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| "Untitled
(Topographic Landscape)," 1997. Particle board, 16 x 18 x 2
feet |
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“Untitled (Topographic
Landscape)”
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"Untitled (Topographic
Landscape)" is a key example of Maya Lin's scientific worldview.
A 16 x 18 foot platform made from 128 individual planks of particle
board, wedged
together, the work is an abstraction of the naturally occurring
curvature of the earth’s surface. As an abstraction, the work
could also read as waves
of water or as a three-dimensional expression of a mathematical
graph or equation. To produce this work Lin used a computer to generate
the design and then cut the particle board. "Untitled (Topographic
Landscape)" is thus evocative of many forms in nature and yet
tied to none in particular. One can imagine the work as the representation
of a texture at the microscopic level or as a simplified rendering
of an enormous land-mass. The piece bears a striking resemblance
to a "Ten Degrees North" (1993-97), a rectangular map
of the world installed at the Rockefeller Foundation in midtown
Manhattan. In this work by Lin, the world and its continents are
carved from individual slabs of black granite, a shallow sheet of
water being the sole differentiaion between land and sea. In a perspective
unusual to normal human perception, one is able to view the linear
continuity between the ground beneath the ocean’s surface and
the ground beneath one’s feet.
While Lin’s public projects and memorials often tap into the
mythic properties of the earth and landscape, connecting human activity
to natural cycles and a lateral geologic time, her studio-based
works are rich with the artist’s interests in science and technology.
While for landscape painters in the Nineteenth Century, the wild
West or the exotic jungles of Africa or Brazil may have represented
the unknown frontier, for Lin, the frontier is not an undiscovered
land but rather the way in which we come to understand the land
through a technological lens. Casting light on the increasingly
mediated mechanisms through which we as humans come to perceive
the world around us, Lin’s sculptures depict both the landscape
and the human mind which perceives it.
The scale of "Untitled (Topographic Landscape)" is a key
element of the work, altering the way in which it is perceived –
is the work a sculpture or a large model, would it look different
while standing on it? Lin has expressed plans to reproduce the work
in rubber and at a larger scale, thus making it possible to lounge,
bounce, and climb on the sculpture. In this scenario, the technology
that it took to realize the work is transformed, literally, into
an artist’s playground. In this version of the piece viewers
would be able to move about an imaginary topology, relearning how
to maneuver within a technological landscape which has it’s
ultimate roots in the human mind. |
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