NEW YORK, NY.- Americas Society presents Marta Minujín: MINUCODEs, an exhibition that revisits an earlier project by Argentine artist Marta Minujín, held in 1968 at the Americas Society, known then as the Center for Inter American Relations (CIAR). The project, called Minucode, explored social codes in four groups of leading figures in the arts, business, fashion and politics. Minujín collected social data through a series of cocktail parties attended by people who responded to a series of questionnaires the artist posted in the press.
MINUCODEs revisits that project more than 40 years later to examine its currency. Commenting on how social codes have changed since the original exhibition, Minujín says, “Politics and economics as well as art and fashion have mixed a lot. I think globalization has had a lot to do with this.”
Through recently recovered original footage and archival documents, the exhibition will shed light on this early work of a fundamental voice of the neo-avant-garde scene in Latin America, and will offer a detailed chronology on Minujín’s other multi-media environments dealing with the mass media like Circuit (1967) and Simultaneidad en Simultaneidad (1966) - a collaboration with Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostel, will also be on view.
Asked what she hopes visitors will take away from the exhibition, Minujín responds, “A fragment in time.”
Marta Minujín is a prominent voice of the Argentine neo-avant-garde art scene of the 1960s and 70s, with a brilliant international career that helped define the discussion about media, performance and participation. Minujín is often mentioned as one of the pioneers of “happenings.”
Born in 1941 in Buenos Aires, Minujín was a wunderkind sculptor who had her first solo show at the age of eighteen. In 1960 she traveled to Paris on a French National Foundation for the Arts grant and met artists such as Arman, Niki de Saint- Phalle, Christo Javacheff, and Jean-Jacques Lebel, who helped introduce happenings to France. In 1964 she won the Torquato Di Tella Institute’s first prize with “Revuélquese y Viva” (Roll Around and Live), an inhabitable construction covered in different-colored mattresses. With a Guggenheim Foundation Grant (1966), Minujín settled in New York, where she started a series of works clearly influenced by McLuhan’s theories. These works combine the ideas, concepts and structures of telecommunications art. At the end of the 1960s, her work turned toward the demystification of symbolic icons. Starting in the 1980s Minujín began to create sculptures that reinterpreted models from ancient Greece and their Roman versions. Minujín has worked with Christo, Allan Kaprow, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Juan Downey and others; she currently lives and works in Buenos Aires.
