The Brooklyn Rail

In the world of conceptual art, there are good ideas, bad ideas, and then there are Minujín’s ideas. Perhaps the most impressive thing about this survey of Argentinian Marta Minujín is that many of those ideas were actually realized—mostly in a place that New York critics hadn’t been paying much attention to until recently, Buenos Aires. We get tantalizing glimpses of them at the Jewish Museum, but the space available to an artist of enormous energy and longevity—essentially one very large room—is simply too limited to do more than suggest the variety and importance of her work. Best case scenario, Minujín, now 80, would get the real estate of Yayoi Kusama in her Whitney retrospective over a decade ago. That said, enormous gratitude to the co-curators, Darsie Alexander and Rebecca Shaykin, for working with Minujín to bring us a strong, if incomplete, representation of the work.

Much of Minujín’s most important work exists only in documentation. She was a proponent of happenings in the 1960s (“Don’t call it performance art,” she said in a discussion at the museum) and always believed that art was more important as an opportunity to bring people together and help them sustain their humanity than as something produced to hang on a wall. There was a great deal of art in the streets all over the world in the 1960s, truly ephemeral events, but Minujín’s trajectory took her in the opposite direction of most American artists like Claes Oldenburg or Jim Dine, for example, who became more object oriented as their careers developed. Minujín, instead, became an orchestrator, or carnival barker if you prefer, which is why her work seems so relevant now. Her art was experiential and invitational. The most active piece in the exhibition isn’t in the exhibition at all; it’s a colorful, giant inflated sculpture in the heart of Times Square based on her early work with painted mattresses. It seems right at home in the lights of midtown, and you can walk through it.

Minujín’s ambivalence toward art objecthood began early. After spending half a year in Paris in 1963, she burnt everything she had produced during that time and invited other artists to join in the bonfire ceremony by manipulating or otherwise altering her work before it was set ablaze. This is especially ironic because, from the few examples in the exhibition, Minujín was (and remains) a gifted, inventive, and even revolutionary painter. Her sex paintings from the 1970s, for example, put her in the class with feminist pioneers such as Betty Tompkins, Joan Semmel, and Lee Lozano. For those who know her work only a little—and for those in Latin America who know it well—her signature production is La Menesunda (“mayhem” in street slang), a multi chambered environment created at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in 1965 with the collaboration of a handful of brilliant Argentine artists, including David Lamelas and Rubén Santantonín. I had a chance to experience a reconstruction in 2016 in Buenos Aires, and a similar version was installed at the New Museum in 2019. But the video of the original opening is maybe even better, as young people who look like they could have stepped out of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and a much more puzzled but interested older generation of Buenos Aires sophisticates work their way through a labyrinth of neon, plastic, mirrors, Styrofoam, and even the bedroom of a supposedly newly married couple. I can testify that it is still wild and fun, digital immersion and infinity rooms notwithstanding.

In almost all the photographs in the exhibition, Minujín is either smiling or laughing outright. But the fun is and always was serious. In 1979, in the midst of a brutal dictatorship, she directed the construction of a tower mimicking the iconic obelisk in downtown Buenos Aires, with its macho nationalist resonance, and covered it with panettone. As Christmas approached, she had it lowered on its side so people could, as she put it, “eat the myth.” In 1983, after the collapse of the same dictatorship, Minujín organized El Partenón de libros (The Parthenon of Books), on the same boulevard in Buenos Aires—a full-scale steel frame mockup of the façade of the famous Greek temple. From the structure she and her co-conspirators hung thousands of books. At the end of its run, they climbed back up and tossed the books to the people below. The symbolism after years of repression and censorship was obvious, and so, according to the video, was the sense of celebration.

The more you dig into the exhibition, the better it gets. In 1966 she organized a time-based video event with multiple monitors and participants in conjunction with input from other artists (including Allan Kaprow) in other global locations. Simultaneidad en Simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity) was the first of many forays Minujín made into mass media and communications technology, a fascination she probably picked up—along with an appreciation for hippies—during her time in New York. She loved New York, its art scene, and Central Park where she spent some time sleeping on park benches. Minujín’s projects there especially showcased her desire to be part of a network of artists across continents, working as makers and provocateurs and sharing the conviction that no matter what the issue, art is always part of the solution and never part of the problem.