There’s a secret game that kids play that doesn’t really have a name, but for convenience, we’ll call it “the ceiling game.” You lie on the floor, with your head propped up with pillows or a couple of books, maybe lying on some stairs so you’re slantwise. Then you just stare at the ceiling. You imagine what it would be like to live up there with a chandelier sprouting out of the floor, to walk on glitter-dusted spackle, with doorknobs and windows too high to reach and the dog and the chairs and the piano on … the ceiling. Or the floor. Or whatever you call it now, since it’s no longer properly the ceiling or the floor …
Artist-architect Maya Lin has always played her own version of the ceiling game (though the majority of her works are large and land-based and involve no ceilings at all). Her art asks you to look at the simplest things—stream-bed pebbles, ocean floors, wire, mountains, squiggles, words, lines, hills, wooden blocks—upside-down and inside-out.
“The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike,” she has said. “It’s almost a percolation process. I don’t want to predetermine who I am, fanatically, in my work, which I think has made my development be—sometimes I think it’s magical.”
Lin’s work draws heavily on natural forms and seems at home out-of-doors; rarely does she bring it indoors, to a gallery. Her first gallery show, 1998’s Topologies, created for the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Raleigh-Durham, S.C., incorporated pieces made of glass, beeswax and wood, including Untitled (Topographic Landscape), a 16- by 18-foot wooden sculpture made of 128 planks placed together to emulate the undulation of soft hills. Eight years later, Systematic Landscapes opened at the Henry Museum in Seattle and even included an enormous ceiling-mounted piece, Water Line, a “drawing” of a mountainous sea floor done with black wire. People were able to walk under this rendering of the ocean bed and imagine it—like the kids thinking of tip-toeing on popcorn spackle—upside-down, both as a kind of magnificent ceiling and ocean floor.
On September 7, at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, we’ll be able to see a reorganized version of Systematic Landscapes, curated by Lin to reflect (of course) the spatial qualities of the building. Included will be the three largest pieces from the Henry show, including Water Line, as well as smaller stacked-wood sculptures that show the water volumes of various seas; Fractured Glass Landscapes, a series of pastel rubbings over broken plate glass, suggesting weather-beaten landscapes; and plaster reliefs mimicking rivers and mountains inlaid on the museum’s walls.
Lin, ever grounded and gracious, effuses over the fact that Landscapes will be paired with an exhibit at the Missouri History Museum, a collection of drawings, photos and models she created during the last five years as she worked on The Confluence Project, a six-part outdoor architectural installation in the Pacific Southwest. Commissioned by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Lewis and Clark Commemorative Committee of Vancouver/Clark County and the Friends of Lewis and Clark of Pacific County, the pieces commemorate the bicentennial of the Corps of Discovery, marking each spot where Lewis and Clark came into contact with tribal peoples. Lin says she was reluctant to take the project on at first, since it will likely be a 10-year commitment.
“I had just started to talk about what will be the last memorial I will do,” she says. “I tend to work in series, and this last one—it’s called Missing—is on extinct and endangered species and places, and I knew that if I took on a multisited, enormous project in Washington state, I wouldn’t be able to tackle extinction for a while. But then when the tribes asked me, they came to my studio … We have finished the first of the six sites in Washington state. But how do you begin a journey when you are at the end of the last state that Lewis and Clark came to? The logic is, we start where they ended, at the Pacific. The funny thing was being able to take that same show, update it—because again, we’re much further along a year later—to St. Louis, so that we can in a way start with the beginning and the end. The show won’t travel anywhere else; but it seemed like the perfect linkage to link the entirety of the Systematic Landscapes show and Confluence and be able to talk about both in sort of the originating state. I could not not suggest that we bring it to St. Louis.”
While displaying sketches and models of an installation is a pretty straightforward translation from outside to inside, Systematic Landscapes is not quite so literal. One of the biggest pieces, 2 x 4 Landcape, assembled from 65,000 pieces of wood, is a made-up form, a hybrid of hill and sea swell, that rises to the height of 9 feet.
“What I really wanted to do was not convert myself when I walked into a museum context, into a white-box context,” Lin says of the show. “Could I still remain as spatially large in scale? Could I really transport a world and create installation work? I did not want to just create objects, because that’s not what I do out-of-doors. I wanted to stay true to that voice—and link what I do inside to what I do outside. There’s a seamless move between inside and outdoor installed works for me.”
Though she is prolific and has created earthworks of all sizes and temperaments—from Wave Field, 50 grass “waves,” sculpted in the earth itself on the University of Michigan campus, to Input, a 3-acre site in her hometown of Athens, Ohio, that incorporates text by her brother, poet Tan Lin—she is still most strongly associated with her black granite Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Created when she was a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale, her proposal was chosen from 1,432 entries in an open design competition, and she herself has said that if it had not been a blind contest, her work would never have been chosen. Today, Vietnam vets sometimes tear up when they shake her hand, but in 1981, when her design was chosen as the winner, many vets (along with Ronald Reagan, James Watt and Pat Buchanan) were furious at the jury’s choice, feeling her monument looked too much like a gravestone or a scar in the earth. Some complained that she knew little about the conflict. Some didn’t like it because it departed too radically from traditional heroic sculptures—and indeed, Lin’s wall was constructed only after the Park Service compromised with critics and commissioned The Three Soldiers, a figurative bronze sculpture by Frederick Hart (a decision that kept Lin away from the dedication ceremony). Today, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is one of the most-visited sites on the D.C. Mall. Like her other work, it’s masterful in the way it balances opposites. You see yourself reflected in the granite wall, your face overlaying the soldier’s names—an intensely personal experience—even though you’re in a busy, public place.
“Everything’s the blurred thing,” she says. “Even my book was called Boundaries. And I think I said in it, it’s not the division that I’m interested in, it’s the line between things. And I think my entire life has been caught between—I wouldn’t say opposites, but it’s about the in-between-ness of things.”
One thing she is not, Lin says, is a political artist. The veterans memorial was designed to be as neutral as possible, so as to be accessible to all Americans, be they Libertarians or bohemians. She has said she adored science and math as a student, and her work often incorporates computer renderings and scientific data; when she works, she tries to keep her eyes clear to avoid seeing anything—from pebbles to shorelines—with prejudices.
“To try to use it as a tool for another domain is not what I believe art is there for,” she insists. “I am trying to get you to rethink and reassume what something is. There are three pieces in the show that are smaller, they’re bodies of water. One’s the Caspian Sea, one’s the Red Sea and one’s the Black Sea. They show the underbody of what it would look like, to get you to think of what we cannot see, because we are polluting our bodies, our rivers, our lakes, our oceans partly because we don’t even think about it. That’s why Water Line is about getting you to focus on the terrain under the water. Am I making this art to get you to move? No. I want us to take a different look at the world around us. If we assume we know it, if we assume we see it, then we don’t look at it. Children, when they look at things, look at them fresh. They don’t bring a lot of baggage and assumption. So I think in that sense it is coming from a deeper history of modern art, Minimalist art in a way, where you were trying to get people to stop assuming and just feel the object in front of them.”
The third large piece in the show, Blue Lake Pass, is a re-creation of a mountain range that Lin has looked at a lot, one that’s near her home in Colorado, where she lives when she’s not in her small New York studio. In order to see the terrain differently, Lin layered particle board, carved it to mimic the gradations of the mountains, then divided it up into a grid, creating 20 3- by 3-foot blocks, allowing you to walk through the mountain and study each piece of it individually. “I’ve literally taken stratified layers of the terrain and segmented it, cut it apart,” she says. “Even in my first show, Topologies, again all these works deal with rethinking what nature and natural phenomenon are, what landscape is. Those simple, blown-glass rocks are what we take for granted—that river-worn pebble—but it’s one of the most complex shapes. By blowing it up and creating it as pure glass, where you can see through the volume, you begin to rethink what it is, whereas before you just walk on it and never notice. Or take a hill inside: What we walk on outside, or run up, we don’t even think about it. Take that hill inside, and all of a sudden, you react to it very differently. It’s about subtle levels of that liminal consciousness.”
As at the Henry, the Contemporary will allow visitors to scale 2 x 4 Landscape, though even without scaling it, the sculpture’s height and breadth (not to mention its shape, which blends water and earth) still shock viewers into thinking differently about the world under their feet, regardless of whether it’s being traversed in special museum-issued shoes made for climbing up wooden mountains.
“It’s an in-between, a made-up form, so it is an ambivalent piece talking about a state between solid and liquid,” Lin says. “My pieces are funny because you really have to be on them to experience them. They’re very experiential in nature.”
After she installs the show here in St. Louis, Lin will finally be able to begin working on Missing in earnest. As her last memorial, it’s appropriate that it will exist in its own in-between state. Neither a land installation nor a gallery show, it will debut next year ... online.
“As I said, I work in series,” she says. “I’ve done Vietnam, civil rights, Women’s Table [at Yale], Confluence, which again is history and text coming together, and Missing will be it, but I’m posing the question, what if I could create a memorial that doesn’t exist physically? It will exist in different locations—the first host will be the California Academy of Sciences—but I’ve also gotten everyone from Wildlife Conservation Society to Nature Conservancy, Conservation International and RDC, UCN, Cornell Ornithology. I’ve been really busy all spring with getting the groups to give me the information [on species extinction]. It’ll exist as a website that will link you to what these great groups are doing, and it will also exist in situ at various different organizations, each one being slightly different, and then it will also exist as a book. In fact, when I give a talk in St. Louis, I’ll show the beginning sketches of what it can look like.”
Lin may have her work cut out for her; there is an undeniable impact to seeing 500,000 soldiers’ names on an elegant arrow of black granite. To look at the names of thousands of plants, animals and amphibians and realize that in the time it takes you to drive halfway to work, another one will dissappear (just as the St. Helena olive tree, Hawaiian thrush, golden toad, St. Croix racer moth and black-fronted parakeet have) is stunning. That information, unadorned, is as disorienting as projecting oneself into the world of ceiling-dwellers. Though Lin’s work is not meant to make an activist of anyone, she does aim to make art that trains one’s eye to see that when the land goes underwater, it doesn’t disappear; that the disappearance of songbirds is intimately related to the disappearance of forests; that our linear, literal mode of perception, a by-product of the industrial age, is not the only way to think, feel or see. And that sometimes it is necessary to look at the world upside-down to see it as it really is: whole, blurry and kinetic.
“It’s rethinking what something is,” Lin says. “That edge, that boundary, that in-between state. I am just … I don’t know why, but that is where I exist.”
Systematic Landscapes opens at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (3750 Washington, 314-535-4600, contemporarystl.org) on September 7 and runs through December 30. The Confluence Project opens concurrently at the Missouri History Museum (Skinker and DeBaliviere, Forest Park, 314-746-4599, mohistory.org) and runs through January 6.
