An artist I am close to wrote me, some weeks after the event, "I am fine, though it is hard to think about what kind of work to make at this point, other than decorative, escapist, or abstract. I suppose I'll explore one or all of these things." The work for which she is deservedly famous is so different from what it now occurred to her to explore, that it seemed clear to me that she was seeking something with the symbolic weight that the shrines had had, as signs and acts of what Wittgenstein speaks of as piety. A very deep piece of art history remains to be written about what New York artists did in those months when we thought or talked about nothing else, and the enormity of our shared experience flooded consciousness fully.

I single out "New York artists" mainly because I have the sense that the intensity of the experience depended very greatly upon whether one was here or elsewhere. A former student, at the time teaching in California, told me that he felt "impotent" in being away. He realized that so far as helping clear the rubble, search for bodies, bring in the supplies, he would have been redundant. The city had all the help it needed. But he felt, having lived and studied here for several years, that he had been injured in a way someone who was not a New Yorker had not been--and he felt the need to be here to share the grief. Not being here was internal to his impotence, if that makes sense, not that it would have made the slightest practical difference whether he were here or not. And I think being here meant that this grief was palpable, that it was like something one breathed. One mark of that feeling was the way everyone became very considerate of everyone else, as if each of us was due a measure of moral sympathy. The kind of art that began to be made was another mark, special to the feeling.

Lucio Pozzi, a performance artist who really cannot properly be described quite that narrowly, tells how a European friend, who managed to get a call through, said, "At this point one cannot carry on making art." Pozzi answered, "Today I have painted a little watercolor, and I shall paint another one tomorrow." He had painted a copy in watercolor of a watercolor of his own, from a photograph of it in one of his catalogues. It is of yellow fields. He did this three times. On the following day, he stood outside his downtown studio and photographed the smoke as it lay in the street where his studio is located. He took several shots quite rapidly, just seconds apart, and turned the images into Xeroxes, which he stapled together into pamphlets, to be mailed to friends. Someone might have thought the pictures so alike that they could have been the same shot, reproduced ten or twelve times. I have seen such sets of images used in psychological experiments, mainly to demonstrate how pigeons, whose visual acuity is far sharper than ours, are able to distinguish between pictures that humans tell apart only with great difficulty. In my view, the images did two things: They showed what everyone downtown would have recognized as how their streets looked, and they did this with the zero degree of art. The other thing was to show how it felt to be there, engulfed in a cloud of sadness that would not lift.

I was struck by the fact that as with the photographs, Pozzi's watercolors looked alike. If I were to curate a show about how New York artists responded to 9/11, I would certainly include his series of photographs, and all three copies of the watercolor. And I would include several of the watercolors I mentioned in an earlier column, by Audrey Flack, who felt the despair of impotence my student spoke of, and went out to Montauk to paint the sunlight on fishing boats. Audrey does monumental sculptures. I have greatly admired her immense figures of powerful females, for the feminist symbolism of course, but also for their masterful execution. She had been at work on a new colossus, intended to stand in the water off Queens. It was to have been of Queen Catherine of Braganza, after whom the borough of Queens was named. It was a brilliant concept, brilliantly executed, and Audrey modeled two airplanes, one for each of Catherine's pockets, standing for the borough's two airports. The reason the work was never completed belongs to the unedifying story of racial politics, but I mention her colossi here for the vivid contrast they point to between her sculptural ambitions and the water-and-sunlight aquarelles that met her needs after the terrible event. They are not in the least monumental. They are daringly ordinary, like skillful enough paintings by a conventional watercolorist, with nothing on her mind except to register how the world looked. The real world needed to be affirmed, and these are perfect examples for the art history of 9/11.

Had Queen Catherine stood, like the Statue of Liberty, when 9/11 took place, the two airplanes would certainly have been read as portents. But I cannot imagine airplanes in my 9/11 show. Tom Kotek, a graduate student in fine arts at Hunter College, told me how he and some fellow students visited an art school somewhere in New England not long after the event. They saw a work consisting of some cardboard towers and a toy plastic airplane. Wittgenstein tells of ways of expressing grief symbolically that we all understand and accept, even if it would not have occurred to us to do things that way. But there are certainly ways that would strike us as wrong or odd. Kotek and his friends thought that the installation they saw was not at all like something they would have made, having been in New York when it happened, and still tasting the grief. In fact, none of them had done anything they would consider 9/11 art yet, and weren't sure they would. There was nothing exactly wrong about the little plastic-and-paper crash-site. It was the kind of thing that might naturally have occurred to artists who had not been in New York, and were given an assignment. But genuine 9/11 art, as my examples suggest, had to find ways of embodying the feeling rather than depicting the event, and is inevitably oblique. An artist I spoke to who happened to have been in Australia on 9/11 showed a drawing she had done of the Sydney Opera House. Her thought was that the terrorists would have taken out the most important building in whatever city they struck. So the Sydney Opera House symbolized the World Trade Center towers, like a substitution in the language of a dream. But I cannot imagine a 9/11 New York artist drawing the great opera house as a way of conveying what it felt like to have lived through the event.

I have been gathering ideas for my imagined 9/11 show, and asking artists whether they have done anything in particular that might be included if I were to have gone forward with it. Here are a few more examples of what I consider true 9/11 art.

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