Luis Grañena
Art. Art. Art. The explosive creative energy of Marta Minujín (Buenos Aires, 1943), the queen of
Argentine
pop art
, managed to cross the Atlantic during the coronavirus pandemic. Minujín was unable to travel to Britain due to restrictions, but he directed by Zoom the works of his monumental reclining Big Ben, which opened last month at the Manchester International Film Festival. “Now I think it was a feat,” he reflects from his workshop in Buenos Aires, where he goes to work for an average of five hours every day. The remote process for the installation began in December and was much more grueling, he admits, than previous installations in his series
The Fall of Universal Myths.
like the Parthenon of books that he built in 2017 at the Documenta exhibition in Kassel (Germany) or the Obelisk lying down that he built in 1978 in São Paulo.
Marta Minujín is the only Argentine artist who, when she walks down the street, everyone knows, says journalist and cultural critic Fernando García.
And it is that it began to appear in the newspapers at 16, 17 years old and has never stopped.
The artist manages to link “the radicality of the avant-garde with popular culture”, highlights García, author of Marta Minujín.
The psychedelic years.
And it is part of a kind of trend of "end-of-the-world cosmopolitanism," he adds.
More information
Marta Minujín: "Since the sixties nothing new has been done in art"
At 78 years old, Minujín remembers herself as a shy and quiet girl, but with the precocious desire to “live off art”. To achieve this, he first resorted to formal studies - he began to study Fine Arts in two schools in Buenos Aires - but he abandoned them and at age 18 he went to Paris with a scholarship from the National Endowment for the Arts. It was in France where he began to use mattresses - at that time he took them off the street. These became, over the years, one of the most recognizable symbols of his art. “We spend more than half of our lives on mattresses. We are born, we sleep and we make love in them ”, he argues when talking about
Implosión!
the exhibition that has until the end of September at the Santander Foundation in Buenos Aires.
The building's façade has been decorated with a giant self-portrait of the most popular Argentine plastic artist: with her sleek platinum blonde hair, a futuristic version of the classic aviator glasses she wears in public appearances, and red lipstick.
"People enter my face and they will end up inside my head," she told Fundación Santander.
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The Buenos Aires sample supposes, for Minujín, an inward explosion like the one experienced by so many people in these pandemic times in which the problems of being able to sleep have increased and, at the same time, once during the day, to get out of bed . "But always with color, color, from a happy side," he says. Vivid, often fluorescent colors, such as those that characterize much of his clothing and work.
An exception to so much color is
Pandemia,
his work exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires between March and June of this year. On a 260 × 210 centimeter canvas, Minujín applied 26,000 strips with small squares in white, black and gray. "When the pandemic and brutal isolation began, I saw that everything was black, all the time they were dead, dead, dead," he said when presenting the work, last March. While working at the facility, news about the pandemic was played as background music. Now he repeats strategy: he listens for hours to the news about vaccines for his next work,
Global Vaccination.
It will be the second in a trilogy that will close with
Restrictions.
Between the sixties and seventies, Minujín's life oscillated between Paris, the avant-gardes that grew up around the mythical Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires - which first housed his iconic installation
La Menesunda
(1965) - and New York where he met Andy Warhol, among others. "It was the coolest time of my life because I met the great artists there and we lived for free," he recalls. "We went to parties to which we had not been invited."
From early on,
happenings
and ephemeral art were part of his artistic identity. In 1963, in
Destruction,
Minujín invited colleagues and friends to burn the works he had done during his French stay in a vacant lot. Almost 60 years later, in Manchester, when the international festival ended on July 18, anyone could take home the books that were part of Big Ben lying down. “The fourth stage of the work I leave it to the public, that they finish it as they want. It's like a rock concert, people take the music, they take what they danced with. Here they take a unique memory ”, he compares.
Minujín liked to see from a distance how visitors walked inside the English facility, but in his head they are spinning other projects and myths to demolish.
"I put them to bed, change their space, because we are in a new millennium and we cannot continue with the same universal myths," argues the artist.
There is one that has been haunting for decades and for now has resisted: laying down the Statue of Liberty in Central Park.
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