Style Icon of the Week: Marta Minujín

Style Icon of the Week: Marta Minujín

Marta Minujin, Argentina's most famous artist, is known for artwork that is both out-sized and outlandish. An "enfant terrible" of Argentina's art world who has cavorted during her career with the likes of Andy Warhol and Christo, Minujin is a celebrity who has exhibited all over the world.

She has been a mainstay of the country's avant-garde scene since the 1960s, famous for works that speak to the public's artistic sensibility, while at the same time tickling its funny bone.

Minujin, a native of Buenos  Aires, where she was born in 1943, still lives and works in the Argentine capital, and her artwork is inspired by the motto that "everything is art".

Much of her career was spent overseas, including long sojourns in New York and Paris, and over the years her work frequently was censored and banned, her hippie sensibility offending past military regimes.

Her first work, in 1963, "La Destruccion" was mounted in Paris and was an early piece of performance art, and involved her eviscerating some of her own works, aided at the time by various friends.  This 1963 creation would be the first of her many "Happenings".

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 , and a mirrored room with black lighting, falling confetti, and the scent of frying food. 

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.

These works earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, by which she relocated to New York. The coup d'état by General Juan Carlos Onganíain 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. She was on hand in 1971 for the Buenos Aires premiere of Operación Perfume, and in New York, befriended fellow conceptual artist Andy Warhol.

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. She was awarded the first of a series of Konex Awards, the highest in the Argentine cultural realm, in 1982.

The return of democracy in 1983, following seven years of a generally failed dictatorship, prompted Minujín to create a monument to a glaring, inanimate victim of the regime: freedom of expression. Assembling 30,000 banned books (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," and following President Raúl Alfonsín's December 10 inaugural, had it 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.

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.

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 festival, the Barbican Center, and a vast number of other international galleries and art shows, while continuing to satirize consumer culture (particularly relating to women).

Quirky, yet profound Marta continues to push the envelope and inspire.  She is Mocha Makeups style Icon of the Week!

-from Wikipedia and AFP