On a bright winter day, when Golden Gate Park was filled with runners, rollerbladers, and other pleasure-seekers, we found ourselves in the de Young Museum’s basement, gazing upwards through a wire net.
We are standing under a wire sculpture by Maya Lin, part of the her Systematic Landscapes exhibition. The piece is quite simple — a large, uneven grid constructed out of thick wires, it outlines an underwater topography with gentle swells and drops. A collaboration with the Woods Hole Institute in Maine, the sculpture loosely transcribes a chunk of the North Atlantic seafloor into wire.
Systematic Landscapes dovetails with Lin’s recent interest in organic forms. Her newest sculptures veer away from the Vietnam War Memorial’s strict geometry; they are messier, more elaborate, and less controlled.
The sculptures in Systematic Landscapes retain Lin’s interest in phenomenology. The larger sculptures invite physical engagement — we move through, or around, the work. In the case of Lin’s underwater landscape, we become more than passive observers. We become part of the sculpture, or perhaps the sculpture intrudes into our space, and the sculpture transforms our physical experience. The net’s swells and curves define, and limit, our space, and we become fish, schooling beneath a gentle, undulating net.
Maya Lin’s career has taken many twists and turns since she won the commission for the Vietnam War Memorial, but the Memorial continues to define her identity as an artist. By now, the story is all too familiar. At the time, Lin was an undergraduate at Yale University. Her design — a simple, black marble chevron, engraved with the names of the 57,000 U.S. soldiers who perished in the Vietnam War — is a work of great gravitas. Though the Vietnam War Memorial is an early work, almost all of Lin’s signatures are present. The Memorial is minimal and abstract. It invites participation. It defines the viewer’s space. The Memorial demands more than passive contemplation; it ignites emotion. Witness the constant queue of visitors, waiting to touch the names engraved in the Memorial’s reflective black marble. Witness the flowers and gifts, laid at the Memorial’s feet. The marble reflects our faces back at us, but now we see ourselves transformed — with the names of the dead laid out across our faces, we suddenly find ourselves drawn into the Memorial, into the War. It is a powerful, wrenching moment. It tears away your composure, and leaves you exhausted, changed.