World | USA
Growing degradation of natural world haunts artist Maya Lin
Lin is increasingly disturbed by the growing stillness around her as the environment succumbs to human onslaught.
- By Anne-Marie O'Connor, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
- Published: 00:31 April 6, 2008
- Image Credit: Los Angeles Times
- Lin says the title of her work could eventually be. 'What Is Missing' or just 'Missing'.
Artist Maya Lin has always had a deep feeling for the land. As a child, she roamed the leafy woods in southern Ohio, listening to songbirds that filled the forest.
Now, Lin perceives a growing stillness, as the number of songbirds across America is decimated by habitat destruction.
The growing degradation of the natural world haunts Lin - celebrated as the creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the reinventor of the American memorial genre - as she pulls together plans for what she calls her "last memorial".
The title of this work-in-progress is evolving: Perhaps What Is Missing, perhaps simply Missing. But the theme is clear: Lin's finale will grieve for the animals, birds and plants driven into extinction - and warn of the urgency of acting now to halt the devastation.
Lin envisions it as a multisite chronicle, including photography and video, at places around the world and with a commemorative list of names - this time, the names of extinct species. It will be launched on Earth Day, April 22, 2009 by the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, which chose her design for its new building in Golden Gate Park.
"Do the math, guys. Where do we want to be in 50 years? That's the question," she said at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego as she installed her latest exhibit.
Sixth largest
"We're in the sixth-largest extinction in the Earth's history and it's the only one caused by a single species," Lin said. "The top 10 songbirds we grew up with are in a 40 per cent-to-70 per cent decline. Our oceans are being devastated by overfishing. The landscape we grew up with has been significantly diminished. I just want to bring attention to it and give people the idea that you can do something about it."
At 48, Lin's artistic fame began when her stark design for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall was chosen while she was 21 and a student at Yale. She has become so associated with monuments that when terrorists attacked on September 11, 2001, faxes cascaded into her Soho studio asking her to prepare a memorial sketch.
"What Is Missing," Lin said, "will close the [monument] series for me. It's so near and dear to my heart. This is the only one I've instigated... I want the last one to be so personal, something I care so deeply about." She holds out a black book that is a working prototype of the project. "Missing ... will focus attention on species and places that have gone extinct or will most likely disappear, within our lifetime," an opening page reads. Funding, Lin hopes, will come from environmentally concerned donors.
"I've always said I present history. I don't dictate what people think," she said. "I don't try to preach. This one, like the others, makes you aware of it: 'Did you know the sound of the songbirds, as we knew it when we were little, are gone?'"
"I grew up surrounded by land, and it had a huge impact on me," she said. "We forget to look out and see how incredibly beautiful the world is. We forget that."
"It's all about what Jared Diamond calls 'landscape amnesia'. We accept it. I'm trying to say, 'It's not OK.'"
Lin is interviewing biologists for the memorial and asking them to contribute testimonials of paradises lost. She wants to travel to environmental hot spots and blog from around the world.
How, according to you, does art reflect the world? Have you ever across an art form that has created a social change?
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