The Wall
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"....a V-shaped wall, period, a wall of polished black granite inscribed only with the names; no mention of honor, courage or gratitude; not even a flag. Absolutely skillproof, it was. Many veterans were furious. They regarded [Maya Ying Lin's] wall as a gigantic pitiless tombstone that said, ''Your so-called service was an absolutely pointless disaster.'' They made so much noise that a compromise was struck. An American flag and statue would be added to the site. Hart was chosen to do the statue. Naturally enough, Lin was miffed at the intrusion, and so a make-peace get-together was arranged in Plainview, N.Y., where the foundry had just completed casting the soldiers. Doing her best to play the part, Lin asked Hart -- as Hart recounted it -- if the young men used as models for the three soldiers had complained of any pain when the plaster casts were removed from their faces and arms. Hart couldn't imagine what she was talking about. Then it dawned on him. She assumed that he had followed the lead of the ingenious art worldling George Segal, who had contrived a way of sculpturing the human figure without any skill whatsoever: by covering the model's body in wet plaster and removing it when it began to harden. No artist of her generation (she was 21) could even conceive of a sculptor starting out solely with a picture in his head, a stylus, a brick of moist clay and some armature wire. No artist of her generation dared even speculate about . . . skill."
The Lives They Lived: Frederick Hart, b. 1943; The Artist the Art World
Couldn't See |
Heroes Against The Wall
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Vietnam Veteran James Webb Jr., a Marine Platoon leader awarded the Navy Cross, resigned from the National Sponsoring Committee of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, to protest the memorial design. Adm. James Stockdale, a prisoner of war awarded the Medal of Honor, also resigned. The Marine Corps League withdrew its support for the memorial as insulting and denigrating those who came home from Vietnam and those who did not. |