NEW YORK— Today, on the 79th anniversary of Black Tuesday, longtime artistic collaborators Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese staged a “literal meltdown of the economy,” installing an ice sculpture of the word “economy” in front of the New York Supreme Court building and waiting for it to decompose into a puddle. The five-foot-tall, 15-foot-long, 1,500-pound block was delivered to the periphery of Foley Square this morning at 9 a.m., and it will last anywhere from 10 to 24 hours, depending on the weather and how much human contact it comes into throughout the day.

“It’s not just a prop, the word ‘economy,’” said Ligorano. “We were thinking about economic justice here.”

In addition to marking the anniversary of the stock market crash of 1929, the work, conceived just two weeks ago, has intentionally been set up in the midst of a financial crisis and in anticipation of the presidential election next week. “With the recent turmoil in the financial markets and anxiety creeping through the country from Main Street to Wall Street, this sculpture metaphorically captures the results of unregulated markets on the U.S. economy,” said Ligorano. “To see the word ‘economy’ melting down is representational of our extreme time.”

Main Street Meltdown, as the work is officially known, is the fourth in a series of Ligorano/Reese ice sculptures addressing the political climate over the last two years, beginning with The State of Things, a melting monument of the word “democracy” installed at Jim Kempner Fine Art Gallery in Chelsea in September 2006. That work was recently re-staged at the Democratic and Republican Conventions in Denver and St. Paul, where, according to Ligorano, it drew mixed reactions. In Denver, it was met with abject silence and steep emotion — people “would stroke, almost pet, the letters with affection.” In St. Paul, where Ligorano and Reese took part in the “No Peace for the Warmakers” march during Senator John McCain’s nomination speech, their fellow protesters “would eat it; they consumed ‘democracy,’” speeding up the melting process to only four and a half hours.

“What we like about these sculptures is that they are very popular in the best sense of the word,” said Reese. “People love to touch them, and as passersby see them melt and totally vanish, they take on a completely different meaning.”

The interactive aspect of the project is essential to its success in the eyes of the artists, who are also interviewing people on-site about the economy and creating time-lapse photographs and video for their Web site, mainstreetmeltdown.com. “It is essentially a photo shoot,” said Ligorano. “It gives us the opportunity to ask people how they’ve been affected by the economy, or not.”