architectural echoes of Pynchonian themes...

[Doug Millison]

...in my wife's cousin Maya Lin's recent article, "Making the 
Memorial" -- reading it brought to mind Gravity's Rainbow's riffs on 
blackness and the rape of the earth by multinational corporations, 
Vineland's delicate waltz around the Vietnam War and the 
protest/failed rebellion it inspired, Mason & Dixon's flimsy 
interface between life and death.

http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?20001102033F

"[...] The memorial is analogous to a book in many ways. Note that on 
the right-hand panels the pages are set ragged right and on the left 
they are set ragged left, creating a spine at the apex as in a book. 
Another issue was scale; the text type is the smallest that we had 
come across, less than half an inch, which is unheard of in monument 
type sizing. What it does is create a very intimate reading in a very 
public space, the difference in intimacy between reading a billboard 
and reading a book. [...]  I do not
  think I thought of the color black as a color, more as the idea of a 
dark mirror into
  a shadowed mirrored image of the space, a space we cannot enter and 
from which the names separate us, an interface between the world of 
the living and the world of the dead. [...]  The fact that I was from 
an Ivy League college and had hair down to my knees further fueled 
this distrust of the design and suspicions of a hippie college 
liberal or aesthetic elitist forcing her art and commentary upon 
them.  Perhaps it was an empathetic response to the idea about war 
that had led me to cut open the earth-an initial violence that heals 
in time but leaves a memory, like a scar. But this imagery,
  which some detractors would later describe as "a black gash of sham 
and sorrow" in which the color black was called the "universal color 
of shame and dishonor," would prove incredibly difficult to defend. 
The mis-reading of the design as a negative political statement that 
in some way was meant to reflect upon the service of the veterans was 
in part fueled by a cultural prejudice against the color black as wel 
as by the misreading or misinformation that led some veterans to 
imagine the design as a ditch or a hole. It took a prominent 
four-star general, Brigadier General George Price, who happened to be 
black, testifying before one of the countless subcommittee hearings 
and defending the color black, before the design could move forward."


You can read the entire article at 
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?20001102033F
-- 
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