2015
Bilingual edition, Spanish/English
Texts: Sofìa Dourron, Iván Rösler, Almendra Vilela, Javier Villa y Agustina Vizcarra
Graphic Design: María Sibolich
Translations: Ian Barnett y Kit Maude
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220 pages
Format: 25x20cm
ISBN 978-987- 1358-40-3
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This publication accompanied the exhibition La Menesunda according to Marta Minujín, which took place at the Museo Moderno in 2015. It was a reconstruction of the legendary work by Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín that was held at the Visual Arts Centre of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in 1965. The new version allowed for a deeper examination, from a current perspective, of the institutional and aesthetic processes that took place in the city’s art scene of the 1960s, as well as allowing for a rethink of the political and economic circumstances that gave rise to those processes. The book contains an essay de Sofia Dourron and a collective text in which members of our team participated (Sofía Dourron, Iván Rösler, Almendra Vilela, Javier Villa and Agustina Vizcarra), going into detail about the challenges the reconstruction posed. It also includes a documentary dossier of images from Leopoldo Maler’s film.
Fifty years after the historic installation that Marta Minujín created together with Rubén Santantonín in May 1965 at the Centre of Visual Arts of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, the Moderno will house a faithful reconstruction in a 400 metre square space on its first floor.
La Menesunda – which means ‘mixture’ and ‘confusion’ in lunfardo, was a labyrinthine structure that took visitors on a tour through eleven situations set up in a sequence of cubic, polygon, triangular and circular spaces furnished with different materials to generate multi-sensory stimuli.
La Menesunda made the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires a cultural witness to a ground-breaking decade that began in 1955 and culminated in a radical transformation of the aesthetic languages used by artists, modes of circulation and legitimization of products, as well as the ways in which new audiences consumed and absorbed avant garde work. La Menesunda summed up many of the issues and preoccupations addressed by avant garde artists in the early sixties: the voracity of popular culture, experience as an aesthetic medium, the viewer as an active figure, the potential to break with artistic tradition and art as a means of transgressing the limitations imposed by de facto government and military interference in democratic processes.
Today, discussion of La Menesunda is important for an enhanced understanding of the institutional and aesthetic processes that took place in the art scene in the city and for rethinking the political and economic contexts that gave rise to them. The project also sought to contribute to research into a major branch of the sixties avant garde, where pop art and political activism came together as mixture of installation and protest.
The exhibition La Menesunda According To Marta Minujín was presented at the museum from 8 October 2015 until 28 February 2016.
