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twitterSculpture at CityCenter’s Aria designed to provoke thought about water
Sam Morris
Artist Maya Lin is on hand as her silver sculpture of the Colorado River is installed Thursday over the registration desk at CityCenter’s Aria.
Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2009 | 2 a.m.
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Artist Maya Lin watches as her 87-foot rendition of the Colorado River is installed behind the registration desk at CityCenter’s Aria.
The sculpture, “Silver River,” weighs 3,700 pounds, hangs from steel cables, slants horizontally and swells at two points of its winding journey — at Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Topographic steps provide a sense of volume to the body of water cast in reclaimed silver.
Elegant, graceful and floating before a panoramic window, it is a tricky piece.
The Colorado River is the lifeline of the Las Vegas area, and the region has water issues. Rapacious growth changed the valley’s landscape and depleted its resources.
The $8.5 billion CityCenter project is emblematic of that growth and the centerpiece of the Strip’s demand for more spectacle, more over-the-top thinking, more ambitious projects and design.
And here within the lobby of a Cesar Pelli-designed hotel is a subtle, contemplative reminder of the problem we’ve created.
“Water is going to become more and more of a debate,” says Lin, who sits on the board of Natural Resources Defense Council. “I’m asking people to take a look at the natural world around them. You want to get people to think of rivers as an entire ecosystem. You want to talk about a river as a volume of water, as an object rather than a ‘flow.’ ”
When contacted to be a part of CityCenter’s $40 million private art collection, Lin, who became famous for her design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., was well known for her contemporary land sculptures and interior art installations that encouraged environmental consciousness.
She had never been to Las Vegas but the opportunity piqued her interest. The buildings were being designed for LEEDS certification and Pelli, Aria’s architect, was the dean of the Yale School of Architecture while Lin was a student there.
Michele Quinn, who manages CityCenter’s art project, refers to Lin as one of the most important sculptors working today, whose connection to the environment and landscape fit in with the “ultimate goals” of CityCenter. “She not only creates work that is challenging and beautiful, but it has this substructure of content. She is able to transfer her interest in the environment in such an elegant way.”
The idea of the Colorado River sculpture was Lin’s. Like much of her art, it combines science and environmentalism. Growing up in Athens, Ohio, during the 1970s, Lin saw the passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. By then the Cuyahoga River had caught on fire and Lin was a young activist, urging a boycott against Japan for its whaling and companies that benefitted from use of steel traps. Her 4-H club was a bird-watching group. She planned to study field zoology at Yale so she could become an animal behaviorist. The plans were scrapped when she realized the college’s animal program was neurologically based. Lin switched her major to architecture because it combined her love of math and creativity.
Art already was a part of her world. Her father was a ceramics teacher and dean of the College of Fine Arts at Ohio University: “I was casting bronzes by the time I was in high school,” she says.
By the time Lin received her master’s in architecture, she was well known for her winning submission for the Vietnam Memorial, which launched a maelstrom by critics riled by Lin’s ancestry (her parents are Chinese) and the minimalist design of the memorial.
The Vietnam wall is now revered and Lin went on to a successful career in art and architecture. Her earth sculptures mimic waves and sand dunes. Large-scale indoor installations include a river system, created by tens of thousands of straight pins pushed into a wall and topographical sculptures of water bodies made of particle board or wires. Her “Storm King Wavefield” is an environmental reclamation project at the site of a former gravel pit in Mountainville, N.Y.
“What Is Missing?” is a multisite international project that focuses on habitats and species that are extinct or disappearing and provides information for consumers on ways to help protect the environment.
The day after the “Silver River” installation at CityCenter, Lin was headed to Mexico with her husband and two daughters to document the migration of raptors.
“What is Missing?” is advocacy, she says, but the rest of her work is the voice of an artist who focuses on the natural world.
Lin is interested to see how the Las Vegas piece will play out:
“Las Vegas is not a place to go for quietness and solitude. My works tend to be more contemplative.”
Discussion: 16 comments so far…
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Regarding the last line, Las Vegas can be a tremendous place to go for quietness and solitude. Go to Red Rock; go to Valley of Fire; go to Lake Mead and find a place. Go a little farther and you can get to Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon in less than half a day. It's all in what you want and where you look.
That art piece just looks silly; out of place and out of scale. It's lost in front of those giant windows. People are going to forever ask "what is that?" It'd be fun to answer if the piece was actually interesting, but it's lacking in scope and size. Maybe it could be a graph of the stock market?
looks OK up close though
None of those places are in Las Vegas. I guess her point stands.
Whether it looks stockmarketing, rafting, your latest MRI and carotid or up close, the amount of fee the artist is being paid is the most important aspect.
Not in Las Vegas? Where do you think Red Rock is, Idaho? If you want to get technical, the Strip is outside the city limits, so Las Vegas isn't the place to go to visit the best casinos. But that's a silly distinction. We all know what we mean when we say "Las Vegas"
If you're in Vegas and you want quietness and solitude, you make a short trip within Clark County to Red Rock, Valley of Fire or Lake Mead. Red Rock is barely more than 4 miles from my house. Hundreds of Vegas residents bicycle out there every weekend. Valley of Fire is not that far from the speedway. Heck, I could name you a dozen poker pros who make it a point to visit Red Rock when they're in Vegas for the WSOP.
The national parks are all an easy trip. Her point doesn't stand. It relects an ignorance of Las Vegas based on an outsider's stereotype. She assumes that if you live here, your life must revolve around the strip. Not mine, and not the lives of the great majority of people I know here. She insults us by insinuating that if we live here, our life must be devoid of quietness and solitude, and that her precious sculpture will be foreign to us.
I must agree with HOWDYJACK on his comment that what really matters is the fee Ms. Lin was paid. The very concept of City Center (and the whole of Las Vegas, for that matter) has always been based on profit, excess, and consumptiveness. That's what is advertised and that's why people come. If Ms. Lin feels so strongly about preserving natural resources, why would she even agree to do a project for a place such as this if it weren't for the recognition and the money? Oh, and I forgot . . . . how many lost their lives or were seriously injured during the City Center construction? I can't keep track.
When you scroll through the pictures, the comments about the stock market become even more comical, as it not only goes up and down but down and to the left in some places, which seems extremely accurate these days. I had a much different picture in my mind of how this sculpture would turn out. For some reason I had this idea of a 100' x 30' tintype cast. I'll have to see this up close before I can decide if my idea would have been better.
"The day after the "Silver River" installation at CityCenter, Lin was headed to Mexico with her husband and two daughters to document the migration of raptors."
You mean, she and her husband weren't chugging Bud Lite while playing penny slots next door at the Monte Carlo the next day?? What more proof does anyone need that she doesn't understand Vegas??
BTW, I like the stock chart analogy. If they could just flip the thing upside down, it would look just like a two-year chart of MGM . . . . . . .
I KNOW MAYA PERSONALLY. HER INSPIRATION FOR THIS ART WAS
***SQUIRTING CREST WHITE TOOTHPASTE ON THE GROUND****
THEN COPYING THE LOOK AND TRANSFORMING INTO ART.
CITY CENTER PAID $1,185,000 FOR IT!!!! GARY STILL DOES NOT GET IT :(
DON'T PITTY MAYA, SHE IS LAUGHING ALL THE WAY TO BANK
Jerry from Uptown, NV
"whose connection to the environment and landscape fit in with the "ultimate goals" of CityCenter"
Now, of course, you are referring to the political environment and economic landscape that fit CityCentrists goals. Power towers and spending into oblivion, a great fit for a solid silver river.
Yeah, I too will have to see this thing up close, before passing final judgement. But from the photo, it sure looks like a $1,000,000 roll of wadded-up tin foil. I'm guessing that even after I get to see this, I'm going to consider it expensive, dopey and vacuous; made to make the hoi polloi think they're in a "high-class joint."
Nice, now I know why we employees of MGM/MIRAGE haven't had a raise and now pay more to our medical insurance so that they could pay for crap like this. I could of made this with all the aluminum cans I collect so I can eat daily. What a joke. More moronic spending by the suits.
So she got paid more for this simple-minded sculpture than any of us will earn in our entire lives? Must be nice.
More power to Ms. Lin".. However the art of this is that employees like me are going to lose their jobs! Having us apply for positions when they're already filled is what we should be focusing on here. Having us apply for positions that are only part-time, on-call and per diem losing our benefits after years of service is what we should be focusing on. Hiring 12,000 employees and only 3,500 from MGM Mirage properties is not my idea of taking care of your own. Having you go test for positions without no notice of failure or the positions has or has not been filled is what we should be discussing. So personally".. No offense to Ms. Lin personally, but to hell with her art and how much she's making and how much it cost -- What about us who helped make this possible when we're losing our jobs?
Does anyone else think that that looks like the waiting room of a hospital? Can't wait to see the public reaction to a cold bank lobby with a long streak of bird doo floating in the air! Hahahahaha!