HOW CHINESE ARE YOU?
The art world was not about to lie down and accept a political invasion into its sacrosanct dominion. What did politicians and veterans know about high art anyway? They were trampling on the time-honored process of a juried competition. They understood nothing of the inviolable sanctity of an artist’s work. A member of the Fine Arts Commission that would soon consider the additions called them “maudlin” changes to the “most sublime monument Washington has received in a long time.” Harry Weese, the architect for the Washington subway and a jury member, was even more blunt. “Putting those elements in that design is a spoiled brat approach—if you can’t kill it, adulterate it.” The Washington Post critic, Benjamin Forgey, called the additions a “monumental absurdity” and a disastrous decision that would “muck up an extraordinary work of memorial art.” The Boston Globe put the situation succinctly: “Commemorating the war in Vietnam is likely to prove no simpler than fighting it.”
The criticisms of the purists, however, overlooked the fact that this was not pure art but public art, and the memorial would be installed in a very prominent place on public land in the most precious political landscape in America. The public was entitled to its say in the matter.
Meanwhile, Maya Lin’s architect-collaborator, Kent Cooper, had grudgingly and reluctantly agreed to stay on as an adviser. But he was deeply unhappy about the violation of Lin’s design. A statue with the wall “tends to weaken the powerful formality—the necessary inhumanity—of the memorial,” he said. “It’s going to be a long summer.”
The Warner compromise had specified that the VVMF patrons should nominate three prominent sculptors, and that they should submit their concepts for review. But the patrons had no appetite for another grand, costly, and contentious competition that would further postpone execution of the memorial. More delay would only encourage more hurdles. Though he was now tentatively on board, Secretary Watt continued to play hardball. He would not authorize ground to be broken until “better and proper language” to honor the 2.7 million Vietnam veterans was found, and the plans for the flagpole and the statue were settled. And he would not approve a dedication date for the memorial in November—as the veterans wanted—until the “refinements” were in place. As a result of Watt’s resistance, groundbreaking was delayed three weeks.
Meanwhile, politics interceded in choosing the actual sculptor. In a genuflection to the concern that no Vietnam veterans had been on the original jury, this time the four judges of the “Sculpture Panel” had all served in Vietnam; two favored the Lin design and two opposed it. But it was scarcely an even divide, since the elephant on the panel was Jim Webb. (Carhart, by this time, was regarded as a loose cannon.) Another panelist, Bill Jayne, an ex-Marine and Lin supporter, defined their challenge: to find a sculpture that would be “prideful, but not glorify the war.” The other premise for debate was how the sculpture should interact with the wall. There should be “artistic tension” between the three elements, it was supposed, but they should act in concert as a single memorial. The wall was not to be simply a backdrop for the sculpture, nor should the sculpture be relegated to the sidelines.
For the lucky or unlucky artist who got the nod, successfully navigating these issues made for a tall order.
In fact, there was no sculpture contest. Frederick Hart had always been the favorite of the patrons, and his growing stature made an open competition unnecessary. By 1982 he was better known in the art world than Maya Lin by virtue of his masterwork at the National Cathedral. He was a consummate professional, renowned for the virtuosity of his exacting technique in the classical mode, even though many in the arts considered him something of a throwback. His attention to detail was unparalleled. The spiritualism of his previous work was also a plus, as he perceived the challenge of his commission to be spiritual. And unlike Lin’s artistic remove, Hart had read deeply about the war. He had interviewed scores of veterans for his entry, and he had carefully nurtured his relationship with the key players in the drama, especially Webb. Indeed, he may have been aware that, during the autumn of discontent, Webb and Carhart had conspired to get the first and second place finishers thrown out in favor of the third place entry.
In late April, the panel began discussions with Hart. He would be the only sculptor to be considered. So much for Von Eckardt’s idea of another national contest. Rather quickly all agreed that a single figure would be too forlorn and lonely and have trouble interacting with Lin’s wall. To his credit, Hart rejected outright the idea of a triumphal macho hero commanding his troops to charge up a hill, like the Fort Benning and Fort Bragg statues. That, in relation to the wall, would leave the macabre impression of a leader summoning his troops into the swamp of sure death. Three figures would work better, Hart felt. Their pose should indeed suggest bravery, but also youth and vulnerability, and project the camaraderie and the wariness that defined the lot of the Vietnam soldier. With three servicemen, the triad could also present the racial diversity of the American armed forces. After his first meeting with the committee, the sculptor repaired immediately to his studio and began working on a “clay sketch.” He would tell his patrons later that he imagined his concept almost immediately and that the model almost sculpted itself.
A month later, Hart met with Cooper to describe the evolution of his thinking. By Cooper’s description the sculptor imagined three fully equipped and armed GIs on patrol. “They emerge from a thicket and freeze in surprise as they behold the wall of the memorial.” The grouping should be close-knit, fully realistic, with their clothing accurate in every detail, and multiracial. Cooper continued to believe that the addition of a statue was unnecessary, but if politics required it to save the entire enterprise, he could think of no better solution to the unpleasant dilemma. Perhaps, he thought, if Hart could produce something reminiscent of Auguste Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, the country might end up with two superb works side-by-side. But how side-by-side? Cooper thought the statue should be placed at the tree line well south of the wall. In that he expected a fight. A full-sized mockup should be fashioned and then moved around on wheels at the site to determine the best spot.
Placement now emerged as the most heated point of contention. Webb had a very different idea. He believed, incorrectly, that the Warner compromise had specifically authorized placing a flagpole on the high ground thirteen yards directly behind the apex of the wall and positioning the sculpture in the open ground on the knoll about fifty-five yards in front of the apex. The politicians would soon jump in to demand that the statue go immediately in front of the vertex.
A meeting of the Commission of Fine Arts was set for October to sort all this out.
In July, Maya Lin had had enough and went public. The time had come for her to clear her conscience. In an interview with the Washington Post, she weighed in with a devastating critique. “This farce has gone on too long,” she fumed. “Past a certain point, it’s not worth compromising. It [the memorial] becomes nothing—even if it’s a 250-foot-long nothing.” Invoking the famous desecration of the Mona Lisa, she charged Hart with drawing mustaches on other people’s portraits. “Artists don’t go around scabbing on other artists’ work.” Hart’s sculpture would create the feeling that the visitor is being watched. Worse, “I don’t want it to appear they’re going to shoot you when you start walking down toward the walls.”
A week later she went on NPR and NBC’s Today Show. When an interviewer asserted that unspecified veterans groups were complaining that her design was not heroic enough, Lin replied, “It’s a question of who ‘they’ are, and I say the people that dislike it are a very small few, and they happen to be very traditional artistically.” Referencing the Washington Monument, an abstract simple conceptual work of art, she noted that “You have people, the same sort of ‘they,’ complaining that we need a statue of George Washington on top of it before it is a memorial.”
With all this contention, she was asked, had she lost all the satisfaction of her achievement? Concern rather than satisfaction was her emotion now, she replied.
Then for the first time she gave voice to the universal reach of the memorial. It was far broader in scope and significance than a mere veterans memorial. “I designed something—it’s not mine—I designed it for not only for the Vietnam veterans but for the country, for people one hundred years from now. … It’s not an object to be owned by anyone.” She was trying to fight for a “very pure thought.”
Would she attend the dedication in the fall?
“Probably not,” she snapped, for the break with Memorial Fund was complete. “I don’t believe that what is happening is very ethical. … I sort of want to stand away from it.”
She was now represented by a lawyer from a major New York firm, and he put the Memorial Fund on notice that according to the rules of the competition no feature that was not part of the winning design could be added without the express consent of the winner. To do so would be a “material breach” of the rules. Until his client agreed to an addition, no modification to the original design should be submitted to any commission.
The reaction was intense. Jan Scruggs, the man in the middle, seemed to retract his previous support of Lin. Hart’s statue will make the memorial “one hundred percent better,” Scruggs said now. To Lin it was a straightforward betrayal. The sharp-tongued juror Harry Weese came to her defense, putting his contempt for the political interference on display. “It’s as if Michelangelo had the secretary of the Interior climb up on the scaffold and muck around with his work.”
Four days later, passionate letters appeared in the Washington Post. One saw Secretary Watt’s compromise as glorifying war and debasing Lin’s design. Another picked up the theme. “Instead of a daringly simple memorial to honor those who served, which is intended to inspire peaceful contemplation … a statue and poor Old Glory are, once again, demanded, on center, to shout, ‘Our country, right or wrong.’ Why?” Five days later another batch of letters appeared. A Vietnam veteran expressed his anger that the controversy “is a memorial to the indecision, political meddling, and lack of principle and conviction that marked the war,” while another argued that, if anything had to be added to the wall, let it be a grove of weeping willows.
Inevitably, this batch of letters contained the obligatory slur on the wall itself. The Maya Lin design, wrote a veteran, was “a great privy, an outside urinal of German beer garden design.”
The press picked up the phrase that an “Art War” was now under way.
In August, Robert Lawrence, the president of the American Institute of Architects, denounced the additions as “ill-conceived” and a “breach of faith” that would cut the soul out of Maya Lin’s design. He called on architects across the country to lobby against them. And Paul Spreiregen, still intent to highlight the grandeur and fairness of his competition, called the addition of a sculpture “an outrageous desecration,” pointing out that no bronze sculpture of soldiers existed in the Arlington National Cemetery.
Nevertheless, the construction process was moving forward. Ground had been broken on March 26. By late summer granite panels were being set in place, one by one. Lin visited the site and expressed her satisfaction. “It really fits in. It slides right into the ground.” In the coming weeks others visited, including Secretary Watt. Kent Cooper, representing Maya Lin, and Joseph Brown, representing Frederick Hart, visited the site together and wrangled over the placement of the flag and the Hart statues. Cooper argued for the tree line, while Brown kept pushing the maquette closer and closer to the wall. Theirs was a testy relationship.
As the wall neared completion, the most noteworthy visitor was the conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick. In a piece the following day, Kilpatrick wrote of being reduced to tears. As the memorial came into view, “nothing I had heard or written had prepared me for the moment. I could not speak. I wept. … This memorial has a pile driver’s impact. No politics. No recriminations. … The memorial carries a message for all ages: This is what war is all about.”
As the public controversy grew more and more intense during the summer, Frederick Hart quietly moved from a rough clay “sketch” to a clay model. On July 1, the “Sculpture Panel” announced to the press his selection as sculptor, and contract negotiations commenced. Hart asserted that it would take him two years to complete the final statue. For his work, he asked for a handsome fee of $330,000, more than sixteen times what Maya Lin had received. At this early stage he adopted a conciliatory tone toward her. “I realize,” he said, “that there is an existing design and that the integrity of the design should be maintained.” With time his language would become far more pointed and combative.
Through the summer, efforts to bring Lin and Hart together were unsuccessful. She did not see Hart’s maquette until September 17, and she said nothing as she viewed it sullenly.
Three days later an elaborate public viewing of Hart’s figures took place in the Great Hall of the Pension Building in downtown Washington. Dwarfed by the building’s massive Corinthian columns, the clay soldiers were set on a table, and Hart stepped forward to describe his concept. Bowing to the “elegant simplicity and austerity of the existing design by Maya Lin,” he hoped for a “unified totality.” Of the emotion he wished to evoke, he said, “The gesture and expression of the figures are directed to the Wall, effecting an interplay between image and metaphor. The tension between the two elements creates a resonance that echoes from one to the other. … I see the Wall as a kind of ocean, a sea of sacrifice that is overwhelming and nearly incomprehensible in its sweep of names. I place these figures upon the shore of that sea gazing upon it, standing vigil before it, reflecting the human face of it, the human heart.”
The press reaction was mixed. The contrast between the two works was hard to fathom; it was an artistic collision, a radical edge, a tortured response to Modernism that would fade in significance with time. But could the collision be made to work? One juror of the original competition, the distinguished landscape architect Hideo Sasaki, thought so. If the Hart statue was placed at some distance from the “visual mass” of the wall and in opposition to it, it could work. “Often works of other artists, if sensitively done, enhance the totality of the design. I hope this latter is true.” Fellow juror Harry Weese was not moved. “I view the adulteration of Maya Lin’s design by any dissident group as arbitrary, capricious and destructive and the approval [of the additions] is irresponsible and beyond the pale… Art is uncompromisable.”
Nor had Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic of the New York Times, embraced the compromise, feeling that the statue and the flagpole would destroy the beauty of Maya Lin’s mystical space. “It tries also to shift this memorial away from its focus on the dead and toward a kind of literal interpretation of heroism and patriotism that ultimately treats the war dead in the most simplistic of terms.”
Goldberger defined the issue thus: With the addition of the statue and the flagpole, Scruggs and company hoped to convert “a superb design into something that speaks of heroism and absolute moral certainty. But there could be no such literalism and no such certainty where Vietnam is concerned,” he wrote. “To try to represent a period of anguish and complexity in our history with a simple statue of armed soldiers is to misunderstand all that has happened, and to suggest that no lessons have been learned at all from the experience of Vietnam.”
As for Lin, she shot back her response through her lawyers. Expressing her disapproval of the proposed additions and denouncing the “enhancements” as a violation of her concept, she seemed especially incensed at the notion that her design lacked humanity. “As each person enters the memorial, seeing his face reflected amongst the names, can the human element escape him? Surely seeing himself and the surroundings reflected within the memorial is a more moving and personal experience than any one artist’s figurative or allegorical interpretation could engender.” The proposed sculpture and flagpole “splits the Memorial at its focal point,” she wrote. The intrusion undercut the circular concept of the names and their timeline and “destroys the meaning of the design.”
The animus between Lin and Hart grew worse by the day. While she seethed at the “immoral” intrusion of another artist on her work, he pouted about operating largely in her shadow. When his magnificent work, Ex Nihilo, was finally dedicated at the National Cathedral on October 2, the event was completely ignored in both the popular and the art press, and the audience was small (although it did include Prince Philip of Great Britain). These snubs, no doubt, thickened his competitive juices.
On October 10, the CBS News program 60 Minutes ran an extensive segment on the controversy. The dramatic triangle of Perot, Lin, and Scruggs was the centerpiece. And for the first time publicly, the question of Maya Lin’s race was put up in lights.
“They sort of lump us all together,” Lin said in response to a question about her Asian ancestry. “I first heard [the term] two years ago. It’s called a gook.” Hearing the word come out of her own mouth, she emitted a nervous laugh. And then she became diplomatic. “If you were being rational and logical, there would be some people who fought in that war who would really hate the idea that someone of my descent would have designed [the Vietnam memorial].”
“How Chinese are you?” Morley Safer asked.
“As apple pie.” (This time the interviewer laughed.) “Born and raised in the Midwest, surrounded by non-Chinese people, I just really never looked at myself as a minority. I looked at myself as just any other kid.”
Cut to Scruggs. Had an Anglo-Saxon male designed the memorial, “I think the difficulties that we had would have been considerably less.”
And then to Perot’s bluster. What if the Fine Arts Commission says, yes, you can have the flag and statue, he was asked, “but not right in front?”
“If anybody ever even raises that point … it is the worst kind of bad faith, the worst kind of double-dealing,” he responded. “If that should even begin to occur, I will intend to spend whatever time, money and energy is necessary to see that people keep their words, because we owe that to the Vietnam veterans. And I’m going to have a lot of powerful allies.”
As the meeting of the Commission of Fine Arts loomed, the Art War was hurtling toward its Stalingrad.