Carlos Garaicoa
125 x 30 x 25 cm
Carlos Garaicoa's "Louis Vuitton travels with Karl Marx, and we travel with Louis Vuitton" restores the critical and convulsive force to one of the emblematic titles of modern economic thought by ironizing commodity fetishism—the central concept in Karl Marx's Capital—through a Duchampian total ready-made. The installation comprises a Louis Vuitton Poche Toilette 19 travel bag containing a volume from the Voyager Avec collection, published by Louis Vuitton in collaboration with La Quinzaine Littéraire, which paradoxically includes Marx's writings. Encased in plexiglass and wood, the objects are divested of their original functions and recharged with meaning in the artistic context, tracing a phantasmagoria between container and content that exposes the commercial domestication of revolutionary critique. This precise juxtaposition highlights the absurdity of global capitalism appropriating its most trenchant antagonist, where the luxury brand—icon of bourgeois consumption—becomes the literal carrier for anti-capitalist discourse. Conceptually, the work interrogates the library and the book as practical artifacts in an era of commodified knowledge, affirming the tension between ideological critique and consumerist co-optation, while underscoring how prestige objects facilitate the ironic dissemination of subversive ideas amid Cuba's economic transitions and the broader dynamics of globalization.
Provenance
Carlos Garaicoa EstudioExhibitions
“Pouvoir & Pouvoir,” Galleria Continua, Les Moulins, France, June 23, 2019 onward (Included as a key piece in this group exhibition exploring power, ideology, and symbolic objects.)
“Memotopography” (solo exhibition), presented by Galleria Continua in association with the Lerici Music Festival, Lerici, Italy, 2024 (Featured the work within the artist’s major solo survey of memory, utopia, and historical critique.)
“Em xeque,” Moraes-Barbosa Galeria, São Paulo, Brazil (Included the work in this group exhibition examining paradoxes of power, value, and incompatible systems.)