fbpx
Wikipedia

Marta Minujín

January 19, 2024

Marta Minujín (born 1943) is an Argentine conceptual and performance artist.

Marta Minujín
Marta Minujín in 2008.
Born (1943-01-30) 30 January 1943 (age 80)
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Known forPainting, sculpture, performance, happening, drawing
Movement
Spouse
Juan Carlos Gómez Sabaini
​
​
(m. 1957)​
[1][2]
AwardsPlatinum Konex Award (1982 and 2002)

Life and work edit

 
Signature.
 
Minujín inside La Menesunda, a 1965 exhibition.
 
Comunicating with Earth, late 1970s.

Marta Minujín was born in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Her father was a Jewish physician and her mother a housewife of Spanish descent. She met a young economist, Juan Carlos Gómez Sabaini, and married him in secret in 1959; the couple had two children. As a student in the National University Art Institute, she first exhibited her work in a 1959 show at the Teatro Agón. A scholarship from the National Arts Foundation allowed her to travel to Paris as one of the young Argentine artists featured in Pablo Curatella Manes and Thirty Argentines of the New Generation, a 1960 exhibit organized by the prominent sculptor and Paris Biennale judge.[7]

While in Paris, Minujín was inspired by the experimental work of the Nouveaux Realistes, and especially their transformation of art into life. In response to this idea, Minujín staged an exhibition in 1962 during which she publicly burned her paintings.[8] Her time in Paris also inspired her to create "livable sculptures," notably La Destrucción, in which she assembled mattresses along the Impasse Roussin, only to invite other avant-garde artists in her entourage, including Christo and Paul-Armand Gette, to destroy the display. This 1963 creation would be one of her first "Happenings" – events as works of arts in themselves; among her hosts during her stay was Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (later President of France).[9]

She earned a National Award in 1964 at Buenos Aires' Torcuato di Tella Institute, where she prepared two happenings: Eróticos en technicolor and the interactive Revuélquese y viva (Roll Around in Bed and Live). Her Cabalgata (Cavalcade) aired on Public Television that year, and involved horses with paint buckets tied to their tails. These displays took her to nearby Montevideo, where she organized Sucesos (Events) at the Uruguayan capital's Tróccoli Stadium with 500 chickens, artists of contrasting physical shape, motorcycles, and other elements.[7]

She joined Rubén Santantonín at the di Tella Institute in 1965 to create La Menesunda (Mayhem), where participants were asked to go through sixteen chambers, each separated by a human-shaped entry. Led by neon lights, groups of eight visitors would encounter rooms with television sets at full blast, couples making love in bed, a cosmetics counter (complete with an attendant), a dental office from which dialing an oversized rotary phone was required to leave, a walk-in freezer with dangling fabrics (suggesting sides of beef), and a mirrored room with black lighting, falling confetti, and the scent of frying food. The use of advertising throughout suggested the influence of pop art in Minujín's "mayhem."[7]

These works earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, by which she relocated to New York City. The coup d'état by General Juan Carlos Onganía in June of that year made her fellowship all the more fortuitous, as the new regime would frequently censor and ban irreverent displays such as hers. Minujín delved into psychedelic art in New York, of which among her best-known creations was that of the "Minuphone," where patrons could enter a telephone booth, dial a number, and be surprised by colors projecting from the glass panels, sounds, and seeing themselves on a television screen in the floor.[10] The Minuphone was designed and constructed, in collaboration with her, by engineer Per Biorn, who was employed at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and the work was shown at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City.[11] She was on hand in 1971 for the Buenos Aires premiere of Operación Perfume, and in New York, befriended fellow conceptual artist Andy Warhol.[7] Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.[12]

She returned to Argentina in 1976, and afterwards created a series of reproductions of classical Greek sculptures in plaster of paris, as well as miniatures of the Buenos Aires Obelisk carved out of panettone, of the Venus de Milo carved from cheese, and of Tango vocalist Carlos Gardel for a 1981 display in Medellín. The latter, a sheet metal creation, was stuffed with cotton and lit, creating a metaphor for the legendary crooner's untimely 1935 death in a Medellín plane crash.[9] She was awarded the first of a series of Konex Awards, the highest in the Argentine cultural realm, in 1982.[13] She also created a conceptual proposal for Manhattan based on a prone replica of the Statue of Liberty re-imagined as a public park.[14]

Minujín returned to Buenos Aires in 1983, and the return of democracy the same year, following seven years of a generally failed dictatorship, prompted her to create a monument to a glaring, inanimate victim of the regime: freedom of expression. Assembling 30,000 books banned between 1976 and 1983 (including works as diverse as those by Freud, Marx, Sartre, Gramsci, Foucault, Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, and Darcy Ribeiro, as well as satires such as Absalom and Achitophel, reference volumes such as Enciclopedia Salvat, and even children's texts, notably The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry), she designed the "Parthenon of Books [Homage to Democracy]." Following President Raúl Alfonsín's 10 December inaugural, Minujín had this temple-like structure mounted on a boulevard median along the Ninth of July Avenue. Dismantled after three weeks, its mass of newly unbanned titles was distributed to the public below and given back to their owners, symbolically putting the tools for rebuilding a free society back in the hands of the people.[9][15][8]

A conversation with Warhol in New York regarding the Latin American debt crisis inspired one of her most publicized "happenings:" The Debt. Purchasing a shipment of maize, Minujín dramatized the Argentine cost of servicing the foreign debt with a 1985 photo series in which she symbolically handed the maize to Warhol "in payment" for the debt; she never again saw Warhol, who died in 1987.[16]

In 2017, Minujín went on to make a second Parthenon of Banned Books in Kassel, Germany. Arranging 100,000 banned books into a replica of the Parthenon in Athens, Minujín honors those books that were censored and subsequently burned by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. Similarly to the 1983 Parthenon, the books were distributed to people around the world when the work was dismantled.[17]

In 2021 Minujín was responsible for making a half-size horizontal replica called Big Ben Lying Down of London's iconic Elizabeth Tower (often called "Big Ben" after its Great Bell), to be exhibited from 1-18 July in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester, England made of books representing British politics. As with similar works, it was to be destroyed after the show by inviting visitors to take a book. She herself was unable to travel to Britain due to COVID-19 travel restrictions.[18][19]

Minujín has continued to display her art pieces and happenings in the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, the National Fine Arts Museum, the ArteBA contemporary art festival Buenos Aires, the Barbican Center, and a vast number of other international galleries and art shows, while continuing to satirize consumer culture (particularly relating to women).[13][20] In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.[21]

She is well known for her belief that "everything is art."[7]

Gallery edit

  •  
    The Destruction (1963). Minujín's colleagues and friends collectively destroyed her works.[22]
  •  
    Sweet Obelisk (1965). Minujín covered the Obelisk of Buenos Aires with ice cream, and three colleagues licked it.[22]
  •  
    Reading the News (1965). Minujín got into the Río de la Plata covered in newspapers.[22]
  •  
    Minuphone (1967). Patrons could enter a telephone booth, dial a number, and be surprised by different effects.[10]
  •  
    Importación/Exportación (1968).
  •  
    Minujín's We are Many, a mural at the Argentine Public Television Station studios.
  •  
    Babel Tower of books in Buenos Aires.

References edit

  1. ^ a b "Los viajes de una artista pop". Revista Ñ (in Spanish). Clarín. 8 February 2013. Retrieved 1 December 2013.
  2. ^ . Para Ti (in Spanish). Editorial Atlántida. December 2010. Archived from the original on 22 August 2016. Retrieved 1 December 2013.
  3. ^ a b "Marta Minujín. Biografía". Virtual center of Argentine art (in Spanish). Government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. Retrieved 1 December 2013.
  4. ^ "Marta Minujín". El Cultural (in Spanish). 3 January 2011. Retrieved 1 December 2013.
  5. ^ "Marta Minujín: "El arte es cultura instantánea"". Infobae (in Spanish). 11 April 2013. Retrieved 1 December 2013.
  6. ^ . Braga Menendez Arte Contemporáneo (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 25 December 2012. Retrieved 8 December 2013.
  7. ^ a b c d e Clarín: 'Superé todos mis problemas, como Maradona' (7/6/2005) (in Spanish)
  8. ^ a b Smith, Terry (2011). Contemporary Art: World Currents. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. p. 123. ISBN 97 8-0-205-03440-6.
  9. ^ a b c Página/12: Pop-ular (5/25/2003) (in Spanish)
  10. ^ a b "Sculpture: The Number is 581-4570, but Don't Call It". Time. 7 July 1967. from the original on 9 March 2016.
  11. ^ Biorn Biography
  12. ^ "Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved 21 January 2022.
  13. ^ a b Fundación Konex: Marta Minujín (in Spanish)
  14. ^ Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia; Giunta, Andrea (2017). Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985. Prestel. ISBN 9783791356808.
  15. ^ La Nación: Política y concepto (in Spanish)
  16. ^ Página/12: Andy y yo (6/19/2005) (in Spanish)
  17. ^ Mafi, Nick (11 July 2017). "100,000 Banned Books Have Been Formed Into a 'Parthenon of Books'". Architectural Digest.
  18. ^ Basciano, Oliver (28 June 2021). "'I hope people remember it all their lives': Why Marta Minujín wants to destroy Big Ben". The Guardian.
  19. ^ Youngs, Ian (1 July 2021). "Big Ben lands in Manchester for international arts festival". BBC News.
  20. ^ ArteBA (in Spanish)
  21. ^ a b c . Marta-minujin.com. 2012. Archived from the original on 27 June 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)

External links edit

 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Marta Minujín.
  • Official website
  • Marta Minujín at documenta 14 Exhibition website (2017)

January 19, 2024
marta, minujín, born, 1943, argentine, conceptual, performance, artist, 2008, born, 1943, january, 1943, buenos, aires, argentinaknown, forpainting, sculpture, performance, happening, drawingmovementaction, conceptual, psychedelic, avant, garde, informalism, s. Marta Minujin born 1943 is an Argentine conceptual and performance artist Marta MinujinMarta Minujin in 2008 Born 1943 01 30 30 January 1943 age 80 Buenos Aires ArgentinaKnown forPainting sculpture performance happening drawingMovementAction art 3 Conceptual art 4 Pop art 1 5 Psychedelic art Avant garde 6 Informalism 3 SpouseJuan Carlos Gomez Sabaini m 1957 wbr 1 2 AwardsPlatinum Konex Award 1982 and 2002 Contents 1 Life and work 2 Gallery 3 References 4 External linksLife and work edit nbsp Signature nbsp Minujin inside La Menesunda a 1965 exhibition nbsp Comunicating with Earth late 1970s Marta Minujin was born in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires Her father was a Jewish physician and her mother a housewife of Spanish descent She met a young economist Juan Carlos Gomez Sabaini and married him in secret in 1959 the couple had two children As a student in the National University Art Institute she first exhibited her work in a 1959 show at the Teatro Agon A scholarship from the National Arts Foundation allowed her to travel to Paris as one of the young Argentine artists featured in Pablo Curatella Manes and Thirty Argentines of the New Generation a 1960 exhibit organized by the prominent sculptor and Paris Biennale judge 7 While in Paris Minujin was inspired by the experimental work of the Nouveaux Realistes and especially their transformation of art into life In response to this idea Minujin staged an exhibition in 1962 during which she publicly burned her paintings 8 Her time in Paris also inspired her to create livable sculptures notably La Destruccion in which she assembled mattresses along the Impasse Roussin only to invite other avant garde artists in her entourage including Christo and Paul Armand Gette to destroy the display This 1963 creation would be one of her first Happenings events as works of arts in themselves among her hosts during her stay was Finance Minister Valery Giscard d Estaing later President of France 9 She earned a National Award in 1964 at Buenos Aires Torcuato di Tella Institute where she prepared two happenings Eroticos en technicolor and the interactive Revuelquese y viva Roll Around in Bed and Live Her Cabalgata Cavalcade aired on Public Television that year and involved horses with paint buckets tied to their tails These displays took her to nearby Montevideo where she organized Sucesos Events at the Uruguayan capital s Troccoli Stadium with 500 chickens artists of contrasting physical shape motorcycles and other elements 7 She joined Ruben Santantonin at the di Tella Institute in 1965 to create La Menesunda Mayhem where participants were asked to go through sixteen chambers each separated by a human shaped entry Led by neon lights groups of eight visitors would encounter rooms with television sets at full blast couples making love in bed a cosmetics counter complete with an attendant a dental office from which dialing an oversized rotary phone was required to leave a walk in freezer with dangling fabrics suggesting sides of beef and a mirrored room with black lighting falling confetti and the scent of frying food The use of advertising throughout suggested the influence of pop art in Minujin s mayhem 7 These works earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 by which she relocated to New York City The coup d etat by General Juan Carlos Ongania in June of that year made her fellowship all the more fortuitous as the new regime would frequently censor and ban irreverent displays such as hers Minujin delved into psychedelic art in New York of which among her best known creations was that of the Minuphone where patrons could enter a telephone booth dial a number and be surprised by colors projecting from the glass panels sounds and seeing themselves on a television screen in the floor 10 The Minuphone was designed and constructed in collaboration with her by engineer Per Biorn who was employed at Bell Telephone Laboratories and the work was shown at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City 11 She was on hand in 1971 for the Buenos Aires premiere of Operacion Perfume and in New York befriended fellow conceptual artist Andy Warhol 7 Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson 12 She returned to Argentina in 1976 and afterwards created a series of reproductions of classical Greek sculptures in plaster of paris as well as miniatures of the Buenos Aires Obelisk carved out of panettone of the Venus de Milo carved from cheese and of Tango vocalist Carlos Gardel for a 1981 display in Medellin The latter a sheet metal creation was stuffed with cotton and lit creating a metaphor for the legendary crooner s untimely 1935 death in a Medellin plane crash 9 She was awarded the first of a series of Konex Awards the highest in the Argentine cultural realm in 1982 13 She also created a conceptual proposal for Manhattan based on a prone replica of the Statue of Liberty re imagined as a public park 14 Minujin returned to Buenos Aires in 1983 and the return of democracy the same year following seven years of a generally failed dictatorship prompted her to create a monument to a glaring inanimate victim of the regime freedom of expression Assembling 30 000 books banned between 1976 and 1983 including works as diverse as those by Freud Marx Sartre Gramsci Foucault Raul Scalabrini Ortiz and Darcy Ribeiro as well as satires such as Absalom and Achitophel reference volumes such as Enciclopedia Salvat and even children s texts notably The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery she designed the Parthenon of Books Homage to Democracy Following President Raul Alfonsin s 10 December inaugural Minujin had this temple like structure mounted on a boulevard median along the Ninth of July Avenue Dismantled after three weeks its mass of newly unbanned titles was distributed to the public below and given back to their owners symbolically putting the tools for rebuilding a free society back in the hands of the people 9 15 8 A conversation with Warhol in New York regarding the Latin American debt crisis inspired one of her most publicized happenings The Debt Purchasing a shipment of maize Minujin dramatized the Argentine cost of servicing the foreign debt with a 1985 photo series in which she symbolically handed the maize to Warhol in payment for the debt she never again saw Warhol who died in 1987 16 In 2017 Minujin went on to make a second Parthenon of Banned Books in Kassel Germany Arranging 100 000 banned books into a replica of the Parthenon in Athens Minujin honors those books that were censored and subsequently burned by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s Similarly to the 1983 Parthenon the books were distributed to people around the world when the work was dismantled 17 In 2021 Minujin was responsible for making a half size horizontal replica called Big Ben Lying Down of London s iconic Elizabeth Tower often called Big Ben after its Great Bell to be exhibited from 1 18 July in Piccadilly Gardens Manchester England made of books representing British politics As with similar works it was to be destroyed after the show by inviting visitors to take a book She herself was unable to travel to Britain due to COVID 19 travel restrictions 18 19 Minujin has continued to display her art pieces and happenings in the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art the National Fine Arts Museum the ArteBA contemporary art festival Buenos Aires the Barbican Center and a vast number of other international galleries and art shows while continuing to satirize consumer culture particularly relating to women 13 20 In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action Gesture Paint Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940 1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London 21 She is well known for her belief that everything is art 7 Gallery edit nbsp The Destruction 1963 Minujin s colleagues and friends collectively destroyed her works 22 nbsp Sweet Obelisk 1965 Minujin covered the Obelisk of Buenos Aires with ice cream and three colleagues licked it 22 nbsp Reading the News 1965 Minujin got into the Rio de la Plata covered in newspapers 22 nbsp Minuphone 1967 Patrons could enter a telephone booth dial a number and be surprised by different effects 10 nbsp Importacion Exportacion 1968 nbsp Minujin s We are Many a mural at the Argentine Public Television Station studios nbsp Babel Tower of books in Buenos Aires References edit a b Los viajes de una artista pop Revista N in Spanish Clarin 8 February 2013 Retrieved 1 December 2013 Marta Minujin Para Ti in Spanish Editorial Atlantida December 2010 Archived from the original on 22 August 2016 Retrieved 1 December 2013 a b Marta Minujin Biografia Virtual center of Argentine art in Spanish Government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires Retrieved 1 December 2013 Marta Minujin El Cultural in Spanish 3 January 2011 Retrieved 1 December 2013 Marta Minujin El arte es cultura instantanea Infobae in Spanish 11 April 2013 Retrieved 1 December 2013 Marta Minujin Arte Contemporaneo de Buenos Aires Braga Menendez Arte Contemporaneo in Spanish Archived from the original on 25 December 2012 Retrieved 8 December 2013 a b c d e Clarin Supere todos mis problemas como Maradona 7 6 2005 in Spanish a b Smith Terry 2011 Contemporary Art World Currents New Jersey Prentice Hall p 123 ISBN 97 8 0 205 03440 6 a b c Pagina 12 Pop ular 5 25 2003 in Spanish a b Sculpture The Number is 581 4570 but Don t Call It Time 7 July 1967 Archived from the original on 9 March 2016 Biorn Biography Some Living American Women Artists Last Supper Smithsonian American Art Museum Retrieved 21 January 2022 a b Fundacion Konex Marta Minujin in Spanish Fajardo Hill Cecilia Giunta Andrea 2017 Radical Women Latin American Art 1960 1985 Prestel ISBN 9783791356808 La Nacion Politica y concepto in Spanish Pagina 12 Andy y yo 6 19 2005 in Spanish Mafi Nick 11 July 2017 100 000 Banned Books Have Been Formed Into a Parthenon of Books Architectural Digest Basciano Oliver 28 June 2021 I hope people remember it all their lives Why Marta Minujin wants to destroy Big Ben The Guardian Youngs Ian 1 July 2021 Big Ben lands in Manchester for international arts festival BBC News ArteBA in Spanish Action Gesture Paint Whitechapel Gallery Retrieved 21 April 2023 a b c Happenings and Performances Marta minujin com 2012 Archived from the original on 27 June 2018 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint unfit URL link External links edit nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to Marta Minujin Official website Marta Minujin at documenta 14 Exhibition website 2017 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Marta Minujin amp oldid 1185337605, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

article

, read, download, free, free download, mp3, video, mp4, 3gp, jpg, jpeg, gif, png, picture, music, song, movie, book, game, games.