As of this morning, the 3,000-pound ice sculpture spelling out “Democracy” placed yesterday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. has likely melted. Though the installation is short lived, that’s entirely the point.
Standing at five feet tall and 17 feet wide when it was first installed, the sculpture, titled Last Call DemocracyICED, was made in New York by conceptual artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese before it was transported in a refrigerated truck to DC.
The icy message comes courtesy of Ben Cohen, a well-known activist and the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, and his Up In Arms campaign, which demands Pentagon expenditures be reduced and redirected towards public health care and education. Cohen told the Washington Post in an interview that Last Call DemocracyICED was “a powerful symbol that helps express the feelings and the sadness and the horror of Americans.”
He pointed to such actions as “Attacks on freedom of speech. Masked, unidentified secret police snatching people off the streets and arresting and deporting them”, carried out by the Trump administration as reasons for the erosion of American democracy.
Cohen added, “These are horrible things that we used to talk about as happening in other countries […] People being prosecuted and punished and sentenced without due process. Using the military against the population of the United States is undemocratic, right?”
The clever work recalls predecessors like conceptual artist Francis Alÿs, who used similar metaphorical techniques to highlight socio-political conflicts in Mexico City, Mexico. In one 1997 work, titled Paradox of Praxis I (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), Alÿs pushed a block of ice around the city for nine hours until it melted. In so doing, Alÿs turned traditional ideas of productivity and value on their head by showcasing the futility of human labor.
As the nation continues to grapple with its democratic values, the now-melted “Democracy” sculpture suggests a similar kind of inefficacy.
