ART CITIES:N.York-Marta Minujín

Over the past 60 years, the epoch-defining Marta Minujín 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.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The New Museum Archive

Emerging in the 1960s as one of the strongest voices in Argentinian art, Marta 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 have 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 which means “mixture” and “confusion” in Lunfardo*, was a labyrinthine structure that took visitors on a tour through eleven situations set up in a sequence of cubic, polygon, triangular and circular spaces furnished with different materials to generate multi-sensory stimuli. “La Menesunda” made the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires a cultural witness to a ground-breaking decade that began in 1955 and culminated in a radical transformation of the aesthetic languages used by artists, modes of circulation and legitimization of products, as well as the ways in which new audiences consumed and absorbed avant garde work. The work, alongside that of Christo, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Niki de Saint Phalle, 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. Occupying the New Museum’s Third Floor, “La Menesunda” is composed of eleven distinct spaces through which visitors move, one at a time. Entering the work through a doorway in the shape of a human silhouette, visitors must then climb a set of stairs and proceed through a series of narrow hallways and staircases, discovering new spaces and situations intended to surprise and shock along the way. Moving through an environment simulating human intestines, a refrigerator, and the interior of a woman’s head, visitors  encounter live performers and moving parts triggered by the visitors’ own actions; they will emerge transformed by an encounter with unexpected textures, forms, and sensations.

* Lunfardo is an argot originated and developed in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries in the lower classes in Buenos Aires and from there spread to other cities nearby.

Info: Curator: Massimiliano Gioni, The New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 26/6-29/9/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org