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Distillations of landscape: sculptures of Maya Lin

Art in America, Sept, 1998 by Eleanor Heartney

Maya Lin's recent sculptures are the focus of a traveling exhibition now at the Grey Art Gallery in New York. Often inspired by natural forms, these new works display Lin's characteristic blend of technological and intuitive processes.

In a 1912 book, Frank Lloyd Wright suggested that his approach to architectural form was linked to the stylized natural forms found in Japanese prints.(1) What interested Wright in Japanese art was its reliance on the "conventionalization of nature," by which he meant a process of simplifying natural forms down to an essential geometry. If one is willing to accept a certain turn-of-the-century mysticism -- Wright believed such geometry expressed the "soul" of natural forms -- Wright's text makes for enlightening reading. it helps us to understand how such "conventionalization" provided him with the key to deriving architectural forms from the dramatic sweep and bold configurations of the American landscape without merely imitating them.

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A current exhibition devoted to the architect and artist Maya Lin suggests that, in her adaptation of natural forms, Lin is a legitimate heir to Wright. Best known for a pair of unconventional public monuments -- the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Civil Rights memorial in Montgomery, Ala. -- Lin has also completed an impressive series of projects for such institutions as the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio [see A.i.A., Dec. '94], the Charlotte Coliseum in North Carolina and the Rockefeller Foundation in midtown Manhattan. Ranging in type from architectural components to installation-style interventions to landscaped topiary parks, these works are united by a recurring connection to landscape. While Lin also draws on the heritage of the Earth Art movement of the 1970s and the romantic vision of nature in 19th-century American landscape painting, esthetic remains closer to Wright's notion of "conventionalized nature." Given the beauty and purity running through Lin's varied projects, it may even be that, like Wright, she, too, is seeking the soul of nature.

Yet, there's an important difference: where Wright found his version of nature's soul in a spiritualized geometry, Lin distills form and material according to the underlying laws of physical science. Over the years, she has found inspiration by working with computer-enhanced imaging, aerial and satellite photography, topographic mapping and the principles of fluid dynamics. Lin's liking for the tools of science and technology is tempered by the intuitive process she favors -- a process which, she reports, sometimes threatens to drive clients used to a more structured architectural procedure around the bend. Rather than follow strict plans, she constantly refines and alters her concepts during the course of construction. Architectural models operate more as places to begin exploring possibilities than as guides to the finished product. As a result, despite their origins in her studies of mathematics, topography and geology, her designs never feel schematic or diagrammatic. In the end, their final forms depend more on instinct than reason.

The current show, "Maya Lin: Topologies," was organized by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, N.C., and opens this month at the Grey Art Gallery in New York. "Topologies" is particularly noteworthy because its five newly made three-dimensional works mark Lin's first foray into the realm of large-scale sculpture conceived for an exhibition rather than a specific site. Along with these sculptures, the exhibition includes prints, as well as drawings and models for landscape projects which, as the catalogue puts it, "function independently as art objects." The show originated when SECCA curator Jeff Fleming approached Lin to participate in the Center's "Artist and the Community" series in which artists develop community-related projects during residencies in Winston-Salem. Out of their discussions came the idea of a show of sculptural works which Lin would conceive specifically for this exhibition. The other part of the project, a public art work in a Winston-Salem park, has been delayed by technical and funding problems.

Stunningly installed within the vaulted, light-flooded addition at SECCA, the sculptures in "Topologies" present Lin's vision of idealized nature. Natural light from a skylight picked out glittering facets in a mound of crushed glass which rose high above the viewer's head in a comer of the gallery. A spotlight captured the ethereal luminosity of Rock Field (1997), a group of 46 stone-shaped glass vessels strewn over a birch plywood floor that had been specially installed for the exhibition. Creamy disks of beeswax lined one wall while another section of floor held a low expanse of undulating wooden waves. Throughout, visually seductive materials were shaped into configurations which suggested natural elements and formations.

Distillations of landscape: sculptures of Maya Lin

Art in America, Sept, 1998 by Eleanor Heartney

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