How to define Marta Minujín, who turns 79 today?
The plastic artist more media than Vanguard argentina; the queen of overall; the owner of the Menesunda multisensory Institute Torcuato By Tella; the most carefree woman of the 20th century who mixed iron with neon, ex-professed-out-of-tune music with soft sculptures, and the Cretan labyrinth with fluo colors.
Marta Minujín, the porteña from San Telmo who recreated, in Germany and in Buenos Aires, a Parthenon Greek, and in Manchester, a Big Ben lying down, to fill them with books and then give them away.
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Parthenon of Books (1983) on Avenida 9 de Julio, composed of books banned during the Argentine military dictatorship.
Marta Minujín, the pop artist that, in 1979, he wrote to McDonald`s to join his nonchalance: riding in New York’s Battery Park, next to the authentic Statue of Liberty, a replica”sitting” of iron that, after 10 days of exhibition, would be covered in hamburgers by McDonald’s employees to give visitors a free lunch. And they said yes!
Marta Minujín is a star of Vanguard international and today turns 79 years old.
Marta Minujín, the Martamania of pop
Marta Minujín spent his adolescence between Europe, Buenos Aires and the United States. With two Konex Awards to his credit and an own exhibition at the MOMA in New Yorkk, on November 9 of last year he received the degree of Honorary Doctorate from the Torcuato Di Tella University.
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Marta Minujín believes in ephemeral art, which is why many of her works were burned, distributed, and dismantled.
For such a formality he presented himself bright: Among his collection of glasses, he chose the dark Ray Bans to mitigate the shocking red lips and his ready to wear from overall colorful.
She was the first woman to have received such a distinction and her comment did the corresponding honors: “art has no sex, it is not even necessary to point out if it was done by a man or a woman”, he pointed out as thanks.
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The Profiles were his rereading of “classic” works.
And he remembered his early years: “The Di Tella Institute always believed in us, in a whole group of people who had the logical ideas of having been twenty years old in the sixties”, he said about the “tremendous years”: “live three years in a place without bathroom or heating in Paris” or “sleeping on the floor in New York and hardly having to eat for four years (…)”, he confessed.
“But he did great works that are recognized today. I couldn’t do anything else 😮 die or create”, he explained Marta Minujín to the audience that attended the delivery of his Honoris Causa.
Among so many other key pieces of his production, Marta Minujín I believe The destruction, Cabbage, The obelisk of sweet bread, Carlos Gardel of fire, The payment of the external debt, Venus de Milo falling, Implosion, Payment of the Greek debt to Germany with olives and art Y Hellenic youth fragmenting.
Marta Minujín, black sheep “in diapers”
His parents, León Minujín and Amanda Inés Fernández, made him the childhood difficult, because – told by herself- “he was not a boy like his brother. Did you ever remember your childhood as something “horrible” since she was very shy and only began to exist within her family group when her brother passed away and she “was in the newspapers”.
Although he studied at the Manuel Belgrano Higher School of Fine Arts and the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts, never graduated in no race. His social life was very scarce: he never went out and he dedicated his entire adolescence to smart. To the 16 years deserved his first exposition.
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Everything he created with those little hands that God gave him…
artistic daughter of Baby boomers and the counterculture in the late 1950s, it was hippie and avant-garde at the same time. It could be said that to be his friend you had to be in against social norms established. consumed drugs, tried with alcohol and, when he was about to go to jail for carrying cocaine in Ezeiza, he relented.
In 1959 he wanted to leave his house and emancipate himself. falsified your document Y got married with Juan Carlos “Bebe” Gómez Sabaini, his only husband until the day of his disappearance, March 11, 2021. With this contador public doctorate in Economics at Columbia University (New York), shared his two children and more than half a century of married life.
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Marta Minujín in version of “the age of Aquarius”.
At 18 years old, Marta Minujín installed his first individual exhibition, and it was then that he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, to finish perfecting his art in Paris.
And it was in France when the mattresses detonated his artistic ingenuity unparalleled and its collection phrases. “More than half of life’s time is spent on them, on mattresses one sleeps and makes love”he explained.
Minujín’s mania: going to the bottom of things
In 1961, after a year in France, he returned to Argentina but twelve months later he returned to Europe to soak up the new french realism.
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Art in progress and mass participation on Plaza San Martin: Torre de Babel (2011) with 30,000 books.
And with the self-confidence of the 19th century, but with the resources and reading of the 20th century, cambalache, Marta Minujín voted for the inner world, she hated husks, despite giving the false image of a cultist of frivolity. He dreamed of spectators being “submerged” in his art both figuratively and physically. Instead of sculptures rigid, preferred commingle: you had to walk on them, sink, experience
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With Andy Warhol they took photos in New York proposing to sell corn to pay Argentina’s foreign debt.
Or something better: destroy them. because art is ephemeral and that conviction linked her with Andy Warhol. She met him in a gallery art in New York and logically, they hit ondto immediately. They took photos together surrounded by corn and they proposed to pay the Argentine debt with corn.
If you called McDonald’s, you might as well negotiate with the IMF…But for now, although she loves the ephemeral, the New York Guggenheim he includes her among his collection artists.