Over the
past sixty years, the epoch-defining Argentinian artist Marta Minujín (b. 1943,
Buenos Aires, Argentina) has developed happenings, performances, installations,
and video works that have greatly influenced generations of contemporary
artists in Latin America and beyond. Minujín combines elements of experimental
theater, film and television, advertising, and sculpture to create total
environments that place viewers at the center of social situations and confront
them with the seductiveness of media images and celebrity culture. Emerging in
the 1960s as one of the strongest voices in Argentinian art, Minujín has often
refused to make lasting objects, instead developing her work in opposition to
institutional structures. Her simultaneously monumental and fragile works
challenge conventions of art while testifying to her unyielding engagement with
both radical artistic forms and the artifices of popular culture. Minujín’s
capacity to inspire awe and surprise has solidified her reputation as a pioneer
of Latin American conceptual art.
In 1965, at
the Center of Visual Arts of the Instituto Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires,
Minujín and Rubén Santantonín devised the now-legendary environment La
Menesunda. The work led visitors on a circuitous journey through eleven
distinct spaces, including a tunnel of luminous neon signs, a bedroom complete
with a married couple, a hallway lined with illuminated TVs, and a salon with
makeup artists and masseuses offering their services. This intricate,
interactive labyrinth sought to provoke visitors and spur them into action, and
to offer new modes of encounter with consumer culture, mass media, and urban
life. In 2015, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires presented a
reconstruction of La Menesunda, and in June 2019, the New Museum presents the
second recreation of this installation, its first-ever presentation in the US.
While La Menesunda was created as a direct response to street life in Buenos
Aires—the title is slang for a confusing situation—the work, alongside that of
Niki de Saint Phalle, Christo, Claes Oldenburg, and others, counts among the
earliest large-scale environments made by artists, demonstrating how Minujín
anticipated the contemporary obsession with participatory spaces, the lure of
new pop-up museums, and the quest for an intensity of experience that defines
social media today.
The
exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director,
and Helga Christoffersen, Associate Curator.
La
Menesunda is co-produced by the New Museum and the Museo de Arte Moderno de
Buenos Aires.
This
exhibition may not be suitable for all audiences. Please click here for more
information.
Marta
Minujín was born in 1943 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she lives and works.
She studied at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano and the
Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón Buenos Aires. In 1961,
she received a scholarship to study in Paris, where she carried out her first
performance, La destrucción (The Destruction), in 1963. Returning to Buenos
Aires in 1964, she was awarded the Premio Nacional Instituto Torcuato Di Tella
for the work ¡Revuélquese y viva! (Wallow around and live!, 1964), her first
interactive installation. Minujín received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966.
During the 1970s, she lived between the United States and Argentina, exhibiting
her work in major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York
(1973), and Centro de Arte y Comunicación, Buenos Aires (1975, 1976). A
retrospective of Minujín’s work was presented at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano
de Buenos Aires in 2010, and her work has been included in documenta 14, Kassel
(2017), and in exhibitions at Tate Modern, London (2015); Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis (2015); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2001); and elsewhere.
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Photography and Painting