THE EUROPEAN TOUR OF 'LA MENESUNDA' ACCORDING TO MARTA MINUJÍN
The Museo Moderno announced that La Menesunda, the legendary work by Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín –a work originally created in 1965, reconstructed by the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and inaugurated in 2015 and later in 2019 at the New Museum in New York– is on view for the first time in Europe as part of a tour that will show it in four countries.
The European tour of La Menesunda according to Marta Minujín is a collaboration between Tate Liverpool and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. This emblematic work traveled to the Copenhagen Contemporary (Denmark) where it was inaugurated on October 10, 2024, and will then travel, in subsequent years, to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), and will be part of the opening program of the new buildings of the KANAL - Centre Pompidou Museum (Brussels, Belgium) and Tate Liverpool (United Kingdom).
This mythical work that Minujín and Santantonín presented at the Visual Arts Center of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella was faithfully reconstructed by the Museo Moderno after an exhaustive research process undertaken by the curatorial, production and conservation teams, led by Victoria Noorthoorn together with the artist. The result was the presentation of the exhibition The Menesunda according to Marta Minujín in October 2015, on the fiftieth anniversary of its original opening.
All these major European institutions recognize the fundamental importance for the history of art of this work, which was one of the first environments in the world. The term environment was first used by the artist Allan Kaprow, in 1958, to refer to his own works. It is no coincidence that Marta Minujín met Kaprow, with whom she created the happening Simultaneity in Simultaneity in 1966. Although environment is used today almost as a synonym for installation, it refers specifically to those works that have the capacity to transform a space and generate an immersive environment. La Menesunda, whose title is a slang expression of a difficult or embarrassing situation, is an environment that puts the participant in strange situations. The work, which in the words of the artists “intensified existence”, was fundamental in generating a radical crossover between art and popular culture. It also incorporated references to the new media of the time, such as a closed circuit of cameras and televisions that recorded and reproduced what was happening. This was one of the many successful operations of La Menesunda, which not only used the new technologies, but also did so to include the public in the work itself, as it could be seen broadcast on a screen for the first time. In each instance of its great labyrinth, La Menesunda transformed the spectator into a participant.
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