The outdoors exhibited

Maya Lin shot into the horizon when she created the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington DC. It was a simple, polished, black granite wall — its image dramatically reproduced almost everywhere for several years. In those days, we had the print media — often American glossies — telling us about a young student of architecture who, defying all odds, won the prestigious commission. For many of us who continued to live in India, Maya Lin was that young woman, frozen in time.

I was compelled to do a mental fast-forward from the work of a 21-year-old to that of a 49-year-old, when I found myself at the De Young Museum in San Francisco last fortnight. There, Maya Lin’s new show — with works from 2006 and newer ones — is laid out. I rate it one of the best shows I have seen in 2008.

The exhibition “Systematic Landscapes” engages with the challenges of representing the sensory and the visual experience of the great outdoors. There are thousands of ways to do this, as indeed, other artists have shown. Lin adds to this repertoire, effortlessly, reading off computer generated topographic representations and weaving them into wood and wire installations. The interpretation of a commonplace language into a highly poetic one created an emotionally charged space.

One of the bigger works is a room-sized installation called “Waterline”. It’s origins lie in complex drawings of the ocean floor, with elevations and the ocean floor itself. Lin has woven a web-like grid made of thin metal wire following existing simulations. The grid is a wavy, shaking movement, suspended above the floor. To see the work, Lin invites viewers to walk into the room. You can, in parts, where the grid is high enough to let you pass (although technically, you can move all over if you crawled). When you are in the work, you realise you are on the ocean floor. The peaks above you are mountain peaks, only their tip sticking out of the water. In a blink, the vastness of the oceans, and their fullness, come surging at you. It is an unlikely moment of awe of the sheer giant-ness of the planet and of the human mind. And clichéd as it is, it is a “wow” moment the art inspires.

Lin’s works also beg to be touched, even if that is not allowed. Her series of carved-out atlases, where she cuts pages off from the middle to create imagined landscapes, such as a crater-like formation on the pages with Brazil, is astounding. The uneven sides, the knowledge that the paper will feel ribbed and like a stringed musical instrument when you run your fingers by the rough edges, creates a tension between the viewer and the museum’s (any museum’s) minimal interaction/no-touch policy. Yet, works such as these are likely to be exhibited mostly in museums, and Lin knows that. Such enforced distances are then, one presumes, part of her plan, just as much as encouraging interaction in other works actively completes the work.

If anything, it seems to simulate the feeling — simultaneously distant and thrilling — of seeing an impossibly large or insurmountable geological formation. Maya Lin’s work is successful precisely because she is able to find new stimuli to elicit comparable engagement indoors. In that way, she has been able to compress the giant outdoors, experienced typically by walking and diving through them, into an exhibition space, with flair.

(bharti@chintan-india.org)