Space and place - Maya Lin, sculpture and architecture, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and other galleries and sites

Art in America, Dec, 1994 by Judith E. Stein

Best known for her Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Maya Lin recently exhibited studio sculptures, building designs, and a new site-specific work at her Wexner Center retrospective. In October, she inaugurated a major new "timepiece" at New York's Penn Station.

If the 20th century has seen the blurring of the boundaries that traditionally separate the fine arts from the decorative arts, it has also witnessed the dimming of distinctions between sculpture and architecture. Take the case of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Lin, like the sculptor Richard Serra, understands the power of bold and simple forms. But she approaches siting as an architect would, by creating space and place, providing a physical context for viewers, experience. Lin was a 21-year-old architecture major when she won the Memorial design competition in 1982. In her graduate program gram at the Yale School of Architecture, she studied with Serra and with Frank Gehry, an exemplar of sculptural architecture, who designs edifices that read as plastic form. In her subsequent career, Lin has refused to choose between the two disciplines. Working as both an architect and a sculptor, she has created buildings with hand-formed components and metaphoric content, and public monuments with enterable space.

Although the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is arguably the best-known, and unquestionably the most-visited work of contemporary public art in the United States, many people are unfamiliar with Lin's other art works. When the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, awarded her a visual arts residency in 1993 to create a permanent, site-specific work in the building, exhibitions director Sarah J. Rogers was spurred to organize a concurrent retrospective covering the past 10 years. The result was the first comprehensive survey of Lin's creative output.

"Maya Lin: Public/Private," on view for three months during the winter of 1993-94, consisted of photographs, drawings and scale models documenting her public monuments and architectural commissions, as well as a selection of her studio sculptures. Groundswell, the permanent installation she created, extended the exhibition from the gallery to sites on the building's exterior.

The Wexner Center, which opened in 1989 at Ohio State University, is a striking building designed by the architect Peter Eisenman. It incorporates translucent and tinted glass curtain walls set off by a five-story faux exoskeleton of gridded steel tubes. If this daring, geometric scaffold propels viewers, thoughts into the future, the past is evoked by other segments of Eisenman's design, such as the reconstructed parts of a medieval-looking brick armory that once occupied the site. Landscaped plinths of differing heights abut the building, rendering the exterior ground level difficult to ascertain. According to Eisenman, these mounded grassy platforms can be read as prehistoric artifacts heaved up out of the earth, or as references to the Indian burial mounds in the nearby town of Chillicothe. "The Wexner Center gives you a constantly fluctuating space," he has said. "There is no static space, no repose." He intended the permanent scaffold to indicate that the Wexner "is about a building forever coming into being."[1]

Lin was attracted to what she calls the "residual spaces" in the design, the irregular gaps that are negatives between Eisenman's quirky positive forms.[2] She chose three sites that the architect never intended to be entered: a secluded rooftop, primarily visible from staff offices; a ground-level area near the main entrance; and a moatlike terrace outside the basement cafe. In the artist's view, she "undesigned" Eisenman's concept by creating a quiet garden of forms in each space. If the building itself is immutable but appears in flux, her sculpture subtly reverses the effect, offering mutable forms presented in repose.

A "ground swell" is a deep, rolling ocean wave caused by distant storms or earthquakes. Lin's sculpture wells up into one's vision as a sea of massed and sparkling cones. For a split second one thinks they must be made of icy gemstones, and then sand or water, depending on the angle of daylight. Up close, the gravelly material reveals itself to be shattered safety glass. Here Lin alludes to polarities - one precious, the other dross. What city dweller out walking a dog or heading to work in the morning has not encountered nocturnal deposits of shattered car windows glinting on streets and sidewalks? Long after the injured vehicle has pulled away, these transient monuments proffer silent testimony to urban risk and violence.

A commercial window recycler and the Ford Motor Company provided the 43 tons of glass Lin required for Groundswell. The artist controlled her "palette" by combining greenish car glass with a more nearly colorless patio-door glass. The mixture was dispensed in multiple loads from a large hopper suspended from a crane. Lin specified its position and controlled the discharge of material. She chose not to alter the accidental configurations of the piles poured on the roof and on the cafe terrace. For the entry-level installation, she initially chose a different approach. Here she intervened by contouring, with hand tools, a few monumental rises. But within a week of the sculpture's completion, an act of vandalism required that this part be scrapped, and Lin began again.[3] She did not replicate her earlier sculpting technique but relied on the spill process she had used in the other spaces. The reworked section consists of a series of small, conical mounds.[4]