Marta Minujín
Malba - Fundación Costantini, Buenos Aires
The well-deserved retrospective of Marta Minujin’s (Buenos Aires, 1943) work at the Malba-Fundación Costantini Museum, brought to the forefront the artist’s popularity and her complex artistic production, which revolves mainly around massive participation by the public and the alteration of perceptions, the modification of the environment, and the creation of a popular art. Before many of her fellow artists, Minujin − who dyes her hair whitish blond in the style of Andy Warhol, whom she met in 1966 and with whom she created the symbolic Pago de la deuda externa argentina a Andy Warhol (Payment of the Argentine foreign debt to Andy Warhol (1985) − created ambientations and installations, worked with Land Art, and realized the importance of the media and of technology.
The exhibition Marta Minujín. Obras 1959-1989, curated by Victoria Noorthoorn, displayed over 100 works and filmed doc- umentations of performances of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, alongside sculptures executed during the past twenty years and shown in the museum terrace. A multifaceted artist, Minujin received her training in her country’s art schools, and in 1959 she began to exhibit “pseudo-futuristic” drawings and paintings. She then traveled to Paris in 1961, on a scholarship from the local Government. From the outset, she established her own figure in the media when, together with Mark Brusse, she created La pieza del amor (1962), one of the first participatory works of art in the world. Then, in her first happening, La Destrucción (Paris, 1963), she invited the spectators to witness the burning of her own work, marking her commitment with the discussion regarding the “death of art”, and commanding a great deal of attention. Despite her pioneering trajectory of fifty years and of her having been the recipient of prestigious awards and scholarships; of having performed multiple happenings, hippie and technological routines, sculptures and videos, relief work on glass; of having designed objects of everyday use, implemented urban intervention projects, and presented dozens of exhibitions, many of her works exist only in the form of documentary archives. The concept and the staging of the show adequately solved the unavailability of works by devoting an individual space to each piece, showing photographs, newspaper clips, and films. In such a way that, besides her initial paintings and her Paris experiences, her most emblematic works were organized chronologically.
The survey of her work included La Menesunda (1965) and El Batacazo (1965), ambientations that the spectators could walk through, experiencing different emotions along this tour of areas containing multiple objects and sensory stimuli. It displayed several works inspired by Marshall McLuhan –the visionary of the electronic age − and by different aspects of the hippie culture. The show included her projects of criticism of the Latin American reality of the end of the 1970s, and works that desacralized myths, such as El Obelisco acostado (Sao Paulo Biennial 1978) and Carlos Gardel de fuego (1981), conceived for and burned during the 4th Medellín Biennial. The itinerary included her mass participation projects, in which she distributed food among the spectators, an essential element in the replica of the Obelisco de Buenos Aires (1979), covered with 10,000 Panettone boxes, and the La Venus de Queso (Cheese Venus) (1981) in Buenos Aires and La Torre de James Joyce en Pan (The James Joyce Tower in Bread) (1980) in Dublin.
The exhibition also incorporated the evocation of the memorable El Partenón de Libros (The Parthenon of Books) (1983), a replica of the Parthenon in Athens erected in the 9 de Julio Avenue to celebrate the advent of democracy, and covered with 20000 books, most of them banned during the military dictatorship (1976-1983), which were redistributed to the public and to insti- tutions after the exhibit. The films of that time showed Minujin holding a fruitful dialogue with the public, just like in the present, when the public loves her and considers her one of their own.
