[youtube ratio=”0.5625″ position=”standard” ]
Take a stroll through any country ran by an authoritarian dictator and you’ll usually come across large, menacing portraits of them staring back at you. You’ll also run into a few massive statues of said dictator designed to give them a larger-than-life appearance. Although this sort of authoritarian presence would never fly in the land of the free, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s rhetorical style and political ideas are scarily close to being authoritarian. So the INDECLINE artist collective set out to mock The Donald with a series of naked statues strewn across the country.
Cozy up to one of these veiny statues you’ll find in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Cleveland, and it’s hard not to notice this representation of Trump has no visible testicles. Also, contrary to what the candidate has said about himself, it has a rather small penis as well. “It is through these sculptures that we leave behind the physical and metaphorical embodiment of the ghastly soul of one of America’s most infamous and reviled politicians,” INDECLINE said in a statement.
Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the statues also serve to mock his authoritarian tendencies. “Like it or not, Trump is a larger-than-life figure in world culture at the moment,” an INDECLINE spokesperson told The Washington Post. “Looking back in history, that’s how those figures were memorialized and idolized in their time—with statues.” When the statue in New York City’s Union Square was removed, the NYC Parks Department released a statement saying, “NYC Parks stands firmly against any unpermitted erection in city parks, no matter how small.”
