{"id":157,"date":"2019-04-27T10:17:17","date_gmt":"2019-04-27T08:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/The-Giraffe-Heroes-Blog\/?p=157"},"modified":"2019-04-27T10:25:28","modified_gmt":"2019-04-27T08:25:28","slug":"maya-lin-interview-with-bill-moyers-ed-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/2019\/04\/27\/maya-lin-interview-with-bill-moyers-ed-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Maya Lin, Interview with Bill Moyers, ed. 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is the final part of the interview<\/a> which is intriguing for the way it is undulating and transgressing boundaries…..<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAYA LIN:<\/strong> Well, because when you\u2019re so young, what do you have going for you? Total belief in what you\u2019ve done. There was no doubt. I think as you get older, we all begin to have doubts. I think when you\u2019re 20 years old, you\u2019re right. And I knew I was right, and once it was up, they would get it. How were you so sure of that? Because I just knew. If we all think back to when we\u2019re that young, that\u2019s one of the things we really have going for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BILL MOYERS:<\/strong> You\u2019re sure of your ideals. You\u2019re sure of your beliefs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAYA LIN:<\/strong> I knew that would help people. And I think back, and there is no way if I won that competition today, I don\u2019t think I could have weathered the storm. Back then, there was nothing to weather. I totally understood that people would think it was all \u2014 if I was a Vietnam veteran and someone said, you\u2019re getting a ditch, a black ditch. I think the quote was \u201ca black ditch of shame and sorrow.\u201d If that\u2019s what I read, I wouldn\u2019t want it either. I could understand. I could understand people not getting what it would be. I had huge debates with the architect of record that was selected to work with me to realize it. Because he could not understand why I didn\u2019t want to create massive stone walls. I, in the end, wanted this stone surface to get so thin, it was paper thin. Now from an architect\u2019s point of view, that\u2019s a veneer. That\u2019s cheap. This is a memorial. We should make this massive and big. But think about the difference. If you put something with weight, then you\u2019ve actually inserted an object. You\u2019ve dropped a physical thing into the earth. All I wanted to do was cut the earth and polish the earth\u2019s edge. I didn\u2019t want weight. Now, I didn\u2019t know that at the time, in a way. I couldn\u2019t explain it. But I just kept going, thinner, thinner. If you look at the top, if you go up on top, you\u2019ll see it was actually a very tricky detail, because you wanted the grass to literally grow right up to the stone. So the top of the memorial is only two inches thick. Then it chamfers down and drops. And everyone was shocked at the size of the text. And they argued, you can\u2019t do that. Because a text in public spaces should be large. Well, and again, I equate it to when you read a billboard, yes, you read it en masse. But it\u2019s more of a personal connection if you read a book because you\u2019re just so connected to it. So can you put a book out in the public realm? Can we make it that personal and still be in a very large public space? And I think that intimacy, which is so important, I think, to any of the work that I do \u2014 and people don\u2019t think of that as \u2014 there\u2019s more of bravado and a largesse. And I always joke that I don\u2019t make monuments. I make anti-monuments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BILL MOYERS:<\/strong> One of your competitors called it an open urinal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAYA LIN:<\/strong> That I didn\u2019t see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BILL MOYERS:<\/strong> You didn\u2019t see that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAYA LIN:<\/strong> No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BILL MOYERS:<\/strong> Right-wingers called it an Orwellian glop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAYA LIN:<\/strong> Glop. I love that one. I think that critic, actually\u2013what I thought was fascinating is, after it was built, the letters I got from, I think the critic of Orwellian glop \u2014 because I remember that one \u2014 actually wrote a letter to apologize. Obviously, it was very traumatic and upsetting, but personally, I didn\u2019t take it personally. I felt everyone\u2019s entitled to their opinion. And I actually think veterans, Vietnam veterans reading in the paper that this is an Asian memorial for an Asian war \u2014 it wasn\u2019t even about racism. It was like, this is hard for them to swallow. The Vietnam Veterans Fund buffered me. I had no idea that there was a problem with my race. And I was so naive that I remember the very first press conference, some reporter said, don\u2019t you think it\u2019s ironic that the memorial\u2019s the Vietnam Memorial and you\u2019re of Asian descent? And I looked at him, and I was like, well, that\u2019s irrelevant. This is America. That\u2019s irrelevant. Because I was brought up in a very rarefied world, where what mattered was what you thought. It\u2019s academia. It\u2019s what you\u2019re thinking. And your gender didn\u2019t matter, your age didn\u2019t matter, your race didn\u2019t matter. So I actually was so happily naive, I didn\u2019t realize that people would have a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BILL MOYERS:<\/strong> Of course, the bigotry and the hatred and the racism did not have the last word. The monument is last word. And people who visit it are visibly moved. I go there many times, and I never go there without being moved myself, and without seeing everyone who\u2019s passing by deeply moved. Why do you think they\u2019re so moved by it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAYA LIN:<\/strong> I think because it\u2019s tapping into some very important \u2014 I would say ancient \u2014 needs. I think fundamentally, when I was designing it, I thought about the nature of death and acknowledging death. And I think in many, many cultures, dying and the acknowledgement of the death is so much a part of the living. It\u2019s a ritual. And there are big rituals around it. I think America is a very young country. And we\u2019re afraid of growing old, because we\u2019re really young. As a country, we\u2019re afraid of dying. So what do we do? We pretend it doesn\u2019t exist. We do not make huge emotional acknowledgements of that type of a pain. We tend to try to forget about it, which is probably the worst thing you can do. So I think the piece, in being kind of primal, it\u2019s tapping into something that is fundamentally very human. It\u2019s extraordinary to watch people touch the names. It\u2019s as if something were passing back and forth between the name and the touch. And there\u2019s something very quiet and very intimate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BILL MOYERS:<\/strong> I didn\u2019t grasp why it was so powerful to be there until I actually read this sentence from your essay where you say, looking at that black marble, \u201cIt would be an interface between our world and the quieter, darker, more peaceful world beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAYA LIN:<\/strong> Right. And that\u2019s a world we can\u2019t enter, because we can\u2019t pass through those names. And it\u2019s painful. But again \u2014 and I had not known anyone who had died. I just had a feeling that it\u2019s got to be the most painful experience that you will ever go through. But what you have is the memory. And you have to accept it. And then you have to turnaround walk back into the light. But if you don\u2019t accept it, you\u2019ll never get over it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BILL MOYERS:<\/strong> Maya Lin, thank you very much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAYA LIN:<\/strong> Oh, you\u2019re welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the final part of the interview which is intriguing for the way it is undulating and transgressing boundaries….. MAYA LIN: Well, because when you\u2019re so young, what do you have going for you? Total belief in what you\u2019ve done. There was no doubt. I think as you get older, we all begin to have doubts. I think when you\u2019re 20 years old, you\u2019re right. And I knew I was right, and once it was up, they would get it. How were you so sure of that? Because I just knew. If we all think back to when we\u2019re Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maya-lin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions\/161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}