Marta Minujín, La Destrucción, 1963. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20) Donación de la Fundación Roy Lichtenstein en memoria de Harry Shunk y Janos Kender. Fotografía: Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust
Over more than six decades, Marta Minujín (Buenos Aires, 1943) has developed one of the most distinctive trajectories in contemporary Latin American art, which earned her the highest distinction of the Ministerio de Cultura of Spain, the Premio Velázquez, in 2016. A decisive figure in happenings, installation and participatory practices, her work has gone beyond traditional artistic categories, questioning the boundaries between art and life and placing collective experience at the center of creation. The exhibition La Menesunda según Marta Minujín reconstructs one of her fundamental works, today considered a pioneering milestone in the history of immersive installations of the second half of the twentieth century.
Created in 1965 by Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín for the Centro de Artes Visuales of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, in a context of great conceptual experimentation and profound cultural transformations in Argentina, La Menesunda radically transformed the relationship between work and spectator. Conceived by its authors as an ephemeral «ambientación» (environment), it replaced contemplation with multisensory experience in order to turn the exhibition space into a place of active participation. The version presented by the Museo Reina Sofía is the result of research carried out in 2015 by the Museo Moderno de Buenos Aires to reconstruct the work from photographs, films and other materials, in close collaboration with the artist herself. After its presentation in Buenos Aires and subsequently at the New Museum in New York and Copenhaguen Contemporary, this reconstruction, co-produced by the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and Tate Liverpool, is shown for the first time in Spain.
In lunfardo, the Rioplatense slang, «menesunda» means mixture, confusion or chaos of heterogeneous elements. The term synthesizes the spirit of a work that integrates a wide diversity of artistic media and sensory stimuli, directly involving those who walk through it and blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life. La Menesunda condensed many of the concerns that ran through the avant-gardes of the sixties: the possibility of entering the mind of a woman artist, the irruption of mass culture, the incorporation of the media into artistic language, the centrality of the spectator, and the possibility of understanding art as a shared practice. Its radicalism not only changed the way the exhibition was conceived, but also anticipated forms of artistic production whose validity continues to define a good part of contemporary practices.
On this occasion, the presentation of La Menesunda at the Museo Reina Sofía is accompanied by a documentary itinerary dedicated to the happenings, performances and participatory actions developed by Marta Minujín between 1963 and 1985. Through photographs, drawings and various archival materials, the exhibition explains in detail the intense process of experimentation that defined more than two decades of work in action art. After her stay in Paris, where she came into contact with the Nouveau Réalisme and abandoned painting in favor of assemblage and performance art, Minujín developed some of her most radical proposals, alternating her activity between Buenos Aires and New York.
From actions such as Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, in which television and radio intervened, and El pago de la deuda externa con choclos, carried out in collaboration with Andy Warhol, or the series Mitos populares desmitificándose, among which El Obelisco de pan dulce and El Partenón de libros stand out, her trajectory has continuously explored new forms of participation and intervention in public space.
More than sixty years after its creation, La Menesunda retains intact its capacity to question the ways in which the collective imaginary is constructed. In a present marked by the incessant circulation of images and the spectacularization of everyday life, this installation of installations continues to invite us to understand art not as a distant object of contemplation, but as an event that exists fully only when it is lived: an aesthetic experience with effects on the subjectivity of those who walk through it. By radically questioning the relations between reality and representation, it recalls one of the key functions of museums: to expand the ways we see the world.
© Ministerio de Cultura - Gobierno de España