Marta Minujín: Difference between revisions

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Life and work: Some Living American Women Artists (collage)
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| image_size =
| caption = Marta Minujín in 2008.
| birth_date = {{Birth date and age|df=yes|1943|01|30}}
| birth_place = [[Buenos Aires]], Argentina
| spouse = {{marriage|Juan Carlos Gómez Sabaini|1957}}<ref name="enie">{{cite web |language=es|url=http://www.revistaenie.clarin.com/arte/Marta-Minujin-viajes-artista-pop_0_862713731.html|title=Los viajes de una artista pop|access-date=1 December 2013|date=8 February 2013|work=Revista Ñ|publisher=[[Clarín (Argentine newspaper)|Clarín]]}}</ref><ref name="parati">{{cite web|language=es|url=http://www.parati.com.ar/lo-nuevo/personajes/marta-minujin/11700.html|title=Marta Minujín|access-date=1 December 2013|date=December 2010|work=Para Ti|publisher=[[Editorial Atlántida]]|archive-date=22 August 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160822044135/http://www.parati.com.ar/lo-nuevo/personajes/marta-minujin/11700.html|url-status=dead}}</ref>
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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 light]]s, 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 light]]ing, falling confetti, and the scent of frying food. The use of advertising throughout suggested the influence of [[pop art]] in Minujín's "mayhem."<ref name=clarin/>
 
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.<ref name="time">{{Cite news|url=http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,899583,00.html|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160309234058/http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,899583,00.html|archive-date=9 March 2016|title=Sculpture: The Number is 581-4570, but Don't Call It|newspaper=Time|date=July 7, July 1967}}</ref> 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.<ref>[http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=581 Biorn Biography]</ref> She was on hand in 1971 for the Buenos Aires premiere of ''Operación Perfume'', and in New York, befriended fellow conceptual artist [[Andy Warhol]].<ref name=clarin/> Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster [[Some Living American Women Artists (collage) | Some Living American Women Artists]] by [[Mary Beth Edelson]].<ref name="SAAM">{{cite web |title=Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper |url=https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/some-living-american-women-artistslast-supper-76377 |website=Smithsonian American Art Museum |access-date=21 January 2022}}</ref>
 
She returned to Argentina in 1976, and afterwards created a series of reproductions of [[classical Greek sculpture]]s in [[plaster of paris]], as well as miniatures of the [[Obelisk of Buenos Aires|Buenos Aires Obelisk]] carved out of [[panettone]], of the [[Venus de Milo]] carved from cheese, and of [[Tango (music)|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.<ref name=pagina12/> She was awarded the first of a series of [[Konex Award]]s, the highest in the Argentine cultural realm, in 1982.<ref name=konex>[http://www.fundacionkonex.com.ar/premios/curriculum.asp?id=741 Fundación Konex: Marta Minujín {{in lang|es}}]</ref> She also created a conceptual proposal for Manhattan based on a prone replica of the [[Statue of Liberty]] re-imagined as a public park.<ref name=radicalwomen>{{cite book |last=Fajardo-Hill |first=Cecilia | last2=Giunta | first2=Andrea |author2-link=Andrea Giunta |date=2017 |title=Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 |publisher= Prestel |isbn=9783791356808}}</ref>
 
Minujín returned to Buenos Aires in 1983, and the [[Argentine general election, 1983|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 [[censorship|books banned]] between 1976 and 1983 (including works as diverse as those by [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]], [[Karl Marx|Marx]], [[Jean-Paul Sartre|Sartre]], [[Antonio Gramsci|Gramsci]], [[Michel Foucault|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 December 10 December inaugural, Minujín had this temple-like structure mounted on a boulevard median along the [[Nueve de Julio Avenue|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.<ref name=pagina12/><ref>[http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=986759 ''La Nación'': Política y concepto {{in lang|es}}]</ref><ref name=":0" />
 
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.<ref>[http://www.pagina12.com.ar/imprimir/diario/suplementos/radar/9-2323-2005-06-20.html ''Página/12'': Andy y yo (6/19/2005) {{in lang|es}}]</ref>