Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982 National Mall, Washington DC, USA Situated on a two-acre site between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument in Washington DC, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial comprises two 250-ft walls of polished black granite set into the earth and joined at an angle, upon which are engraved in chronological order the 58,307 names of the US dead and missing. “The memorial appears as a rift in the earth,” wrote its designer Maya Lin, “a long, polished, black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth.”1 Materializing the national trauma of the United State’s disastrous military engagement in Vietnam as an anti-monumental scar or wound in the landscape, the memorial establishes a contemporary language of mourning commensurate with the enormity of suffering and loss. Although the memorial was built through the advocacy of a private group of veterans, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, it was allotted a highly symbolic public location in the National Mall that positioned it as central to a cathartic national debate regarding both the Vietnam War and war more generally. The memorial has attained widespread public resonance through its singular ability simultaneously to evoke the mass human cost of the war and to bring the viewer to an emotionally powerful recognition of the individual lives lost. Through its aesthetic form, the memorial engages viewers as part of the work itself, not to produce mass consensus but rather to open space for multiple opinions, emotions, and viewpoints that encompass the full conflictive complexity of the war. Although the memorial’s design originally prompted controversy, it has since “touched millions” and “helped a nation to heal.”2 Its overwhelming success hinges principally on three aspects, through which the memorial enacts a refusal of any triumphalist heroism, judgement, or even consensus on the war’s legacy: the wall’s abstraction; its chronological listing of names; and its counterposition to the commemorative conventions operative in other monuments on the National Mall. Abstraction: Radically abstract, the memorial rejects the traditional commemorative sculptural tropes of human figuration and heroic narrative. Gone are any conventional symbols such as flags or military paraphernalia; gone are any mimetic references to the bodies of the dead. These are replaced by the unrelenting starkness of the black granite wall with its devastating catalog of names. Yet paradoxically, it is the memorial’s very abstraction that returns the human body, not as an object to be passively contemplated, but as a living subject, in the form of the ordinary citizen who visits the monument. The polished surface of the wall reiterates all of the war’s human losses while at the same time mirroring back our own living bodies, optically uniting living and dead. Finding a name on the wall involves an act of self-finding: “The point,” wrote Lin, “is to see yourself reflected in the names.”3 Locating, touching and tracing names, leaving personal offerings, seeing yourself as you do this – these bodily gestures and rituals respond to the wall’s “charged yet symbol-free form of abstraction.”4 By 1
Maya Lin's original competition submission for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1981. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Maya_Lin%27s_original_competition_submission_for_the_Vietnam_Veterans_Memorial Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund President Jan Scruggs, cited in Kent Garber, “A Milestone for a Memorial That Has Touched Millions,” U.S. News & World Report (3 November 2007) http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2007/11/03/milestone-for-a-memorial-that-has-touched 3 Maya Lin, cited in Wagner 4 Wagner, 73. 2