This time, a torch as cold as ice

NEW YORK — Shintaro Okamoto spent several long hours outdoors in Manhattan on Friday, a day so cold that anyone who could stay indoors did. But for Okamoto, the 21-degree weather was fine.

He is an ice sculptor.

He has shaped blocks of ice into everything from old-fashioned locomotives to giant beer bottles. He has done ice sculptures in Alaska when it was 30 degrees below zero. That is too cold. “The ice won’t join together,” he said. The joining is done by squirting water between the blocks, like mortar. At 30 below, “the water freezes before we can squirt it.”

On Friday, bundled-up subway riders were still shivering on chilly train platforms and coffee-cart vendors were stomping their feet, but Okamoto did not have to worry about water problems. Several gallons were sloshing around in a huge plastic jug that looked as if it had been snatched from a water cooler. What fused the blocks was not squirted but poured.

Like a surgeon preparing to operate, Okamoto laid out his tools — chain saws, chisels and grinders. And then he and some of his ice-sculpting colleagues went to work, happily, on a replica of one of the most famous statues in the world, the Statue of Liberty.

But not the whole statue, just the torch, the hand and the arm.

A day like Friday was also different from a day with temperatures in the 30s. The torch was not going to drip or droop, at least not while he was still carving and chipping and molding and modeling. Ice is not the marble of Michelangelo’s David. It will lose the form Okamoto gives it.

“It continues to transform” after he finishes, he said. “That’s inevitable. That’s part of the drama. It’s changing, but constantly reminding us of what the source was.”

The source in question — the object to be sculpted in ice Friday — was the Statue of Liberty’s original torch, with the hand holding it and the disembodied arm, cut off at the elbow. These odd-looking body parts had sat in the same place, Madison Square Park, for several years in the 1870s and 1880s to raise money for the project’s completion.

Okamoto and colleagues from his studio worked in the base of the fountain in the park, which had been drained. There is melting in the forecast, even if the National Weather Service was not exactly explicit when it predicted a high of 37 degrees on Sunday, 54 on Monday and 58 on Tuesday.

Bringing Okamoto to Madison Square Park was the idea of Arlene Shechet, an artist best known for colorful ceramics. She created “Full Steam Ahead,” an exhibition of her sculptures that will be on display in the park until April 28. The title refers to the monument to Adm. David Glasgow Farragut in the park. It was Farragut who said “full speed ahead,” or perhaps “full steam ahead,” during a Civil War battle — along with “damn the torpedoes,” according to some accounts.

“What better material to work with than ice in the middle of the winter?” Shechet asked, adding that she wanted to draw people into the park, even in 20-degree weather.

“In New York, our lives are so much more interior,” she said. “We experience winter as the time to go indoors and not appreciate some of the more beautiful things that winter can present. Ice is one of them.”

Shechet had more in mind than the torch-and-arm sculpture. She also asked Okamoto to create a statue of Audrey Munson, the all-but-forgotten model for artists in the early years of the 20th century. She was the heroine at the Maine monument in Columbus Circle and the Roman goddess in the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. She is above the Municipal Building, in front of the Low Memorial Library and Columbia University and at the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn Bridge (as Miss Manhattan).

Unlike those statues, Okamoto’s bears Munson’s name.

Unlike those statues, too, Okamoto’s will melt. He said he had designed it to do so gracefully.

As for the Statue of Liberty, it was constructed over nine years; Okamoto’s replica over a few hours. The designer of the statue, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, had been mesmerized by the view of New York when he arrived by ship — “here where people get their first view of the New World,” he said.

One of Okamoto’s colleagues, Benjamin Grasso, had a view of the torch and arm from a color photograph that he held in one hand. In his other hand was a chisel he used to sketch the shape to be cut into the ice, first with a chain saw, then with smaller hand tools.

But where Okamoto’s replica was solid and translucent, Bartholdi’s was hollow, with a thin copper skin. Bartholdi had enlisted architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who designed the torch-bearing arm, but he died in 1879 without devising a plan for the rest of the statue. For that, Bartholdi recruited engineer Gustave Eiffel, not yet famous for a certain tower in Paris.

New Yorkers had to be persuaded to accept the statue, and when the original installation went up in Madison Square Park, there were skeptics. “The sculptor sent us an isolated and useless arm and hand," The New York Times complained about the display.

Okamoto’s torch-bearing wrist was a fraction of the size of the actual one. Brooke Kamin Rapaport — a curator who oversees art installations as part of the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s public art program, known as Mad. Sq. Art — said the original, when it lay in the park in the 19th century, reached the treetops. When the rest of the statue arrived from France and was assembled on what became known as Liberty Island, it was hailed as the largest statue ever built — until then, anyway. It was briefly the tallest structure in New York.

“You can imagine the scale of the buildings then,” Rapaport said. “We’re not talking about the excessive height of skyscrapers that we have now. It was quite a spectacle.” New York Times art critic John Russell, writing in the 1980s, said that the torch and hand had "overpowered their surroundings.”

By contrast, Okamoto’s replica was only about 8 feet tall.

Okamoto and his colleagues did some preliminary work on the Statue of Liberty replica at his studio in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, shaping the blocks they joined together in the park. For the ride to Manhattan, they wrapped the blocks in insulation blankets and stretch wrapping, and loaded them onto a truck.

“Sometimes we have to be a mechanical engineer,” he said. “Sometimes we have to be animal wildlife artists. For something like this, we had to dig up historical references. We spent time studying actual references.”

But his research did not include a trip to the statue itself. He has never climbed the 377 steps from the lobby to the crown platform, although work has taken him to Liberty Island. He was hired once to build ice bars and carve logos for a party on the lawn.

In warm weather, of course.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.