TWO FROM BERLIN.(The Talk of the Town)(artists Renata Stih, Frieder Schnock have different views of New York, New York)

The Berlin conceptual artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock stopped in New York recently to install a show at the Jewish Museum, and while they were here they spent some time at Ground Zero--and took up an old argument about what they'd do at the site to keep memory alive instead of, as Stih says, "memorializing it" or, as Schnock puts it, "shutting the dead away." Stih and Schnock are acute travellers through the thorny semiology of their own city. They didn't enter the competition to design a 9/11 memorial, but their thoughts on memorials are instructive. "Bavarian Quarter," the subject of their Jewish Museum show, consists of eighty silk-screened aluminum signs, banded onto lampposts that wind through an old Berlin Jewish neighborhood, chronicling the accumulation of small proscriptions--against things like owning pets, buying eggs, and using park benches--that slowly and insidiously pushed Berlin's hundred and sixty thousand Jews out of the life, and the mind, of the city. Memorials like that are as intimate as they are powerful, and that's what many New Yorkers want their 9/11 memorial to be.

Listening to Stih and Schnock have an argument about art--"A discussion," Renata says; "Anything Renata wants," says Frieder--is like chaperoning the creative process. This argument began last winter, in the Berlin loft where they brainstorm at the same long table they use for dinner parties, making it hard to know precisely when marital banter meets that process. What you do know, though, is that the argument is serious, the result of a total, almost consuming collaboration ("We need a wife," Renata says), and not Serious, since they've shopped together, cooked together, and will be doing the dishes together later. Frieder is a lanky, brown-haired Saxon in requisite Berlin black, and Renata is a small, platinum-blond Croatian in requisite Berlin black--except for her shoes, from a collection of exceptionally lurid footwear, which tend to be orange, puce, or iridescent green. The couple are in their forties. The world they inhabit runs the gamut from Herrprofessordoktoren to the regulars at their local bar, which caters to disabled transvestites.

Frieder announced at once that he and Renata carry different images of New York City in their heads. "I see the view from the ferry," he said. "All the tall buildings." Renata sees "the narrow streets running between them." Frieder thinks the important thing about the twin towers is that there were two of them, and that this offers him a clue about how to commemorate the people who died in them: "A memorial has to say, 'You are someone. You have someone else in front of you right now. You will not be alone.' " Of course, as Renata said a few days later, at a friend's apartment, it's by no means certain what kind of buildings will go up at Ground Zero, and this makes choosing a memorial for it a fairly blinkered undertaking, at least to two Berlin artists who've been through the Holocaust-memorial wars at home, and whose own "anti-monument" proposal there--a simple bus ...