••LA MENESUNDA SEGÚN MARTA MINUJÍN••
Cincuenta años después de la histórica ambientación que Marta Minujín realizó junto a Rubén Santantonín en mayo de 1965 en el Centro de Artes Visuales del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, el Moderno se convierte en escenario y testigo de una reconstrucción fiel que se desplegará dentro de un espacio de 400 metros cuadrados en el primer piso del Museo.
La Menesunda -"mezcla", "confusión", en lunfardo- consistía en una estructura laberíntica que incluía un recorrido por once situaciones y se organizaba a partir de una secuencia de espacios cúbicos, poliédricos, triangulares y circulares, recubiertos por diferentes materiales, que generaban estímulos multisensoriales en el visitante.
La Menesunda según Marta Minujín recupera en la actualidad el conjunto de relaciones materiales, sensoriales y simbólicas que hicieron posible su existencia en 1965. Fue una experiencia de ruptura respecto a los lenguajes visuales de la década. Durante medio siglo se fue cargando de múltiples significaciones y relecturas, hasta transformarse en una obra central del imaginario cultural argentino. Hoy, el Moderno propone una experiencia que apunta a repensar la carga legendaria depositada en la obra original. De esta manera, la reconstrucción realizada en 2015 invita a hacer nuevas lecturas del pasado, pero también despierta reflexiones y sensaciones en un contexto contemporáneo.
3 - 5 de octubre, 2014
Centro Cultural Estación Mapocho
Santiago, Chile
Cada vez que tenemos que escribir sobre Marta Minujín o reportear a la artista, sabemos de antemano que la sorpresa y el asombro serán inevitables. A eso hay que agregarle el frenesí que esta mujer hiperactiva, que mantiene el espíritu rebelde, alegre y zumbón de los años de la Menesunda, contagia inevitablemente con su entusiasmo, su capacidad de ver el mundo como una gran obra de arte. Aunque es sabido, hay que añadir que a la artista pop más importante de Latinoamérica le fascina decir que transcurre sus días como si fuera una historieta que ella misma dibuja, y siempre que puede reitera que "todo es arte".
FROM THE ELLA FONTANALS-CISNEROS COLLECTION DEBUTS DURING ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2013
A collaboration between the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Ayer se desarmó el Agora, una estructura de 32 columnas con 25 mil libros adheridos
26 September to 15 December 2013
Una extensiva muestra en la Fundación Proa reflexiona sobre los cambios que sufre y sufrió Buenos Aires.
La exposición ¨Buenos Aires¨, en Fundación Proa, descifra el jeroglífico urbano repasando la historia de sus representaciones.
A mediados de 1985, la notable Marta Minujín presentó en el Centro Cultural Recoleta una instalación que confrontaba al espectador con la efervescente tecnología de la época. De la exposición original hoy se exhiben unos paneles pintados en su taller, demostrando la vitalidad pop de la gran Diva del arte contemporáneo en Buenos Aires. ¨Laberinto Minujinda (1985-2013)¨ puede visitarse en 11 x 7 Galería.
“Marta Minujín: Laberinto Minujinda”. Galería 11 x 7. Libertad 1628. “Leandro Katz: arrebatos, diagonales y rupturas”, Espacio Fundación Telefónica. Arenales 1540.
Laberinto Minujinda
Vivir para y por el arte
por Marcela Costa Peuser
La muestra que se presenta en la Galería 11 x 7, hasta el próximo 8 de agosto, reedita parte de la instalación que la artista presentó en 1985 en el Centro Cultural Recoleta.
Preferidos de artBA 2013
Evocaciones personales e históricas, nostalgia y emoción, celebración del arte y los artistas, en galerías y espacios corporativos.
Dólares no, ventas sí
Con muchas adquisiciones realizadas en pesos, arteBA volvió a constituirse en un espacio legitimador apreciado por artistas y galerías.
Por Ana Maria Battistozzi
Pop, Realismi e Politica. Brasile - Argentina, anni Sessanta
08.03.13 - 26.05.13
A cura di Paulo Herkenhoff e Rodrigo Alonso
Inaugurazione: giovedì 7 marzo 2013, ore 18:30
Dall’8 marzo al 26 maggio 2013 la GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo è lieta di ospitare POP, REALISMI E POLITICA. Brasile – Argentina, anni Sessanta.
Curata da Paulo Herkenhoff e Rodrigo Alonso, la mostra presenta e analizza la produzione artistica in Brasile e in Argentina negli anni Sessanta, evidenziando la creatività e l’originalità degli artisti e le sfide che essi hanno dovuto affrontare in una decade caratterizzata da profondi cambiamenti sociali.
Cuatro: Leandro Katz, David Lamelas, Marta Minujín, Horacio Zabala
Pensar es discriminar. Si no hubiésemos podido extraer unidades discretas del magma informe del caos, jamás habríamos pensado. No sabemos cómo lo lograron los hombres del paleolítico, pero lo cierto es que hace miles de años, de la nebulosa sinsentido de lo real se extrapolaron sentidos básicos que luego adquirieron la potencia abstracta de lo que hoy llamamos ideas.
Marta Minujín recogió cenizas del volcán Puyehue en la región de los lagos Villarino y Faulkner y también tomó fotografías que documentan el efecto de las cenizas volcánicas sobre ese territorio. Ella quedó profundamente conmovida al ver que el paisaje multicolor de los Andes patagónicos se transfomó en una pesadilla monocromática. Su instalación es una reflexión visual sobre el poder sobrecogedor de la naturaleza cuando se manifiesta de manera violenta.
Leandro Katz inscribe en el frasco de cenizas volcánicas la oposición que funda el sentido mismo de lo humano: Eros y Thanatos. La potencia de la vida y la fuerza de la muerte. Con los cuatro colores relacionados con el fuego, Katz compone una partitura visual que tiene la energía de una ópera, pero que es tan sutil y ambigua como una sinfonía. Pone a disposición del espectador un repertorio cromático y un juego de asociaciones que pueden intercambiarse. Es un ajedrez, en el que los colores cálidos, una llama y una serie de palabras (tragedia, drama,comedia, farsa) dibujan un aleph del sentido.
La obra de David Lamelas parece tan simple y tan explícita que hablar sobre ella suena a sobrecargarla. Dos relojes marcando distintas horas. Pero nada es tan simple ni nada es tan explícito. El trabajo de Lamelas presenta una reflexión sobre el conjunto de esta muestra: exhibe el intervalo, ese espacio entre dos momentos distintos o entre dos objetos. En ese agujero entre temporalidades y espacios, se construye la trama discreta de nuestro trágico destino: ser para la muerte.
Horacio Zabala presenta obras de su serie Hipótesis. Estos trabajos ponen en relación monocromos con signos. Trazan el mapa conceptual de un pensamiento visual preocupado más por las correspondencias sintácticas que por el contenido. Es una lógica visual-conceptual que en su vacío esencial concluye en poema. Su tan callada música opera como máquina de imaginar.
Daniel Molina
[Excerpt:] Marta Minujín hand in hand with Analía Saban: An unusual meeting of two generations
Marta, I’d like to ask you some questions I have lingering. I’ve often heard you say you come from another planet. In that case, to what extent do you feel you’re the author of your works? Perhaps you feel a channeling of the collective unconscious, a bit as though ideas can come from elsewhere, from beyond. If that is the case, have you drawn any conclusion about it?
MM: I never feel that it’s my work; rather, I feel that it transcends me. The ideas come to me on their own, as if they were using me.
AS: A few days ago, I ran into Marta in Paris. We arrived the same day – another coincidence. Marta was going to show her films in the retrospective the Pompidou organized for her, and I was there to inaugurate a show at Praz Delavallade Gallery. So I went to the Pompidou and the next day Marta came to my exhibition.
But seeing all the movies (it was a fairly large retrospective), they showed things from The Parthenon of Books, hippie films, everything up to The Tower of Babel. And I thought, “What energy!” And one of the films that you showed was one you had made under the influence of LSD, and it seemed interesting to me, because just recently Steve Jobs died in California, and he spoke a lot to the fact that one of the greatest influences in his creation that revolutionized Apple was that he experimented with LSD, and that not even people as close to him as his wife had a clue as to what had happened to him. Yet after, when the film ended, you said: “ultimately, the only interesting thing about this film is the fact that it was made under the influence of LSD.”
MM: Yes, exactly.
AS: Well, then, I wanted to ask you if you’ve come to any conclusion about that.
MM: Well, LSD’s very helpful because it expands your consciousness and you see things with great intensity, and if you really are living within that effect you’re leading another life, because the hippies had a life parallel to society’s. A society that ended up wrecked, but it was so interesting to have done that, I would do it over again, though now it would be totally old-hat to do it.
AS: But after, on the creative level, was it really useful?
MM: On the creative level it’s of no use, because psychedelic art loses identity. If you open a psychedelic art book, you can’t tell to which artist a given work belongs.
AS: And is that a bad thing? Does it matter?
MM: Yes, it matters, because we exist for some reason. You go through the hippie movement, you live it, and all that, but that psychedelic art has no visual interest in itself, in the history of art. In the 60s more doors were opened for art. The whole decade is like the Renaissance, and in the past 40 years, those trends continue, but there are no more doors that have opened.
AS: I wanted to ask you about that too, because it’s seemed to me that, after seeing your retrospective, after you got to know Warhol, Dalí, so many others, Kaprow, all those people who really knew how to have fun, shall we say, you come back to finding meaning in the day-to-day, which doesn’t have any of that vertigo. It strikes me that life today is utterly boring if you compare it to those years.
MM: Well, no, because soon enough I manage to make impossible art like The Tower of Babel. I believe in the impossible.
AS: Then you’ve found meaning in your own work. The movitation, the wish to keep on amusing yourself. You’ve turned that into your own work.
MM: Into my own life.
AS: About your brush with death, which happened so early, with the death of your brother. I also had various experiences, ever since the bombing of the Israeli Embassy, in 2005 they kidnapped me for several hours, and I thought they would kill me. To come into contact with death, was that also a motivation, knowing from a very early age that all this comes to an end?
MM: It was a catastrophic experience. The experience of the death of my brother and all deaths are catastrophic.
AS: And the suicide? Greco’s for example?
MM: No, I consider Greco’s a work of art. It was art. In fact, it struck me as fantastic, because he always wanted to do it. It wasn’t negative. It was making something of his own life, and deciding his own death.
AS: Yet you wanted to save him, because you went looking for him.
MM: Yes, when I was very young I wanted to save him; but later, I no longer did, because it seemed to me that he had to do what he wanted to, he had to choose his life.
AS: But does that help you in some way as a driving force? Because I’ve also seen over the past few years, and I’ve heard you say in an interview, that you have to hurry things up, that you have to do things. Does it serve you as a motor to know that somehow there’s a limit?
MM: Well, yes, there’s a time limit. There’s the factor of age. There is a limit. I believe you always have to think of something impossible in order to make, because it gives you a driving force for continuing. You can do boring things, but if you have something impossible to think about, that impossibility doesn’t exist.
AS: Regarding your creative process: On the one hand, here everybody knows you, there’s always a swarm of people around you; but do you feel solitude in your creative process? You and your ideas, how do get on with that solitude?
MM: Badly! I feel bad because I can’t be alone, a terrible existential angst comes over me (pause). It’s that angst of existing that you can’t account for in any way.
AS: What do you do to cope with that? Does it help to surround yourself with people?
MM: Work saves me, even if what I’m doing doesn’t interest me. The activity in itself saves me.
AS: Another thing: sometimes it seems to me that artists basically start looking for recognition, seek fame; I wanted to ask you how it was for you on that plane. Have you come to any conclusions about it? Did you ever question yourself about it? What it a matter of something impulsive? Was it worth it?
MM: I think it came to me as a fate, because I was always different from the others. Being different brought me attention, and then, everything that happened, happened. After, in my moment of fame, which was with Warhol, the only thing I felt was that fame interested me, only in the sense that fame interested other people. But I wasn’t interested in being famous. What interested me was the interest, the curiosity in why people would go after fame.
AS: Sure.
MM: To have money, prestige, money – whatever else.
AS: And your own motivation for fame, where did that come from?
MM: It was accidental. It came from the fact that I made something as forceful and convincing as La Destrucción, and everything that came after that was inevitable. These are accidents in life that just sweep you along.
AS: When you’re being self-critical with yourself, what do you think?
MM: I get past it.
AS: You cast it aside, then, and go on?
MM: That’s right.
AS: And the last question is: Talent or discipline? Which of the two helped you more?
MM: Talent. Natural talent. I think I’m a genius, that’s the heart of it. I truly believe that and always have believed it, so no one matters in the least to me who says, “No, you’re not, you’re not,” – because I believe I’m a genius….
AS: Yet there’s a saying in English, “Talent is cheap”, no? Without discipline it’s also … well, it’s as the saying goes.
MM: You know how they say you have to practice the piano 8 hours a day? Well, I don’t believe in that; you can be a genius and not practice. But what happens is that the profession, your trade, sweeps you, and your surroundings do too. So work helps you to develop ideas. You’re doing something mechanical; for instance, I’m putting down some little color tiles or some other equally tedious thing – and yet I’m flying.
AS: The way the pianist keeps his fingers from atrophying.
MM: In order to be able to fly. You use it like an airport. If you go to your studio, it’s your airport. There you either fly or you don’t.
AS: Fine, but you do have to have the discipline to go to the studio.
MM: Well, yes, that’s it.
AS: Nothing else!
Acknowledgements: Jimena Ferreiro
Buenos Aires, November 18, 2011, at 11x7 Gallery.