‘Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte!’ Review: A Colorful, Creative Cry
New York
‘Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte!” at the Jewish Museum lives up to its exclamatory title and is a vibrant celebration of the 80-year-old Argentine artist that sparkles with the many facets of her work. No small feat when considering a career that’s spanned six decades and ranges from sculpture and painting to performance, installation and happenings.
With almost 100 works, this first American survey of Ms. Minujín is a major corrective for those living stateside—a long overdue institutional introduction to a pioneer in textiles, a singular feminist voice, and an inveterate activist whose cheery projects have never made the term “happy warrior” more apt.
Ms. Minujín’s most recognizable pieces are her vivid soft sculptures, created out of painted and lacquered mattress fabric. The chunky yet sinuous “Intertwined Concepts” (2019-22) greets visitors as soon as they enter, its puffy striped forms weaving in and out of one another, sumptuous, silly and sensual all at once, with mouthlike holes devouring flexuous squiggles. While she didn’t begin working with this unique material until nearly a decade after starting art school in the mid-’50s, we can see the beginnings of her thinking in “Vivaldi’s Four Seasons,” an abstract oil on canvas from 1959. Inspired by the titular concerti and taking a cue from her friendship with Alberto Greco, an Argentine Informalist and conceptual artist, the impulsive, layered forms and intense colors presage her later signature style.
Moving on from early works, this chronologically and thematically arranged show next looks at Ms. Minujín’s happenings and conceptual pieces from the ’60s and ’70s. Curators Darsie Alexander and Rebecca Shaykin have struck a smart balance throughout in their presentation of these ethereal works, usually including just a brief video or a couple of photos or brief video that capably capture the heart of each project instead of overloading us with documentation. This light touch allows us to take in the full range of Ms. Minujín’s ideas, from “Mayhem,” a series of rooms where visitors had different encounters—with a couple in bed, a hallway of closed-circuit televisions, a carousel—to “MINUCODE,” a series of cocktail parties whose guest lists were based on people’s careers (a party for politicians, a party for businessmen, etc.), to a performance with Andy Warhol that riffed on Argentine agriculture and the economy.
Pure fun is her “Panel depicting rugby players,” a flashing neon sign created for a 1965-66 happening that sent up swanky playboy culture, with the life-size players pitching the ball and going in for a tackle. It’s also evidence of Ms. Minujín’s boundless creativity, incorporating another unconventional material into her lexicon around the same time that Bruce Nauman, the master of neon, was beginning to experiment with it.
Not everything here is as invigorating, though. Ms. Minujín’s erotic paintings from the 1970s—flatly abstracted close-ups of genitalia—caused a stir when they were new but today seem blasé. And a series of “toppled monuments,” a response in part to the 1976-83 military dictatorship of her homeland, can come off as too on-the-nose. That said, her proposal, seen here with preparatory drawings, for a never-realized Statue of Liberty is laugh-out-loud funny: The overturned lady would be covered in raw hamburgers that were then cooked using flamethrowers and distributed to the public, who would pick up buns from a nearby truck as ketchup rained down from a helicopter. She impishly wrote to McDonald’s to ask for its help with the project and its polite refusal is on view.
Jumping into the present, the exhibition concludes with Ms. Minujín’s most recent work, which demonstrates her commitment to the materials she’s consistently returned to and her continued exploration of new forms. As regards the former, her “strip paintings,” large canvases covered in thousands of tiny scraps of painted fabric, hark back to her mattress-based works. These are dense and explosively colorful—like someone split an atom of cadmium red—with the exception of “Pandemic” (2020-21). Created during the Covid-19 crisis and entirely grayscale, it envelops you completely, as if you’re drowning in a sea of TV static. And a room filled with striped projections surrounds you literally—bringing to mind the work of Jen Stark, it’s a dizzying orgy of swirling hues. An ideal conclusion to a show that’s heady, flamboyant in the best way, and smilingly subversive.
Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte!
Jewish Museum, through March 31, 2024
Mr. Kelly is the Journal’s associate Arts in Review editor. Follow him on X @bpkelly89.
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