Early life
Minujín’s grandfather Salvador was a military tailor whose Russian Jewish family arrived in Argentina in the 1890s. He was active in the Jewish community and was a founder member of Buenos Aires’ Paso Temple. Minujín still lives in her family home in the San Telmo district of Buenos Aires. She first realised she wanted to be an artist when she was 10 years old, stating: “a light flashed, telling me that the only thing I could do with my life was to be an artist.”
Career
She started out working in Paris and New York (she was a friend of Andy Warhol’s) and from the mid-1960s became one of the most energetic proponents of pop art and public art events in Buenos Aires. Her 1964 work, ¡Revuelquese y Viva!, invited audiences to lounge around a room constructed of huge hand-painted mattresses. La Menesunda (1965) invited participants to tour a labyrinth of different environments: one room resembled a giant refrigerator and was kept below freezing, another was filled with the smell of a dentist’s office, and a third featured a domestic interior, complete with a couple lying in bed. Minuphone (1967) was an interactive telephone booth and her Parthenon of Books (1983), on the busy Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires, recreated the renowned Greek edifice, paying homage to the symbol of democracy. The work was composed of 20,000 books that had been banned during the country’s military regime and, when the piece was disassembled, the books were distributed to the public.
Source link
