Controversial Art

When the Maya Lin video came to an abrupt stop, I wasn’t sure if it was the end of the excerpt or if there was a problem with QuickTime. I looked at the counter and realized that the section of the video on Lin’s controversial Vietnam War Memorial was over.

I can’t get the image of the little girl in the big hat listening to a critic harangue her about her as yet unrealized work out of my head. At that moment, she must have been feeling the same pain as the Vietnam Vet who came home and was spit upon.

I was reminded of another cutaway shot from a documentary about the Civil Rights movement. It was a cutaway to a teenage girl in a crowd of people listening to Martin Luther King. I’ve always wondered what became of the girl who was listening so intently to King’s words. I will have to get a hold of the complete Maya Lin documentary and see what has become of Maya Lin.

I came to another abrupt ending when I read the excerpt from “Interpretation and Judgment: Controversial Art”. I started to read about Norman Rockwell whose work it would seem wasn’t controversial enough, when suddenly I was cut off once again. I took the Norman Rockwell calendar off my wall and decided to look at it more closely.

To the left of the Norman Rockwell picture chosen for the month of May were these words, “Courage…Face Your Fears”. A man with a fireman’s hat, a boy, and a dog are running. The man is carrying a hatchet and a bucket. All three characters have firelight reflected on their faces and their lower extremities. This is an inspirational work about volunteers; a popular work that was meant to inspire and delight a large audience.

Art can’t always be uplifting. Sometimes art has to make us think. Sometimes art has to make us get up off our lazy asses and do something. Sometimes art has to show us the dark side.
When people don’t like what an artist has to say or more importantly don’t understand what an artist is trying to say, they become angry; judgmental; and in some cases, violent and destructive.

Artists need to face their fears and decide what they want to say and who they want to say it too. It is a rare work of art that appeals to the heart and the mind like Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial does.

It costs money to create a work of art, so an artist must decide whose message they want to deliver, their own message or the message of their sponsor. Critics often condemn the artist who delivers the message of their sponsor and only respect the artist who delivers a unique message of their own. Personally, I don’t care whose message an artist is delivering. If the message or the experience of their work makes my life more interesting or inspires me, I’m content. There will always be those who judge without seeing.

It takes a tremendous amount of courage to put your work on public display because when you do, you are just as likely to be ridiculed as you are to be praised. Maya Lin conceived of a work of art that met the criteria of her sponsors. She fought a tough battle to preserve the purity of her concept. There was a compromise to satisfy the traditionalists, but I think the final judgment can be seen in the eyes of those who visit her work. When they see it, it touches them in the way it was meant to touch them.

In this unit, we didn’t just look at artwork; we looked at the faces of people looking at art. But for me the face that really stood out of the crowd was the face of the artist looking back at her critics. What a beautiful face it is.