The earliest of these battles was the controversy over Lin’s design. In large part, this was accomplished through a series of conflicts waged at the level of culture. Far from being a fait accompli, amassing the public will to support this new agenda took real work. This development was shaped by the theories of economic neoliberals on the one hand and by the values of their socially conservative allies on the other. However, the years that saw the memorial’s proposal, design, and construction-1980 to 1982-coincided with a momentous shift in the topography of American political culture: the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the ensuing negotiation of a new federal agenda. ![]() Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1981–82. By now, we are so accustomed to its visual rhetoric-the polished black granite, the lists of names, the horizontal positioning-that to think of these components as anything but standard practice takes an act of real imagination. Thirty years later, it is difficult to think of her memorial as a controversial work of art. Following its dedication, Lin’s memorial quickly became the prototype for American war memorials. Thus, it is unsurprising that the first skirmish of the culture wars of the 1980s can be traced back to the public debate that broke out in reaction to Maya Lin‘s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. These meanings serve as unifying forces, reinforcing the idea of a shared national identity and healing rifts in the communal experience of nationhood.īy endowing memorials with the ability to accomplish these tasks, we bestow them with an extraordinary amount of power and authority. We expect them to do the work of history writing, to draw single comprehensible narratives out of a Gorgon’s nest of individual, often contradictory, experiences. They serve as testaments to lives lost, as repositories of grief, and to facilitate processes of mourning. ![]() Washington, D.C.Īs memorials are objects of public commemoration, we demand a lot of them.
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