AFTER THE TOWERS.(re-developing site of World Trade Center bombings)(Brief Article)

The agonizing work of cleanup and recovery at Ground Zero, which ended officially a month ago, was carried out by men and women whose shared purpose made them a united force. Now comes the far more controversial job of rebuilding. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is about to release up to six detailed proposals for the site, with public hearings to follow. A separate design process will eventually lead to the selection of a memorial to the victims, but community organizations, victims' families, business interests, the city, Governor Pataki, and other interested parties are anything but united about the nature, the size, and the location of this key element. With that in mind, we asked several artists to think about the void downtown--not so much to design a memorial but, rather, to conjure up visions, with no constraints regarding cost, scale, or feasibility. The results, a selection of which are reproduced here, were gratifyingly unfettered, diverse, and a long way from what a committee would think up or reality permit.

Artists seem to have a direct line between mind and eye. Who else would plant a dairy farm down there, with twin red silos and contented cows grazing right up against the rebuilt Cortlandt Street subway entrance? In this case, it's two artists, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, born in Moscow and transplanted to studios in lower Manhattan, where they work on joint projects marked by an incisive, ironic wit. "This is a very intense area," Melamid, whose apartment is one block from Ground Zero, says. "We need something pastoral here, real cows, a smell of manure, and, of course, everything organically fed and grown and so forth. In the middle of hell, you know. The subway is real hell. Every city needs a milk farm."

J. Otto Seibold, a multimedia artist and children's-book illustrator, came up with an interesting concept that links the ancient culture of Afghanistan with the vertical geometry of New York. Jenny Holzer would use her signature xenon-light projections to bathe two of the surviving World Financial Center buildings in a constant, nighttime stream of poetry and other texts, each one relevant in some way to the tragedy and its aftershocks. Nancy Rubins, a California-based sculptor of found-object constructions, who admits that she doesn't like to go above the second floor of a building, had the notion of going down instead of up--a hundred and ten stories down into the lower-Manhattan bedrock, where the remembered shape of the Twin Towers would be forever safe from aerial attack, and where their phenomenal presence, unseen but not unfelt, might serve to counterbalance the hectic ephemerality of life aboveground.

That sense of ...