Marta Minujín | Short Circuit

Daniel Quiles
Arte al Día
March 23, 2010

MINUCODEs, the Americas Society’s current exhibition of archival materials and a multimedia environment related to participatory works by Marta Minujiín in the late 1960s, provides an opportunity to reconsider the Argentine artist’s projects between 1966 and 1968 that were either produced abroad or make reference to international exchange. During this period she was primarily based in New York, producing art that incorporated viewers into shared social experiences, in a manner strikingly similar to some widely discussed examples of contemporary “relational aesthetics”. Beyond facilitating this accessible dimension of her work, however, Minujín’s uses of media and choices of participants and venues also served to expose the circuits of cultural and political exchange in which these institutions and individuals—including the artist herself—were ensconced.

In October 1966 at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, Minujín staged Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity), the Argentine installment of the Three Country Happening, a collaboration with Allan Kaprow in New York and Wolf Vostell in Berlin in which all three artists executed simultaneous happenings. In the final phase of her project, Minujín recorded members of the Argentine media via film and audiorecording, subjecting those normally in control of mass communication to its mediatic capabilities. It should also be noted that, in anticipation of her coming move abroad, the Three Country Happening instantiated an international artistic network between Minujín and the Di Tella and artists and institutions in other cities. Toward the end of that year, the artist arrived in New York on a Guggenheim Fellowship. In April 1967 she created Circuit, a media environment for three groups for the Pavillon de la Jeunesse at the Montreal World’s Fair. One of the groups watched films and others appraised the first group’s activity via radio and audio broadcast.

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