I came across the web site of Maya Lin in a circuitous search around the web yesterday. You probably know her name from the Vietnam War Memorial, but she's designed a variety of other memorials, buildings, and art installations as well.
It shouldn't have surprised me that her Maya Lin Studio site, like all of her work, is spare, elegant, and supremely thoughtful. Run your cursor across the delicate hatch marks on the black homepage and you'll see closeups of each work emerge, each accompanied by a different musical tone; click on one of the headers near the bottom of the page and the marks unrelated to its topic fall from the visual field like rain. I'm not usually fond of music on web sites, but the sound here is beautiful, and very much a part of the site's minimal, powerful language.
Compared to Lin's web site--which holds a lot of information, I might add--most sites look crammed and haphazard. There's something that speaks to the writer in me here: a reminder, maybe, that great art is built as much with what is left out as with what is put in. It's sometimes hard to trust your own instinct to discard or simplify a text, to go for one effect rather than ten, to speak more strongly to fewer readers rather than less strongly to many. Yet if you shape it right, you can make the space defined by restraint or even absence most powerful element of all. The point isn't that less is more, exactly. It's that the emptiness or mystery are themselves a "more." The soldiers' figures Maya Lin chose not to sculpt. The literal "meanings" Emily Dickinson chose not to explain. All the aching or anticipatory energy of the unsaid, the withheld, the longed-for and the lost.
I'm not sure how Maya Lin had figured all this out by the time she submitted her Vietnam War Memorial proposal at the tender age of twenty-one. But as I wandered through her web site, I found myself glad that she hasn't forgotten it in the decades since.
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