Word: monumentality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...familiar images in recent American sculpture -- blue-collar minimalism, a pugnacious combination of muteness with extreme manipulations of space. Nobody could call his work accessible, but there is no denying his influence on other artists. To take only one example, the black granite notch of Maya Ying Lin's monument to the Viet Nam dead in Washington, D.C., the most intensely moving war memorial in America, is basically a spin-off from Serra's land sculptures...
...should try / slipping a public-acceptability clause into its future commissions, if it can draft one that holds water. That way a perfect level of mediocrity can be upheld for all time. But Tilted Arc should stay, if not as a source of general pleasure, then as a didactic monument to the follies that can arise at the juncture of undemanding patronage and truculent aestheticism...
...small riverfront park, the veterans laid wreaths at a gray stone monument that recalls the 1945 encounter in Cyrillic lettering. Robertson, now 61 and a neurosurgeon in Los Angeles, and Silvashko, also 61, and a secondary school headmaster in Minsk, re-enacted their 1945 embrace. Said Silvashko: "I have a peaceful profession now, and so does...
Washington is thick with monuments, several of them quite affecting. But as + the Viet Nam War was singular and strange, the dark, dreamy, redemptive memorial to its American veterans is like no other. "It's more solemn," says National Park Service Ranger Sarah Page, who has also worked at the memorials honoring Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson. "People give it more respect." Lately it has been the most visited monument in the capital: 2.3 million saw it in 1984, about 45,000 a week, but it is currently drawing 100,000 a week. Where does it get its power--to console...
...wear fatigues, but the pose is not John Wayne-heroic: these American boys are spectral and wary, even slightly bewildered as they gaze southeast toward the wall. While he was planning the figures, Sculptor Frederick Hart spent time watching vets at the memorial. Hart now grants that "no modernist monument of its kind has been as succcessful as that wall. The sculpture and the wall interact beautifully. Everybody won." Nor does Lin, his erstwhile artistic antagonist, still feel that Hart's statue is so awfully trite. "It captures the mood," says Lin. "Their faces have a lost look...