{"id":5246,"date":"2015-10-20T23:58:12","date_gmt":"2015-10-21T04:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/?p=5246"},"modified":"2015-10-21T06:29:48","modified_gmt":"2015-10-21T11:29:48","slug":"draft-beer-draft-gore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2015\/10\/draft-beer-draft-gore\/","title":{"rendered":"Draft Beer? Maybe Draft Gore"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Forget Biden, drop HRC & Bernie. Maybe we need a Draft Gore for ’16 movement. Maya Lin’s enviro concerns inspired that impulse.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Al<\/a>
Al Gore in 2009. Photo: Wikimedia Commons<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

BENTONVILLE, Arkansas — The above\u00a0was my Facebook post from just after a lecture Monday night by artist-architect-environmentalist Maya Lin<\/a> (the descriptives are hers). Mind you, Lin said absolutely nothing about politics\u00a0nor\u00a0former Vice President Al Gore.<\/p>\n

My social media comment\u00a0got one “like.”<\/p>\n

Lin of course is best known for her Vietnam Veterans Memorial<\/a>, which she designed as a contest entry in 1981 while still a student at Yale. With that as a\u00a0first (in more ways than one), she’s had a tremendous career in sculpture, four other memorials and still the occasional design for a home or other building.<\/p>\n

Our Crystal Bridges of American Art commissioned her for an artwork. “Silver Upper White River, 2015” will be unveiled soon on a wall of the North Gallery Bridge. It’s similar to her other water sculptures that follow topographical maps of the identified streams. She crafts\u00a0them from silver — recycled silver, mind you — for three reasons: Water from a distance looks silvery, schools of fish can appear silver from above and silver’s a precious metal, she said during her program<\/a>\u00a0Oct. 19.<\/p>\n

Other sculptures resemble the mountains that islands really are.\u00a0Mount Everest isn’t the world’s tallest mountain, Hawaii is, Lin said in Bentonville.<\/p>\n

As a reflection on her genre, this month the publisher Rizzoli released Lin’s book Topologies<\/a><\/i>, an oversize, illustrated book with several co-authors including John McPhee and Dava Sobel. (It lists at $75 but is far less expensive online.)<\/p>\n

A number of her three-dimensional works plowed the audience over, almost literally. She has redesigned fields to resemble waves. After a lot of bulldozing work then resodding, these lands have become green-bladed seas.<\/p>\n

What she calls her last memorial is online, a collection of short videos from Lin and her friends and allies as well as contributed by regular folk — crowdsourced art. It is WhatIsMissing.net<\/a>, about how humankind (she called the people of Earth “mankind”) is destroying the planet and its life forms.<\/p>\n

Lin showed the large crowd in the museum’s Great Hall one of the videos, “Unchopping a Tree.” It’s below, just 3:14 long. Music is by Brian Eno.<\/p>\n