The Lifelong Art Revolution of Marta Minujín
Marta Minujín, La Menesunda: According to Marta Minujín (2024), Installation view of Intensify Life at Copenhagen Contemporary (2024). Photo by David Stjernholm.
The remnants of the Pop Art era echo through the streets of New York—Keith Haring’s dancing pastels adorn the Carmine Street Pool, and Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book-esque illustrations enliven the 42nd Street station. Despite these relics of the golden age of American Pop Art, one Argentine visionary continues to find innovative means of reinventing her work and further shaking things up. Marta Minujín—a performer and artist regarded for her happenings, soft sculptures, and immersive installations—is a trailblazer who bolsters advocacy through the avant-garde.
Following her introduction during Pop Art’s peak, Minujín adopted an abstract lens in her work, commenting on consumerism, feminism, and classism, all while recalling the vibrancy of her home, Argentina, where she was born in 1943, as inspiration. Her affection for soft and malleable materials, such as cardboard boxes and mattresses she found on the street, directly juxtaposes the dense topics she takes on in her work.
At the time, being male, American, and white seemed like the criteria for acceptance into the New York school, and the likes of Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol maintained their dominance as the purveyors of Pop Art in the city.
Marta Minujín at her studio in Buenos Aires. Photos by Emilia Van Raap.
While Warhol, her collaborator, became the face of the era, Minujín has long gone underappreciated for her advancement of Latin American art in the context of New York's avant-garde. Her work explored sexuality and liberation while challenging the class disparity and censorship of authoritarian Argentina, preaching her ideology that, “Art is higher than politics.”
Political unrest in authoritarian Argentina stained her upbringing. The instability of the period and the recurring notion of destruction informed her work, including her first happening, La destrucción (1963). She encouraged collaborators to dismantle, break, and set her art aflame, paralleling the dictatorship's censorship and suppression of artists at the time. Further, Minujín stressed the theme of dispensability by using physical means to break down, deface, and eradicate her work.
Minujín’s use of tactile materials, such as plush fabrics like mattresses and discarded cardboard, was central to her innovative approach to the era. As her financial constraints limited the number of things she could get her hands on, she explored the tactility of cardboard, also finding inspiration in the logos that branded the boxes of popular products with which she grew up. This fascination with consumer culture led Minujín to incorporate advertisements and everyday packaging in her works, mirroring the Warholian emphasis on consumerism. In Cajas (1962), Minujín’s early work, she played with the idea of disposability and the branding of everyday objects—themes she continued to toy with throughout her career.
Informed by her time in Paris from 1960 to 1962, this transition to nouveau réalisme marked her outright rejection of the traditionally elitist norms of the art world, fueled by the sociopolitical factors implicating her daily life in Argentina.
She promptly ordered the destruction of her old works, clearing the way for La Menesunda (1965).
La Menesunda—headed by Minujín, who collaborated with Rubén Santantonín and five others—created a conceptual reflection of Buenos Aires through a set of interactive rooms. Designed with accessibility in mind, the exhibition combined performance and sculpture with its patrons.
The experience, originally organized at the Torcuato di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires, begins as the viewer steps through a human-shaped cutout of pink-tinted plastic, leading to a peephole through which onlookers peer into a woman’s head doused in all pink, walls decorated with sponges and beauty supplies. Minujín described it as a look into the minds of women in the 1960s, going as far as allowing visitors to get their makeup done by in-house beauticians, acting as a commentary on the pin-up aesthetic of the time and the domesticated role women played. Some of the notions she forth in some of the rooms received backlash due to their seemingly provocative contexts—especially the room showcasing a man and woman in bed.
The installation sits at the epicenter of the Pop Lunfardo, a movement of radical, participatory conceptual art in 1960s Argentina, which women, including Minujín, championed. Pop Lunfardo is unique in its sociocultural flair, influenced by Argentinian pop culture, found materials, and mayhem that immerses the audience.
“The installation sits at the epicenter of the Pop Lunfardo, a movement of radical, participatory conceptual art in 1960s Argentina, which women, including Minujín, championed.”
La Menesunda was one of the first works to create a participatory art experience while also acting as a performance in and of itself—this concept would later become commonplace in many other contemporary art contexts globally. Minujín popularized unconventional methods of creation, interaction, and topicality that still define U.S. art in the modern day. The installation set the conceptual groundwork for Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms that engulf the viewer's perception and recall the maximalist work of Jeff Koons, combining kitsch elements with commentary on consumerism.
The work's personalization and immersive nature resulted in 30,000 visiting and experiencing the installation. Minujín sparked a newfound exploration of art’s accessibility and what communities have permission to consume—imploring its audience to become a vital part of the work.
Following her decision to flee the conservative regime overhauling her home, she came to the U.S. in 1966, where people also considered her work radical. Her out-of-the-box methodology set a precedent for generations of artists as she carved a place for herself in a generally elitist New York City art world of the ‘60s.
Minujín ushered in a new paradigm, the melding of politically charged protest under the means of avant-garde expression and abstraction. Her cultural heritage set her apart from the New York School artists and spoke to her experience as an Argentine fleeing from her home due to political disarray and suppression, expressed in her eclectic fashion.
The title Pop Artist doesn't speak to Minujín’s depth of range and versatility. She constructed a Parthenon out of banned books, paid the Argentine foreign debt to Andy Warhol with corn, and burned the entirety of her early works in a public Paris street.
Her once-criticized works—addressing themes of sexual expression, consumerism, and urban chaos—served as a counterpoint to the repressive regime in Argentina during the late 1960s. Where La Menesunda was a breeding ground for expression, freedom, and liberation, the political state of the country sought cultural control and compliance. The military dictatorship targeted works like La Menesunda, making it an act of resilience—its underlying themes echoing for generations to come.
Marta Minujín, La Menesunda: According to Marta Minujín (2024), Installation view of Intensify Life at Copenhagen Contemporary (2024). Photo by David Stjernholm.
The work had an upheaval of interest when the New Museum in New York resurrected the 12-room installation in 2019. It later went on a world tour, introducing a new generation to the participatory work.
Though her flowers are long overdue, Minujín is a pillar of the Pop Art era, and if her visual Warholian aesthetic wasn't enough, she still prioritizes public attainability of art and pushes the boundaries of performance.
Her journey has come full circle, returning to New York from her home in Argentina for her most recent installation in the hub of capitalism: Times Square. In this presentation, the long-standing critique of commercialism in her work is directly in conversation with the bustling epicenter of culture and consumerism in the heart of New York City.
The Sculpture of Dreams (2023) is a nod to her colorful career; the plush sculpture stands at 50 feet tall and disrupts the already chaotic environment in which it sits. Acting as her first public exhibition, the “anti-sculpture” connects New York to her most recent project that debuted in Argentina and Brazil.
Minujín’s legacy stands for empowerment, resourceability, and a dedication to social justice while maintaining an irreverent outlook on her art. Her upbringing as a low-income woman in war-torn Argentina is a foundational piece of her history that she continues to carry in her work, even after a six-decade run in the art world.
Minujín is a refreshing example of using one’s platform to push against oppressive systems of power while still holding onto one’s morality and enthusiasm. Mirroring the ideologies outlined in Pop Lunfardo, the genre highlighted the beauty and culture of the country, intertwining local slang, iconography, and sociopolitical ideologies within the subgenre.
The impact Pop Lunfardo had on Argentinian art history was revolutionary in its prime, and as outlined in The World Goes Pop, on its way to “. . . transforming Buenos Aires into a great artistic center on par with New York or Paris, but this slipped as the decade drew to a close.”
The coup of the Argentinian dictatorship would come a decade later, stunting any growth the Pop Lunfardo movement had accumulated. However, its origins are still noteworthy, highlighting this trailblazer who combined performance, narrative, and viewer interaction to forge her path in a white, male-dominated field.
Marta Minujín, La Menesunda: According to Marta Minujín (2024), Installation view of Intensify Life at Copenhagen Contemporary (2024). Photo by David Stjernholm.
Today, La Menesunda’s iconography is prevalent in global history and lives on through the installations' reprisals in 2015 and 2021. The first installation broke barriers barring art for only the elite. Through the work, thousands of individuals from diverse backgrounds received the opportunity to live in La Menesunda once more.
Although referenced as the “Warhol of Argentina,” Minujín carved out a space for herself in the realm of Pop Art and established the brand of Pop Lunfardo. She used her intersectionality as a base for her work and didn’t succumb to the binds of gender, class, or cultural expectations. Today, the impact of Minujín and La Menesunda lives on, reimagined, celebrated, and referenced in contemporary art and cultural discourse.