The Hue and Cry of Art

The “Missing” fliers went up first, as desperate relatives brought photocopied head shots to hospitals and other places where they hoped to find loved ones alive. Within days, there was a “Wall of Prayers” outside Bellevue Hospital and a “Mural of Hope” outside the Lexington Avenue armory, each with hundreds of photos of World Trade Center workers in wedding tuxedos, or graduation gowns, or by the swimming pool.

Then others set candles and flowers by the fliers, creating shrines at the hospitals or in parks, one of the largest around a statue of George Washington, on horseback, in Union Square. Handmade posters were next, usually showing hearts or flags or with “God Bless America”-type messages. But some brought rolls of white paper so anyone could express themselves, and one became a mural of the Statue of Liberty sagging to support a fallen man. By the first weekend, crowds were lining up to file past the displays.

On the first day back at school, children were given crayons and construction paper. A Brooklyn fourth-grader drew the twin towers turning into monsters while a classmate drew a beautiful blue sky, with the sun crying.

Separate groups of architects and artists proposed re-creating the towers with projected lights. Others called for preserving the standing ruins of the walls, a haunting silhouette.

Commercial art made its appearance, as fast as the silk screeners could work. Vendors asked $34 for T-shirts showing Osama bin Laden as a target in the crosshairs, “wanted, dead or alive.”

The events of Sept. 11 were an overwhelmingly visual experience that demanded, for many, a visual response.

There also were words to remember, of course, as in the calls from passengers on the doomed jetliners, like the “Let’s roll!” of Todd Beamer, over Pennsylvania, as he and others apparently headed off to confront their hijackers. Certain poetry had resonance, as well, such as “September 1, 1939,” in which W.H. Auden observed “the lamentable odour of death.”

The memorable words, however, seemed fewer than the memorable images.

That was one reason New York’s legion of professional artists was reluctant to offer its own images of what happened--or so they said. How could any painting match what the world had seen on CNN?

Most artists insisted they would need time to distill what they did not need TVs to witness, having seen the towers crumble from outside their homes and studios in lower Manhattan. The experience would have only an oblique impact, if any.

“We were out in the street looking and saw this incredible fireball. I don’t know if any artist will be able to cope with that,” said Leon Golub, 79, who has never shied away from the underside of human nature, painting scenes of political interrogation and torture.

“The art world is a pretty introspective place. It rarely has a direct response to events like this,” Golub said. “How this will come out in time, it’s hard to say. But I don’t think either of us will take this on in a direct way.”

Yet even as he spoke, the other half of the “us”--his wife, artist Nancy Spero--was defying his prediction. On her side of their Greenwich Village studio, Spero, 75, was finishing two collage paintings that came out “like a really wild, angry explosion.”

Although Spero, like her husband, has often portrayed brutality--in her case to women--she was celebratory in a recent work, creating a colorful mural for the subway station below Lincoln Center, showing archetypal dancers and acrobats and an angelic diva raising her arms. As with many of her pieces, it was horizontal, unfolding like an ancient scroll.

Her works, after Sept. 11, were vertical and “kind of insane,” she noted, with splattered purple paint. One has several contorted figures, tumbling. The other is topped with a cloud made of tiny, tormented heads. “I just did it,” Spero said and shrugged.

“Analyzing--that’s not my job. My job is to make art, whether anybody wants it or not.”

Others also have found their work taking unexpected turns.

Painter Jane Dixon, who lives in TriBeCa, 10 blocks from the trade center destruction, is known for her portrayals of urban realism, such as Times Square prostitutes. But she did not turn her camera to the rubble--she left that to the journalists. Dixon decided it was time to pull out photos she had been taking since 1996, at airports.

“I take photos sometimes for years of subjects I don’t know what I’m going to do with,” she said. These began when she dropped her kids at Newark International Airport on the day TWA Flight 800 crashed off Long Island. “There was this horrible feeling. I just took pictures of people waiting for the bus, doing nothing,” she recalled. Another time, she focused on limo drivers “with the little signs, waiting in the baggage area, all these things that seem inconsequential. But now when I look at those.... “

After the Sept. 11 hijackings, she sees a favorite theme, the menace of the mundane. “The total ordinariness of people collecting their baggage suddenly has another dimension. For a lot of people, this is the last thing they did,” says Dixon, who has begun making drawings from the photos, the first step toward turning out full paintings.

Like many colleagues, she is working in a “semi-dazed” state. She had to look after her son, who goes to Stuyvesant High, formerly in the shadow of the towers. She has helped friends driven from their soot-filled apartments. She worries about the economy and “Who is going to buy a painting?”

One artist was killed. Michael Richards, a Jamaican-born sculptor, had worked late and slept in his studio on the 92nd floor of the North Tower, facing the Statue of Liberty. His remains were identified Sept. 17. Fourteen others lost studios in the tower as well, part of a “World Views” residency program sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which lost its offices.

Another sculptor, James Croak, an expert on cutting tools, assisted the rescue crews while Richards was still listed among the missing.

Croak had a show scheduled to open Thursday at the Stux Gallery in Chelsea, and knew he’d have to add “something” to the planned works. He considered writing on a wall, in Arabic, “Does this make you nervous?” then decided on a less edgy message, “Sept. 10, 2001.” He sees that as “the obscure object of desire, what everyone wishes--to have the world back as it was.”

The show will still feature a “Dirt Man,” one of his life-size figures made of cast dirt. Croak believes audiences will have a different view of such works now. “I’ve been doing after-the-bomb art for 15 years,” he says.

Many other artists already were tackling life-and-death themes that could be seen in a different light. Kiki Smith, in the East Village, had recently begun painting weeping willows, inspired by their use in early American grave drawings. After Sept. 11, she was tempted to view her work “as a premonition,” but resisted playing that game, or embracing any notion of topicality, which depends on viewers’ being “in the know.”

“You’re making things within time, and people are reading things within time,” Smith said. “But I think that art has its mysterious process and it’s very rarely linear. It’s also something I don’t have control over.”

Gwynne Duncan, a 32-year-old Brooklyn artist, did change her work. Duncan was not finished with two lush paintings, one titled “Empress,” showing a saintly woman in repose, “dreaming of a better world.”

Before the attack, her eyes were open. “After, I felt the need to close them,” Duncan said. “It took over a week for me to return to those paintings. I wanted to do something new but felt frozen, and obligated to finish what I started. I wanted them as peaceful and calm as possible after what happened.”

Her new works will be on display Saturday, in a show that may be the most direct attempt to tie art to the events of a month earlier.

A group of artists and performers had already been planning a three-week event in the East Village to help save a crumbling building, CUANDO, the Cultural Understanding and Neighborhood Development Organization. Built in the ‘20s as a Methodist missionary training school, the structure at 9 Second Ave. had fallen into disrepair, and an eviction notice pending. A builder was poised to put housing and shops on the site.

Before Sept. 11, it was merely another local development battle, with the artists trying to stop “gentrification.” But after Sept. 11, the effort became a metaphor. The artists renamed their show “From the Ashes,” with fliers promising “Artist reflections on the recent tragedies.... In the midst of destruction and chaos, art stands witness to the creative soul.”

Some of the art is still in the works. Jackson Krall is transforming a trashed baby grand piano, putting bells on its sound board, “a rebirth,” he promises.

William T. Meyer III, who calls his art “visual ecology,” is planning to dig a hole in a community garden and bring the plant matter inside, so there’s “a space with emptiness and a space with hope.”

Mark Koval is exhibiting two abstract paintings made before Sept. 11, “Some Distress” and “Chase the Malcontent,” which he now sees as prescient, and not merely because of the titles. One has rod-like shapes in it, he noted, “and when I turned it upside down, it’s like a weird visual obliteration.”

“My sister is working for the Red Cross. This is what I can do,” he said of the show.

Not surprisingly, given the bohemian traditions of the Lower East Side, some are uneasy with the patriotic fervor seen everywhere these days. Trisha Cluck, who was in Orange County, Calif., at the time of the attacks, said she may display photos she took Sept. 10 of a little girl running with her arms out like wings, “playing airplane,” by her family’s front-door flag. “It’s my response to the happy, flag-waving suburbanites,” Cluck says.

But just like the flag-waving groups, the artists will be raising funds for the cause. It may not be the big-dollar “Art for America” benefit planned by Sotheby’s and other auction houses for November, but they will have a “portrait marathon,” in which artists will sketch spectators in exchange for donations for the Sept. 11 victims.

And here too, there’s debate over what’s appropriate. Duncan, the painter who closed the eyes of her dreaming “Empress,” had the debate with her own father. A sculptor, he considered exhibiting photos also--of the exploding towers. Duncan, a curator of “From the Ashes,” turned him down.

“I told him, ‘People don’t want to see that,”’ she said.

“He said, ‘Really? I can’t get enough of it.”’

The East Village show is being assembled as many of the street displays are vanishing.

Rains have taken a toll on the “Missing” fliers and flag posters around the city. Parks officials said they removed displays in Washington Square for safekeeping, perhaps for showing in the future. At Union Square, workers scrubbed the base of George Washington’s statue, obliterating a peace sign.

But the “Have You Seen My Daddy?” fliers can still be found, carrying a power hard for any art to match. The “Wall of Prayers” in front of Bellevue was protected by plastic. Visitors continue to study the photos and messages that relatives assembled in minutes: Rocco Medaglia, 49, shown in lime green swim trunks, seemingly proud of his barrel chest and python tattoo; Lindsay Herkness, a vice president of Morgan Stanley, in a Christmas card showing him next to a four-legged creature during a trip to Switzerland, with his own caption, “The bulls are tiring”; and Deanna Micciulli, seen only in a small snapshot because a cousin used most of the space to say she was last heard from on the 106th floor, “saying that there was smoke and flames all around and that she was waiting for someone to rescue her.”

It’s far more a memorial than a gallery, and the spectators absorb it in silence, and then walk away past the street version of a gift shop, a vendor selling tiny American flags.