A laundered monument: the original statue’s location is marked by the tower of Colón brand detergent in the foreground while the relocated statue sits in the background. (image via Luzinterruptus)
The Madrid art collective Luzinterruptus has crafted a satirical public sculpture to protest the corrupt allocation of 3.96 million Euros ($5.3 million) to shift a Christopher Columbus statue a few meters in a public square. The sculptural intervention stands at the place Columbus once stood, a towering symbol of “Colón”-brand detergent, a monument both to rectitude in cleaning and crookedness in government. It’s a gesture recalling and mocking the banal punchline suggested by Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, with the further benefit of wordplay — Cristobal Colón is the non-anglicized version of Columbus’s name.
Besides the obvious linguistic reference, the artists intend to literally accuse the government of using the statue’s move as a pretext for money laundering. They write:
Perhaps it is with this magical potion, that the Spanish dirty money has been washed of its origins, to convert it into something else, cleaner and whiter and of perfectly legal use.
The English-language double entendre is, we surmise, a gratuitous bonus.
h/t Huffington Post.
