The visual rhetoric of war monuments spans the gulf between the personal and the universal to convey a message of the import, the cost, and the consequences of war, as well as the meaninglessness of our patriotic symbols. Four monuments that serve as an excellent illustration of this include Three Flags by Jasper Johns, The Vietnam Memorial Wall by Maya Ying Lin, The Three Soldiers by Frederick Hart, and the Vietnam Women's Memorial by Glenna Goodacre.
Jasper Johns' 1958 painting Three Flags takes a patriotic symbol, the flag, and "divest[s] it of its original symbolic and conventional usage," instead "transform[ing] it into data for examining perception, visual ambiguity, and the meaning of art itself" (Sims). Johns' flags here are "not the wavy, windblown banner of flagpoles and parades, but the flat, rigid flag characteristic of American folk art and craft" (Sims). Here, the flag is a visual play that shows the flag diminishing in size(and metaphorically in importance(from back to front. The flag is not a symbol of America, its soldiers, or its heartfelt honor and patriotism; it is merely a picture of flags for their visual interest. Johns explains, "There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists" ("Jasper Johns").
The Vietnam Memorial Wall by Maya Ying Lin, by contrast, is abounding with meaning. The wall serves as a visual representation of the more than 58,000 male and female soldiers who died or were missing in action in the Vietnam War ("Memorial Monuments"). Their names are engraved on the monument, which extends like a gigantic marble tombstone across the landscape. Dedicated in November 1982, the V-shaped monument can be viewed from different angles, one of which captures a reflection of the Washington Monument, which appears superimposed over the names of the soldiers ("Memorial Monuments"). This monument provides a dramatic visual representation o...