Last December we visited Buenos Aires after two weeks camping and trekking Patagonia. Upon arriving in BA we did a lot of consuming, mostly of steak pasta and wine, but also a bit of art too. Most impressive was a retrospective at the MALBA on the work of Marta Minujin, an eccentric modern artist from San Telmo, Buenos Aires. What struck me about her life’s work is its scope, ambition, diversity of form, accessibility, and strength of statement. From fashion design to video installations, to sculpture, to public art, Minujin experimented in provocative ways for three decades. Minujin’s La Destrucción (1963), the first of many “happenings” or events as works of arts themselves, involved a display of mattresses arranged by Minujin along the Impasse Roussin and later destroyed by her avant-garde artist friends.
One of my favorite “happenings” was in December 1983 when Minujin and several helpers spent 17 days building a full-scale model of the Parthenon in a public park in Buenos Aires. Aside from metal scaffolding, it was made almost entirely of books wrapped in plastic, all of which had been banned by the country’s dictatorship, dismantled that year after Argentina’s first democratic election in a decade. “The Parthenon of Books/Homage to Democracy,” as it was titled, stood for about three weeks, after which the public was permitted to disassemble the piece and keep the books. 
One of Minujin’s best known pieces is the “Minuphone”, a telephone booth that patrons can enter, dial a number, and be presented with a projection of colors, sounds and images of themselves on a television screen floor. The Minuphone was one of the more unique art installations I’ve ever seen, other than of course the live couple in bed. Yes, in the middle of the museum was a fully dressed bed in which two actors were lying together, chatting and caressing, uninterrupted by the stares of museum patrons walking by. The MALBA exhibition’s curator Victoria Noorthoorn does a wonderful job of characterizing Minujin’s work:
“Three variables enter into dialogue, Minujín’s capacity to propose a constant redefinition of the categories of art, the possibility of imagining a fate for herself on a global scale, and her need to assert, at every step, a freedom of body and mind. Or, said differently, Marta is and isn’t all that what we think she is: freedom, whirlwind, excess, egocentrism, celebration, pure creativity and madness, and at the same time – contrary to what we would imagine -, method, precision, rigor, resistance, generosity, a critical mind, as well as initiator and manager of artistic projects never seen before in Argentina.”
I was happy to learn that Minujin is continuing to do great statement installations, as I like to call them. Below is a picture of her latest, an 82 foot high tower of books in dozens of languages standing in Buenos Aires, named 2011 Book Capitol. “A hundred years from now, people will say ‘there was a Tower of Babel in Argentina … and it didn’t need translation because art needs no translation,'” Minujin told Reuter’s Television. When the installation ends this month, literature lovers will be permitted to take a book from the installation. Minujin is well known for her mantra, “art is everywhere.” Her work compels me to agree.
