner Middle, Colombus, Ohio

1995

The Wave Field

Designed for the FXB Aerospace Building on the University of Michigan campus, this outdoor sculptural installation engages one of Lin'due south earliest and most fundamental passions: science. Specifically inspired by the movement of water, the work is about fluidity. A three-month study of fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, and turbulence, conducted past the artist on site, preceded the work. While visibly indebted to other large-scale Earth Works (Robert Smithson'due south Spiral Jetty comes to mind), alignment betwixt the conceptual and formal properties of Lin's piece of work is much closer. For example, its precise xc' past xc' grid of rising crests mimics that of a naturally occurring moving ridge. Lin selected a particular wave type that brought together all areas she had been researching, including fluid dynamics, flight resistance, and turbulence.

Literally role of the ground on which the artist designed information technology, this delightful sculpture is at one time playful and intellectual. Walking beyond it is quite different from viewing it through the window of 1 of the next classrooms. It changes throughout the twenty-four hours equally the sun passes and shadows emerge on unlike parts of information technology, achieving Lin'due south goal to highlight the interconnectedness between art and landscape.

Earth and grass - University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan

2002

The character of a loma, under glass

While evident fifty-fifty in her earliest sculptures, Lin's conviction that her work should be an homage to world has grown stronger over the years. In 2002, she designed an interior landscape that worked its way from the outside into the centre of an office building in Minneapolis, transforming the American Express Customer Service Center into an installation, an Earth Work, and an architectural class that defies categorization. In the edifice's central atrium, a 28 by 55 foot sculpture with an undulating wood surface lifts off the ground and seems to travel toward the viewer, bearing grass and trees. The fluidity this construction, an intentional element of surprise, relates to Moving ridge Field in thwarting our expectation that the footing in public space should lie flat. The installation also includes a "water wall," and an indoor and outdoor winter garden. There are olive trees on the inside of the building and ethnic river birch on the exterior. The water wall appears to exist flowing from the within out and culminates in a pool. The wall freezes during the wintertime months, offer visitors an indication of the temperature outside. In blurring the boundaries between inside and outside space, the piece of work is designed to heighten sensation of the environment, even in a major metropolitan center.

Woods, trees, water, earth, and metal - American Express Customer Service Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota

2004

Eleven Minute Line

Lin's interests range widely, from the most avant-garde concepts in science to the very earliest artists on earth. According to the artist, her objective in this 12-foot-high 1,600-human foot-long curving line of earth was to make a three-dimensional cartoon. This site-specific work was created for the pasture of i of the largest organic dairy farms in Northern Europe, nigh Wanas castle (now the Wanas Foundation). As an American away, Lin saw a captivating similarity betwixt the early burial mounds of Europe and those in her homeland of the United States, and sought to elaborate on that connection. Lin had long had an interest in the Native American burial and effigy mounds in her home state of Ohio. Among the largest and virtually striking of these mounds is the so-called Serpent Mound of the Hopewell Indians (100 BC-700 Ad). Information technology is a visible source of inspiration for this work, part drawing, office sculpture, which Lin describes as, "somewhere betwixt a line and a walk."

The creative person used gravel (hither again, her relationship to Robert Smithson, whose Spiral Jetty is equanimous of gravel, is axiomatic) to make preliminary sketches on the grounds of the castle. She then created a topographic model of the site from which she transferred her gravel cartoon to the permanent sloping pasture, an elaborate process that relied on her skill equally a draftsman and cartographer (another one of her passions). Lin situated the terminal piece so as to be visible from multiple angles, from the road and nearby buildings.

World and grass - Wanås, Sweden

2006

Water Line

Consequent with Lin's interest in evoking landscape and transforming interior space, Water Line reveals part of the earth that was inaccessible in its entirety. While to the untrained center this looks like a tangle of aluminum wire, it is actually a meticulously constructed three-dimensional model of i the most remote locations on the planet: the ocean floor sitting along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that rises to form Bouvet Island, about 1,000 miles northward of Antarctica. Using the most advanced technologies of the time (models, grids, topographical drawings, sonar, radar mapping and satellite photographs) Lin studied this pocket-sized piece of the world and created what is essentially a room-sized line cartoon of it, measuring 34'10" x 29'2" x 19'. This work is part of an installation called Systematic Landscapes, the first presentation of her work within the confines of a museum. While Google Globe and other developments since 2006 take made it easier to view far-flung locations, we even so don't remember much about what lies below the world's surface, yet water makes upwards 70% of the Earth's area. Always drawn to nature, as a mature artist, Lin has gravitated to sites of natural wonder, in works that seek to highlight the boggling fragility of earth's ecosystem.

Aluminum Tubing - Gagosian Gallery

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Content compiled and written by Laura Fiesel

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Ruth Epstein

"Maya Lin Creative person Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Laura Fiesel
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Ruth Epstein
Available from:
First published on 28 Mar 2016. Updated and modified regularly
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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/lin-maya/