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Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín’s legendary La Menesunda, first created for the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires in 1965, was reconstructed by the Museo Moderno and unveiled at its Avenida San Juan location in 2015. It was later presented at the New Museum of New York in 2019. After five years of work and preparations, in October 2024 La Menesunda según Marta Minujín [La Menesunda according to Marta Minujín] will begin a European tour, where it will be presented at four leading museums. This European tour of La Menesunda según Marta Minujín is a co-production of Tate Liverpool and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. The first stop for this emblematic installation is Copenhagen Contemporary (Denmark), where it will open on 10 October, 2024. In the years that follow, it will travel to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain) and be part of the programming for the openings of the new buildings of the KANAL – Centro Pompidou museum (Brussels, Belgium) and Tate Liverpool (United Kingdom).
The legendary work that Minujín and Santantonín presented at the Centro de Artes Visuales of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella was faithfully reconstructed by the Museo Moderno, thanks to the exhaustive research carried out by its curatorial, production and conservation teams under the direction of Victoria Noorthoorn, together with the artist. The result was the exhibition La Menesunda según Marta Minujín [La Menesunda according to Marta Minujín], presented in October 2015 on the 50th anniversary of its original opening.
In 2019, Tate Liverpool and the Museo Moderno signed a letter of intent in which they committed to co-organising the European tour of the acclaimed work, thanks to the interest of Helen Legg, Director of Tate Liverpool, and Kasia Redzisz, former curator of the gallery and now Artistic Director of KANAL – Centre Pompidou. The enthusiastic participation of Copenhagen Contemporary and the Museo Reina Sofía complete the programme of museums participating in the exhibition of La Menesunda según Marta Minujín.
These leading European institutions recognise the importance of this work in the history of art, as a landmark show that created one of the world’s first ‘environments’, or installations. The term ‘environment’ was first used by artist Allan Kaprow in 1958 in reference to his own work. Not surprisingly, Marta Minujín knew Kaprow, having collaborated with him to create the 1966 happening, Simultaneidad en simultaneidad [Simultaneity in Simultaneity]. Although the term ‘environment’ is used today almost synonymously with ‘installation’, it specifically refers to works that have the capacity to transform a space and create an immersive environment. La Menesunda – the title is a lunfardo (Argentine slang) expression for a difficult or awkward situation – is an environment that puts the participant in strange situations. According to the artists, the work sought to “intensify existence”, and it played a fundamental role in generating a radical crossover between art and popular culture. It also incorporated references to communication media that were new at the time, such as using closed circuit cameras and televisions to record and reproduce what was happening. This was just one of the many successes of La Menesunda, which not only made use of new technologies but did so in order to include the audience in the work, which could see itself broadcast on screen for the first time. In each of the spaces that made up the large maze, La Menesunda transformed the spectator into a participant.
More than 65,000 people attended the reconstruction of the experience at the Museo Moderno, which took place between October 2015 and March 2016.
In the middle of May 1965, hundreds of Buenos Aires residents lined Florida street, queuing outside for hours, blocking the entrances to the boutiques and provoking stares and whispers from passers-by. They waited patiently to enter, one at a time, La Menesunda, the mythical work that Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín had built inside the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella. Under the premise of “Beyond gods and ideas / feelings / mandates and desires”, the intricate maze inside challenged, unsettled, surprised and startled anyone who dared to cross its threshold.
According to its creators, La Menesunda was neither an artwork, nor a happening, nor a spectacle. It was somewhere between an urban folk rite and a media event; with its brazenness, revulsive spirit and histrionics, it was pure experience and provocation. It was a colossal project that would become the scandal of the year and also one of the great milestones in the history of Argentine art.
The enormous display organised by Minujín and Santantonín was only possible as part of the process of modernisation in art and culture, which initiated a decade ago, appeared to be consolidated by 1965.
By the mid-1960s, many artists associated with the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella had already embarked on their transatlantic voyages of exploration and self-discovery. Paris was the main destination, though it was later replaced by New York, the new centre of modern art. These young people returned to Buenos Aires elated and full of ideas, ready to unleash their work and build upon the experiences and lessons learned abroad. The Di Tella provided them with the space and support they needed to expand their networks and propel Argentine art into a new era.
In 1964, the word ‘happening’ entered the lexicon of the mass media and the Di Tella found itself at the centre of controversy and discussion. This was the decade in which a new dimension in art opened up, giving way to a space for transgression and for breaking down barriers on subjects that had long been impossible to discuss.
The clear statements of artists at the time – questioning the viewer’s participation in the processes of creating and showing works of art, as well as the ever-shifting boundaries of aesthetic language and its potential for disruption – along with persistent badgering from artists, particularly the indefatigable Minujín, seem to have inspired Jorge Romero Brest, Director of the Visual Arts Centre at the Instituto Di Tella, to finally commission a daring project. And so, in late 1964, work began on the titanic project of La Menesunda. Overseen by Minujín and Santantonín – with the collaboration of Floreal Amor, David Lamelas, Pablo Suárez, Rodolfo Prayón, Leopoldo Maler, and a master builder – they embarked on the creation of a labyrinth of compartments containing different situations. The work, with its eleven chaotic and labyrinthine environments, created a web of visual and sensory experiences anchored in modern city life, with its collective cultural and folk rites and established itineraries and concerns that became apparent as one journeyed through the maze. After a long wait in Florida street, the eager audience was finally able to enter the exhibition that had all the media abuzz.
The first step was to pass through a pink acrylic door in the shape of an elongated human figure, where a security guard would greet visitors and instruct them about how the exhibition worked. In the same vein, a small sign indicated visitors to climb a steep and precarious staircase that blocked the way to a tunnel of neon lights that emulated the frenetic nature of the streets of the city centre. Upstairs, visitors would discover the first environment, which was a kind of ship’s deck equipped with seven television sets, two of which showed the images of the passers-by captured by the closed circuit cameras, while the other five showed different local television programmes, from the news to the music show El Club del Clan. The presence of the television sets, a relatively new addition to the family home in Argentina, and the novelty – for most – of seeing their own image on television, raised a series of issues that would become commonplace, such as the advance of technology and the media into the domestic space and the consequent invasion of the body and the privacy of the spectator. After being struck by the appearance of their own image on a screen, visitors had to choose between descending into the neon tunnel that emulated the lights of Avenida Corrientes, or continuing on to the next space, where they would be struck by the sight of a couple lying on a bed in their underwear. The actors spent the day smoking, knitting and listening to The Beatles, while visitors passed by the side of the bed, some intruding with questions or casting looks of disapproval, while others offered knowing smiles of approval and acceptance. The nudity and the matrimonial bed in the light of day were an affront to morality where the private crossed into the public space. In short, it was a scandal, or rather, a cry for freedom by a youth suffocated by a prudish society. An image of the scene was reproduced in the media and became a hallmark of the work, synonymous with provocation.
After hitting their heads on the doorframe as they made their way through the tiny exit door, visitors would continue their journey via another narrow staircase into the interior of an enormous woman’s head. The exterior had been painted by Pablo Suárez, while the interior was filled with beauty products. There, a professional make-up artist and a masseuse offered their services to anyone who wanted to receive them. The next step consisted of a difficult entry into a rotating iron basket covered with coloured plastic strips, which in turn led to two other spaces. The first was a narrow corridor covered in enormous polyethylene “intestines” and with a ceiling that got progressively lower as visitors advanced through the space towards an orifice – likely an anal reference – through which they could watch a series of peaceful landscape scenes taken from films by the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. The interweaving of highbrow and popular references reflects the complexity of a work closely attuned to its environment and the transformations it was undergoing, bringing together a mix of references from diverse cultural spheres in a single setting. After the short cinematic interlude, visitors had to return to the basket and enter what the creators called “The Swamp”, a corridor covered in foam rubber that was so soft it hindered progress, while bits of foam gradually fell away and covered the floor. Next, visitors would enter a small, dark room that smelled strongly of a dental clinic. It was a potentially claustrophobia-inducing room furnished with a huge telephone dial and a single instruction: “Press the button to open the door”. This was followed by a brief passage through a sub-zero temperature fridge to a corridor filled by different forms and textures: smooth and rough, pleasant and irritating surfaces that could not be avoided. Finally, one would arrive at an octagonal room with mirrored walls, where the smell of used frying oil hung in the air. At the centre was a transparent acrylic booth from which black lights and fans were switched on to create a whirlwind of confetti. It was the final blow: a chaos of confetti in the air, black disco lights and mirrored walls, like a house of mirrors or haunted house at an amusement park.
La Menesunda arrived in the middle of the decade, halfway between Pop and political art, in that liminal space that opens up in the face of events capable of transforming reality. It radicalised artistic practice, expanding it in space. It was brazen, shocking and sought to provoke, and then withdrew into itself: two weeks later, it disintegrated, and all that remained were the traces of its existence in the newspapers and in the bodies of those who had visited. La Menesunda was not so much the start as it was the close of a chapter in the history of Argentine art.
Fragments of the text by Sofía Dourron, published in La Menesunda según Marta Minujín, [La Menesunda according to Marta Minujín]
In 2015, the Museo Moderno was the setting for a faithful reconstruction of Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín’s ‘environment’, occupying a 400 square metre space on the first floor.
The Museo Moderno presented La Menesunda según Marta Minujín [La Menesunda according to Marta Minujín] as a work that bears witness to the end of a decade, beginning in 1955, a time of drastic transformation of the aesthetic languages used by artists and of the modes of circulation and legitimisation of their productions, as well as of the ways in which the nascent public consumed and processed the works of the avant-garde. La Menesunda condensed many of the concerns the avant-garde had addressed since the early 1960s onwards: the voracious advance of popular culture, experience as an aesthetic medium, and the viewer as an active agent, as well as the possibility of breaking with artistic traditions and the use of art as a means of transgressing the restrictions imposed by military dictatorships and the military oversight of the democratisation process.
The Moderno project sought to contribute to the analysis of one of the forms practised by the avant-garde in the 1960s, at the crossroads of pop art and political activism, between installation and demonstration. Reviewing and discussing La Menesunda in the present allows a greater understanding of the institutional and aesthetic processes that took place in the Buenos Aires art scene of the time and at that particular political and economic conjuncture.
The experience of reconstructing the work was an invitation to reconsider the legendary weight of the original work, to evoke the past and build new readings of it, but it also awakened new reflections and sensations from a current perspective. La Menesunda según Marta Minujín [La Menesunda according to Marta Minujín] recovered, for a contemporary audience, the set of material, sensory and symbolic relations that made its existence possible in 1965, when it presented a clear rupture with the visual languages of the 1960s. Over the half-century that has passed since its presentation, the work has become loaded with multiple meanings and readings and is now a central work in the Argentine cultural imaginary.
La Menesunda consisted of a maze-like structure that took the viewer through eleven different situations, organised into a sequence of cubic, polyhedral, triangular and circular spaces covered with different materials that generated a range of multi-sensory stimuli to be experienced by the viewer. The enormous work of reconstruction required an understanding of the original plans and how the rooms were laid out in the space. The plans for the original work have been lost and the records available are scarce and fragmented. It was thus necessary to redefine the size of each of the rooms, researching the materials used in the original production, finding out which are still being manufactured, and identifying which would allow the materiality of the spaces to be reconstructed, among many other challenges. Based on this research, the Moderno’s technical teams were able to build the rooms that made up the installation as well as the transitional spaces between them.
In addition, safety and prevention measures at museums have increased greatly over the past fifty years, and thus several aspects of the work had to be adapted to meet today’s safety standards while preserving the aesthetics and atmosphere of the original 1965 work.
The external structure was thus designed and produced with other important factors in mind – such as durability and transportability for future showings – since the 1965 version of La Menesunda was open to the public for just a fortnight and then completely disintegrated. For this reason, each room was constructed independently and is modular.
The reconstruction of the work was the result of the painstaking efforts of the multidisciplinary team of professionals of the Moderno, under the supervision of Javier Villa and Sofía Dourron of the Curatorial Department; Iván Rösler, Almendra Vilela and Agustina Vizcarra, of the Exhibition Design and Production Department, and the essential involvement throughout the process of Pino Monkes, the Museum’s Head of Conservation. We also worked with a team of specialists hired especially for the project.
The exhibition at the Museo Moderno was accompanied by an ambitious catalogue that documents and delves into the reconstruction process, including archive materials, current floorplans, and stills from recordings of the 1965 La Menesunda. The book contains an essay by Sofia Dourron and a collective-produced text in which Dourron, Rösler, Vilela, Villa and Vizcarra go into detail about the challenges of reconstructing the work. It also includes a documentary dossier of images from Leopoldo Maler’s film about the work.
In June 2019, the New Museum of New York presented Marta Minujín: Menesunda Reloaded.
The exhibition was curated by Massimiliano Gioni, with artistic direction by Edlis Neeson of the New Museum, and Helga Christoffersen as Associate Curator. It was co-produced with the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. The New Museum production followed the protocols and knowledge of the Moderno, and was carried out under the supervision and continual guidance of Agustina Vizcarra, senior producer at the Museo Moderno and the lead researcher for La Menesunda.
It was the second exhibition of La Menesunda following its reconstruction at the Moderno in 2015, and the first exhibition of the work in the United States.
Copenhagen Contemporary is exclusively dedicated to the promotion of large-scale installations by contemporary artists, some highly acclaimed and others emerging. On 10 October 2024, it will open La Menesunda según Marta Minujín as part of a larger exhibition of works by the Argentine artist titled Intensify Life, which will run until April 2025 at the Danish venue. Marta Minujín: Intensify Life is curated by Marie Laurberg and Aukje Lepoutre Ravn.
The tour of La Menesunda was co-produced with the Museo de Arte Moderno and Tate Liverpool, who have been working together for the past five years, preparing the tour and adapting the installation to the different museums and spaces. This complex reconstruction takes place according to the protocols and knowledge of the Moderno and under the direction of Victoria Noorthoorn, with the essential leadership in providing coordination, supervision and continual guidance of Agustina Vizcarra, Head of Temporary Exhibitions at the Moderno and the lead researcher and senior producer of La Menesunda, and the adaptation of the design of Iván Rösler, Head of Design and Production at the Moderno, who worked side by side with Marta Minujín and the teams at Tate Liverpool to adapt the work to the conditions and demands of the European museums and to make this ambitious project a reality.
Each European exhibition will include material components of the installation that were painstakingly reconstructed by the Museo Moderno in 2015, such as the neon tunnel, vintage signage, the antique television consoles, vintage lamps, Siam refrigerator doors, and the record player, among the other antique components of the work that will travel from Argentina to be incorporated in the architecture of the exhibitions in Europe.
Marta Minujín: Intensify Life will be on view at the Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark, from 11 October 2024 to 21 April 2025.
