Entrap, Engulf, Overwhelm
From Existentialism to Counterculture in the Work of Marta Minujín
In the words of her friend, the critic and curator Jorge Romero Brest, the Argentine artist Marta Minujín launched herself into a transnational network of avant-garde activity with ‘a true auto-da-fé’ (2000, 4), committed in Paris during June 1963. La destrucción [The Destruction], which has subsequently become one of her best-known happenings, saw Minujín gather together a series of assemblages made from old mattresses, cardboard, and sutured textile sections, all of which she had fabricated while living in the city during the preceding year, and drag them into an empty lot on the Impasse Ronsin.1 Minujín then invited a group of artists she had met in the French capital to alter her constructions with their own stylistic flourishes – to, as she put it, ‘delete, erase, modify my works’ (2004, 61) – before setting fire to the sculptural conglomerates in a spectacular pyre of metaphorical and tangible self-immolation.
If La destrucción signals the centrality of sabotage to Minujín’s practice during the 1960s and 1970s, then the work also reveals its complex operation. At its most overt level, sabotage functions in Minujín’s oeuvre as an act of wilful destruction, through which artworks, participants, audiences and the artist herself all come under attack at various points. While this attack is often explicitly physical, it is also implicitly psychological. More specifically, by constantly endangering her work through erasure and ephemerality, and as a result questioning artistic authority and agency, Minujín employs a form of self-sabotage that often verges on nihilism, as the processes she sets in train seem actively to engineer her work’s un-doing.2
Minujín’s sculptures, installations and performances frequently test the seductive appeal that obliteration might have for the individual subject, through immersion as much as destruction. Yet Minujín’s work also continues to embrace the paradoxically enabling qualities of sabotage – in La destrucción, for example, the display of self-sabotage also provided a passport into established communities of artistic exchange, such as the French Nouveaux Réalistes. Brest’s intriguing characterization of La destrucción as an ‘auto-da-fe’, in which Minujín simultaneously appears as instigator and victim while the mattress-assemblages accrue heretical implications, alerts us to the subversive connotations of her artistic approach. While sabotage in Minujín’s work might appear connected with self-destruction, there is often a clandestine agenda at play that seeks to redefine subjectivity, rather than accepting its dissolution.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Minujín travelled between the different cultural and political contexts of Argentina, France and North America, creating installations, environments and performances in Buenos Aires, Paris, New York, Montreal and Washington DC. The diverse body of work Minujín created in this period encompasses her Colchones (sculptures using mattresses) (see Figures 1 & 2), participation in collective exhibitions such as La feria de las ferias [The Fair of the Fairs] (1964), happenings like Suceso plástico [Plastic Event] (1965), and environmental installations including Importación-exportación [Import-Export] (1968) and Espi-art [Spy-Art] (1977). This chapter argues that, through these works, Minujín explored the roles played by aggression and self-obliteration in social interaction. Initially, this exploration was informed by an existentialist worldview, but as the 1960s progressed it became linked to an increasing alignment with the carnivalesque irreverence of international counterculture. While existentialism and counterculture might initially seem poles apart, this chapter proposes that the nihilism of the former prepared the ground for Minujín’s affinity with the collective disaffection evidenced in the latter. Her responses to both influences were underpinned by a consistent attentiveness to the experiences of alienation and the loss of a clear concept of self, and to the processes by which a subject might be reduced to an object.
Many of Minujín’s performances and environments have been concerned with either intervening in established cultural groupings, both within the art world and in wider communities, or delineating alternative ones. Even her particular take on the happening as a form, and the extremity with which she imbued it, can be seen as a manifestation of this approach. While La destrucción was Minujín’s self-proclaimed ‘first happening’ (2000, 61), critics such as Alicia Paez noted that the concept of the ‘happening’ was an awkward imposition on the Argentine avant-garde by critics and artists from the US, ‘where the true history of this genre has developed and where the word which defines it emerged’ (1967, 21).3 Within this context, sabotage emerges as both an effect of everyday interaction, and a tool that can be deployed to negotiate the cultural field, and carve out unconventional artistic and social spaces. While Minujín’s shifting forms of sabotage have never been explicitly political, they are not without a politics, intimately linked as they are with the simultaneously terrifying and elating instability of the subject’s being in the world, and with a consistently anti-conservative investment in the fraught possibilities of individual freedom.
By situating sabotage and self-destruction, particularly the strategies of ensnaring subjects and bombarding them with sensory phenomena, as integral to Minujín’s artistic productions of the 1960s and early 1970s, we can begin to account critically for her work’s deliberately provocative aspects, and regain a sense of its potential to challenge normative social constructs. The Argentine and international press feted Minujín in this period, while her embrace of celebrity and an unashamedly populist approach has fostered the view that her work is a fashionable confection.4 Even Minujín’s defenders have been cautious in their appraisals: for example, in his 1967 book El ‘pop art’ Oscar Masotta observed that Minujín’s artistic approach manifested ‘a strange mix of absolute rejection and a total acceptance of the effective structures of real society’ (1967a, 28). More recent commentators such as Christian Ferrer, while celebrating the experimental nature of Minujín’s enthusiasm for technology, have highlighted the danger that ‘with hindsight, what seemed like a rupture, novelty or even scandal now reveals itself as something short-lived, a bit fruitless, or not as radical as it promised to be’ (2010, 72). By contrast, this chapter argues that Minujín strategically deployed apparent self-sabotage as a means of infiltration, subversion and even entrapment, while establishing a place for herself within international avant-garde networks and creating a role for the woman artist as director and orchestrator, rather than model or muse.
‘Laying Traps and Dangling Baits’
Minujín has cast her movement into non-traditional media during the early 1960s, specifically the use of mattresses as a material that she would paint in vibrant colours, as an act of determined self-sabotage. ‘When I was 18 or 19’, the artist recalls, ‘I was a very good painter, so good that I was bored with it. So one day I punched a hole in the middle of my painting, took the mattress off my bed and said “I’m going to work with mattresses” [… and] made a kind of plastic house’ (2000, 230). While many Argentine artists, notably those associated with Kenneth Kemble’s Arte Destructivo initiative, started to use non-traditional materials in their work during the 1950s and early 1960s (see Giunta 2007, 119–162), Minujín seems to have chosen mattresses specifically for their overblown, even histrionic associations with erotic and terminal dramas.5 By using mattresses, Minujín wanted ‘to symbolise how people spend half their life in bed: they are born, they love, they die’ (cited in Romero Brest 2000, 1). As if literalizing these connections, during the 1962 exhibition El hombre antes del hombre [Man Before Man] at the Galería Florida in Buenos Aires Minujín arranged for a photographer to capture her perched gingerly inside one of the resulting Colchones [Mattresses], gazing out from its frame-like armature (see Figure 1). The formal rupture enacted by Minujín’s use of assembled found objects, which here includes sections of cardboard boxes as well as mattress material, becomes transposed into an evocation of psychic threat and entrapment. The pliant, yielding material of the mattress supports her body but also contains it: there is a sense that the construction might snap shut at any moment, devouring its occupant.
Between 1961 and 1963, as she moved back and forth between Buenos Aires and Paris for two extended stays in the French capital, Minujín actively pursued the threat of potential equivalence between embodied subject and object posed by the three-dimensional mattress constructions. While in Paris, Minujín began to construct what she describes as ‘invented mattresses’ (2004, 61), recounting how: ‘I bought fabric and a glue pen and managed to borrow a sewing machine and the first one I made was my first environment […] a kind of mattress-house […] that construction I hung in the centre of the studio and people could enter and leave it as they wished’ (61). Minujín’s architectural conceptualization of these three-dimensional sculpture-installations is borne out by their immersive, enveloping qualities, revealed in surviving photographs of destroyed or lost works.
A picture taken circa 1963 at Minujín’s Rue Delambre studio in Paris again shows the artist occupying a Colchón (see Figure 2). Her body is subsumed within its swelling protuberances so that only her head, with its distinctive mop of blond hair, and an arm poke out of a window-like aperture at the top. The Colchón is covered in a repeating pattern of green and red bands, their slightly slapdash application revealing how Minujín painted the stripes directly onto the fabric. The arrangement of its bulbous sections, apparently affixed to a rectangular supporting frame, is distinctly haphazard, as if deliberately resisting coherent organization or recognizable form. When combined with the stripe-pattern, which jumps and stutters across the stuffed shapes of different sizes, the overall visual effect is, for all the Colchón’s festive air, one of slight queasiness. Although the construction in the Paris photograph could be interpreted as a mobile home, a ‘kind of mattress-house’ (Minujín 2004, 61) intended to provide comfort for a peripatetic artist, it also displays distinctly constricting and even imprisoning qualities. Indeed, the Colchones seem to infer that the transnational relocations requiring such a protective cocoon – what Nikos Paspastergiadis has influentially theorized as migration’s ‘turbulence’ (2000, 4) – might be as disorientating as they are exciting.
These performative photographs indicate that Minujín envisaged the Colchones as engulfing, even overpowering, viewers and inhabitants alike. In the Rue Delambre photograph, Minujín averts her gaze from the camera while her head rests on her arm, communicating an impression of deep and studied ennui. The inference here is that the Colchón simultaneously stands for, and occasions, the snares of self-absorption and mental confinement, while moreover constituting an analogy for the disconcerting collapse of subject into objecthood, by encircling the flesh of the occupant with sacs of wadded material. Just prior to La destrucción, Minujín held an exhibition of the Colchones she had made in Paris at her Rue Delambre studio: in the pamphlet produced to accompany the display, José-Augusto França describes them as ‘monstrous organisms’, linking them to the blasted landscape of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play Waiting for Godot (França 1963, n.p). In a 1966 article for the publication Arts Magazine, Jacqueline Barnitz asserted that Minujín ‘tries to liberate people from what they are not by steering them into experiences that free them to be what they really are. She does this by laying traps and dangling baits’ (1966, 38). Barnitz highlights the paradoxes and tensions that result from the simultaneous dynamics of liberation and entrapment that structure Minujín’s work across multiple media. The hybrid mattress-works, then, threatens to sabotage the viewer who approaches and enters them not just by acting as a physical snare, their bright colours luring the viewer in, but also because the correlation they establish between sacking and skin – Romero Brest evocatively referred to the mattresses as ‘carcasses’ (2000, 4) – presents a reductive vision of the subject as object, one which implicitly references mortification.
In a statement from the mid-1960s, during which she reflects on works such as her 1965 installation El batacazo [The Long Shot], Minujín relays her desire to create situations in which ‘people will be subject and object at the same time’ (c.1966, n.p.).6 Minujín’s interest in this dynamic can be seen to develop out of her involvement with mattresses, and their particular material effects. While the viewer could presumably choose whether or not to enter one of Minujín’s mattress-houses, the performative photographs imply that once inside, there was a danger that audiences would discover that they were not only surrounded and embroiled but, as Masotta put it in his essay ‘Three Argentines in New York’, cast in the role of ‘a thing among things’ (1967b, 109). For all their tactile and visually appealing qualities, the early Colchones represented a concerted attempt to initiate disorienting breakdowns of subjectivity in their viewers and occupants, which as Masotta’s essay testifies, would be continued in Minujín’s subsequent installations and environments.
In accounts of her time in Paris during the early 1960s, Minujín connects this period with an embrace of ‘existentialist feelings’, vividly recounting how ‘I wanted to commit suicide and I was crying as I worked. It was like torture art’ (2000, 231). The physical barrier erected between the inhabitant of Minujín’s Colchones and the outside world by their unwieldy padded segments, together with the transformation of subject into object implied by the equivalence between live flesh and the striated epidermises of the mattress-material, echo Jean-Paul Sartre’s understanding, in Being and Nothingness (1943), of the relationship between the individual and society as one of alienation. For Sartre, the experience of subjective embodiment results in the individual’s recognition of both the impossibility of ever fully registering other subjects and their interior lives, and the contemplation of their object-hood in the eyes of others: ‘I exist my body: this is its first dimension of being. My body is utilized and known by the Other: this is its second dimension. But in so far as I am for others, the Other is revealed to me as the subject for whom I am an object’ (Sartre 2003, 375). Sartre presents human interaction as a paranoid process whereby interiority and autonomy are constantly sabotaged through the internalization of external objectification. This is because, ‘with the appearance of the Other’s look I experience the revelation of my being-as-object; that is, of my transcendence as transcended’ (375).
The photographs of Minujín secreted within her early Colchones encapsulate this tension between subjecthood and objectification, as the individual attempts to shore up a coherent sense of self in the face of incursions from within and without. Although existentialism seems to have made a particular impact on Minujín while she was in Paris, Philip Derbyshire notes that Sartre’s influence in Argentina during the 1950s had also been ‘extensive’ (2009, 11), owing in part to the longstanding cultural and linguistic ties between Buenos Aires and the French capital. After her return to Buenos Aires in 1964 by way of the Venice Biennale, Minujín ostensibly rejected existentialist feelings, declaring, ‘“I want to be happy, I don’t want to be an existentialist, I want to be pop”’ (2000, 231). Yet even the Colchones Minujín previously created in Paris, with their gaudy stripes and yielding parts, witness a mocking and humorous hijacking rather than a clear instantiation of existentialist tenets.
This ambivalent relationship with existentialism can be detected in La destrucción, in that the piece apparently both embraced obliteration, and signalled a conceptual break with the grungy and abject assemblages of mattresses, fabric, cardboard and found objects that Minujín had made under the influence of ‘existentialist feelings’ (2000, 231). Yet from the outset, La destrucción was more than an instance of existentialist pessimism. Daniel Quiles notes that by scripting a section of the group performance in which artists, including the provocateur Jean-Jacques Lebel and others, such as Christo, associated with the Nouveau Réalisme movement, were specifically asked to adulterate and adapt Minujín’s works, ‘it was not only her sculptures that were obliterated. Diffused into the activity of other artists, her very identity was “burnt out,” undone through collectivity’ (2008, 73). As Quiles’ reference to ‘collectivity’ indicates, the self-destructiveness on display in La destrucción was also enabling. While Andrea Giunta observes that Minujín ‘appropriated resources she had picked up in Paris and […] put them at the service of her own work’ (2007, 150), by inviting other artists to create their own additions to her mattress-pieces before she destroyed them, Minujín moreover metaphorically condemned their work to the fire at the same time.7
A photograph by Harry Shunk and Janos Kender documenting the performance (see Figure 3) shows six of Minujín’s sculptures lined up in the lot like cars on a production line. Artists work busily on four of them, as Minujín adopts the position of overseer. In employing and supervising the labour of the artists who gathered at the Impasse Ronsin, Minujín reversed the perceived centre-periphery relationship between Paris and Buenos Aires, by first trapping the French artists in the role of parasitical dependents on her sculptural forms for the realization of what effectively became their own work, and then by slyly inveigling them to commit group annihilation, razing their efforts along with hers.8 Sabotage here is achieved through infiltration, conducted via seditious engagement with, rather than direct attack on, a comparatively established international network of avant-garde practitioners – and by adoption, rather than outright rejection, of an artistic definition (the ‘happening’) associated primarily with the US. Minujín’s claim to the role of director, meanwhile, which she reprised in later performances such as the complex multi-media collaboration Simultaneidad en simultaneidad [Simultaneity in Simultaneity] (1966), countered the gendered restrictions of the early 1960s.
In this respect, though Sartre might provide one source for Minujín’s engagement with existentialism, Simone De Beauvoir’s 1949 text The Second Sex further illuminates the specifically gendered subjectivities at stake in Minujín’s work. De Beauvoir maps the subject-object positions of existentialism onto the experience of the female subject – a female subject constantly required by patriarchal society ‘to make herself object, to be the Other’ (1997, 291). In the wrecking of the Colchones and their symbolically alienating structures, together with the placing of the woman artist centre stage, La destrucción can be construed as a manifestation of De Beauvoir’s insistence that the female subject has ‘the power to choose between the assertion of her transcendence and her alienation as object’ (82). In the catalogue accompanying the major exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), which featured Minujín’s work, Marsha Meskimmon emphasizes the need to explore ‘affinities between diverse geographical positions’ when tracing transnational feminist activity (2007, 325). Minujín’s output comprises a unique, but interconnected, aspect of wider challenges to reductive conceptions of femininity during the 1960s and 1970s.
Although the Colchones were physically destroyed in La destrucción, the violent ramifications of the happening can be interpreted as the ultimate realization of the conflict threatened by their composition. The covertly aggressive, enfolding actions of the first Colchones staged in the Paris photographs, and in later large-scale fabric works such as Chambre d’amour [Chamber of Love] (1964) and ¡Revuélquese y viva! [Wallow Around and Live!] (1964) were amplified and made explicit in other early happenings such as Minujín’s infamous Suceso plástico (1965) at the Montevideo football stadium in Uruguay. For this piece, Minujín gathered together a group of participants before pelting them with missiles from a helicopter, including cabbages and live chickens. Minujín describes the scene dramatically: ‘the chickens – heavy chickens on your head. It was crazy – pow, pow, pow. Like bombs all the chickens […] some of the people got hurt in the head’ (1991, 22). The physical violence of this attack on her actors corresponds with the implicit cruelty of their recruitment and direction: Minujín advertised in local newspapers for ‘fat women’, ‘muscle men’ and ‘prostitutes’, reducing the individuals involved to purely one-dimensional physical and social categories (22).9 She then demanded that they execute a range of awkward social interactions, including grabbing and kissing each other. There is an element here of what Claire Bishop, drawing on Masotta’s characterization of the happenings that he devised in Buenos Aires during 1968, has identified as ‘social sadism’ (2012, 105–128).10 The festival humour of mayhem and confusion in Suceso plástico is deeply ambiguous, cut through with the malice that can accompany laughter.
As such, Minujín’s changing conceptualization of sabotage can be linked to the understanding of carnival behaviour elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin in relation to medieval literature. Bakhtin celebrates the carnival as establishing ‘a boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed [to] the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastic and feudal culture’ (1984, 4). For Bakhtin, the carnival opens up moments of rupture in official culture, but never manages – or even arguably intends – to dislodge or change the superstructures of power, which remain obdurately in place. Works like Suceso plástico, the public condemnation of which entailed that Minujín felt unable to return to Uruguay for several years (Minujín 1991, 22), achieved a disruptive mayhem at odds with prevailing social norms, but its provocation seems almost deliberately, deliriously random, without a clear target. Moreover, the tipping point at which carnival liberation and elation might become coercive violence and destructive frenzy shadows both La destrucción and Suceso plástico in equal measure.11
Despite using a very different formal vocabulary, the Colchones constitute immersive situations that teeter on a knife-edge between enjoyment and aggression, as indicated by the psychedelic stripes of the mattress-related works made in late 1963 and 1964. ¡Revuélquese y viva!’s intestinal, uroboric forms twine themselves around each other, hanging in pendulous neon orange and pink confusion to create a nest-like environment that is both inviting and disorientating. The large-scale sculpture, big enough for people to crawl inside, went on display at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella during 1964 to the strains of rock music, which was intended to create a total sensory experience in which viewers could immerse themselves.12 Like other works that developed out of the early Colchones in the mid-1960s such as Chambre d’amour, ¡Revuélquese y viva! uses Pop-inflected vocabularies of fluorescent colours and entertainment, but infused with bodily overtones.13 While these works might stage the sabotaging impulses embroiled in many romantic and erotic relationships, they also celebrate sensuality and sexuality, aligning Minujín with other women practitioners from this period such as Niki de Saint-Phalle, Yayoi Kusama and Carolee Schneemann. As its title underlines, ¡Revuélquese y viva! established a carnivalesque zone in which audiences were invited to intermingle, but which also had the potential to be deeply destabilizing.
The majority of Minujín’s Colchones offer abstracted correlations with interlinked, often sensuous organic forms reminiscent of the US critic Lucy Lippard’s 1966 formulation of ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ as much as Pop Art, but she also used them to execute figurative works.14 In the same year as the 1964 group exhibition La feria de las ferias at the Galería Lirolay in Buenos Aires, Minujín constructed two gigantic, cartoon-like mattress figures, their faces reduced to goggling eyes and gaping mouths. Realized on a larger-than-life scale – a photograph shows them towering over Minujín – they are reminiscent of the effigies paraded at festivals (see Figure 4). Their brightly coloured, plump and fleshy forms, covered in bands of lurid stripes, manifest carnivalesque exuberance. For La feria de las ferias, meanwhile, Minujín and her fellow artists installed themselves in the gallery and sold their work directly to the public, with Minujín hawking sections of mattress. They were joined by Minujín’s friend and supporter the French critic Pierre Restany, who sat in a small kiosk purveying catalogue ‘forewords’, thus parodying art world systems (Giménez 2006, 240). In an echo of La destrucción, any works left unsold were demolished at the exhibition’s close and thrown into the River Plate during an act of ‘ritual destruction’, undermining the production, circulation and consumption of stable artworks (240). The delight this finale manifested in transformative, metamorphic demolition is not without an element of critique. Here carnivalesque self-sabotage interrupts established processes of commodity exchange, specifically the reliance of commercial galleries on unique, saleable objects.
As she moved from the early Colchones into the larger mattress-based works, together with installations and happenings, Minujín thus used self-sabotage to explore the power imbalances inscribed in subject-object relations, resulting in implicit attacks on established social structures. Rather than borrowing from existentialism, sabotage became increasingly linked to Minujín’s enthusiasm for countercultural identities, which led to Restany crowning her the ‘hippie queen’ (n.d., 3). Between 1964 and 1966, Minujín produced works in New York, Washington DC and Montreal. On her travels, Minujín joined mass hippie gatherings in Central Park and embraced US counterculture.15 Building on these experiences, in July 1968, Minujín returned to Buenos Aires and created a work entitled Importación-exportación at the Di Tella’s Centre for Visual Arts (Centro de Artes Visuales, CAV). Importación-exportación was a combination of environment and happening for which Minujín imported subcultural ephemera from the US into Buenos Aires, plastering the walls of the Di Tella with posters and light-projections, and infusing the rooms with the smell of incense (see Figure 5). This resulted in what Romero Brest described as ‘a festival of images, lights, colours, sounds’ (1969, 77), conveying how Minujín created a miniature carnival gathering inside the Di Tella.
As in ¡Revuélquese y viva!, there was a significant sonic element to Importación-exportación, with music by Jimi Hendrix and Hare Krishna chants flooding the space. Minujín herself formed an important part of the mise-en-scène, moving through the environment clad in the kinds of identifiably countercultural fashions with which she had become associated in Argentina – partly as a result of newspapers and magazines indulging in detailed descriptions, for example, of her predilection for miniskirts with ‘large concentric flowers’ (Anon. 1966, 54). At a literal level, there are clear links between the fluorescent bands of acid colour that adorn the later Colchones such as ¡Revuélquese y viva! and Minujín’s hallucinogenic ‘hippie’ installation. Moreover, Importación-exportación similarly constituted a distinct zone that audiences were invited to occupy and explore, after leaving their inhibitions behind upon entering. Comparably, Minujín wanted her 1967 installation Minuphone, a modified telephone booth presented at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, to send its users on ‘a unique trip’ (cited in Longoni and Carvajal 2010, 114).16
While it might be easy to dismiss Minujín’s engagement with counterculture as trivial, it is important to situate it within the particular context of Buenos Aires in the late 1960s. In his history of the Di Tella, John King notes that Importación-exportación received favourable reviews and created widespread public commotion, but concludes that it offered an ‘amusement’ rather than anything ‘interesting or valuable’ (2007, 219). Importación-exportación could moreover be viewed as a straightforward embrace of US culture – and a highly compromised one, considering US interventions into Latin American politics and economics during the Cold War. Importación-exportación was initially envisaged as a two-part piece, which would result in the export of Argentine cultural signifiers back to the US. That Minujín was unable to realize the second section of the work might be taken as symptomatic of the asymmetrical relations between the USA and Latin America – succinctly encapsulated by Luis Camnitzer as ‘the centre-periphery relationship and its parallel denominations, empire-colony, North-South, developed-underdeveloped’ (2009, 86). Yet it is as if Importación-exportación entertains these possibilities in order to offer an alternative vision of cultural exchange, in which signifiers circulate laterally rather than being imposed hierarchically, and are adapted as they pass between hands.
On the flyer advertising Importación-exportación Minujín asserted that: ‘Information enables us to adopt facts, ideas, fashions without taking their nationality into account. The economic factor (place of origin) does not confer nationality on the product. Import is an interpretation of the materiality of information’ (see Noorthoorn 2010, 82). The goods on display in Importación-exportación, which were also for sale in a small shop Minujín incorporated into the exhibition (82), belonged to an alternative economy, which existed alongside official routes of exchange sanctioned by the Argentine and US governments, or officiated by private companies. This shop component recalls La feria de las ferias, indicating the continued presence of a subtle but significant interest in economic disruption in Minujín’s practice, by establishing alternative and even anti-commercial or anti-market operations. Minujín’s aim in transferring the living artefacts of US – but also, significantly, identifiably transnational – ‘hippie’ culture into Buenos Aires had political undertones, proposing that individual and group identity did not have to be based on nationalism, or for that matter, market economics. Responding to the rise of mass media communications, and the ability to exchange ideas through radio and television as well as print and travel, Minujín conceived of Importación-exportación as a point in a wider international community united by enthusiasm for, to take one example, the music of Jimi Hendrix, while nonetheless registering the ease with which such counter-cultural identifiers could be reduced to mass commodities.
In 1968, the year in which Importación-exportación went on display at the Di Tella, there was widespread social and political unrest throughout Argentina in response to the increasing cultural and economic repression of the military government led by General Juan Carlos Onganía, who had assumed power in a 1966 coup. The Tucumán Arde [Tucumán is Burning] initiative emerged in the city of Rosario and saw artists align themselves with striking sugar-cane workers, while in Buenos Aires artists launched a series of critiques against the censorship of works in the Experiencias 68 [Experiences 68] May exhibition at the Di Tella (see Longoni and Mestman 2013, 100–120). Importación-exportación was not part of this unrest, while the Di Tella itself was increasingly viewed as embodying the kind of political complicity against which many politicized avant-garde artists protested. Although the Di Tella and the surrounding Calle Florida district were targets for the right wing, Laura Podalsky notes that left wing commentators were equally dismayed by ‘the allegedly decadent behaviour [the Di Tella] supposedly promoted’ (Podalsky 2004, 139). Indeed, the Di Tella’s difficult, compromised position is encapsulated by a report from one reviewer that the residue of the exhibit which was closed by police during Experiencias 68 – Roberto Plate’s toilet stall installation, inside of which visitors took to writing anti-government messages – was still visible to viewers entering Importación-exportación.17 The presence of Plate’s work reflects the ambivalence of Minujín’s project, underlining her readiness to inhabit the rooms of the Di Tella which had so recently been rejected by the explicitly politicized wing of the Argentine avant-garde, yet also potentially inferring a shared commitment to free expression.18
Importación-exportación’s alignment with international counterculture is moreover arguably significant in light of the draconian laws Onganía’s government attempted to impose in Buenos Aires, which at one point included a proposed ban on miniskirts. King notes that although ‘there were few hippies’ in Buenos Aires, ‘the public reaction to them was brutal and indiscriminate. […] The new “look” […] provoked suspicion and repression’ (2007, 170). At the same time, in their re-assessment of countercultural activity in the USA, Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner observe that ‘its emphasis on culture and lifestyle alienated it from political histories of 1960s radicalism’ (2012, xviii). Importación-exportación indicates how the transplantation and covert circulation of subcultural identities into the Argentine context of the later 1960s might be a quietly subversive, disruptive move, if an idiosyncratic and unconventional one which sits outside received histories of resistance.
A hit with the public that provoked both those on the right and the left of the political spectrum, Importación-exportación occupied a conspicuously indeterminate place among jockeying political positions. Although undeniably reliant on the institutional context of the Di Tella, it provided a carnivalesque space apart, where visitors could relax and play, and perhaps indulge in a momentary flirtation with countercultural identifiers, such as the miniskirt, that might attract persecution outside its circumscribed safe area. Importación-exportación effectively established a temporary place for solipsism and inward mental voyages – for indulgent meditation on individual and group psychology. Its economy within an economy, and alignment with an alternative aesthetic understood as superseding national borders, re-purposed countercultural liberation as a counter-intuitive mode of covert sabotage against nationalism and conservatism, even as the project remained open to accusations of compromise.
In drawing out the latent radicality within Minujín’s embrace of destructive and strategically self-destructive tendencies, this chapter by no means seeks to suggest that Minujín’s work should be viewed as politically engaged in the manner of her contemporaries, such as the artists Graciela Carnevale or León Ferrari. Minujín’s reticence in committing overt acts of political critique is demonstrated by Espi-art, a collaborative exhibition in 1977 (see Figure 6), executed at the Galería Birger during the beginning of Argentina’s brutal dictatorship and ‘Dirty War’, which lasted from the mid 1970s until the return of democratic government in 1983.19 Formed from two rows of partitioned cells in which a range of performers created their works, visitors could watch the artists inside the small, box-like structures through spy-holes in the doors to each cubicle, so that the invited practitioners were simultaneously enclosed and protected, yet subject to voyeurism and scrutiny (Glusberg 1986, 83). Minujín describes how Espi-art occurred at ‘a time of much repression, when you couldn’t walk down the street or be in large groups in one place; it wasn’t a political work but it was a reflection of this’ (cited in Noorthoorn 2010, 151). The cubicles Minujín created for Espi-art impose separation, confinement and privacy, yet the environment as a whole also opened up an alternative site away from the street in which people could gather together in a large group, under the legitimating auspice of the exhibition.
Like Importación-exportación, Espi-art might be conceived of as providing access to what Bakhtin describes as the ‘second life’ of carnival and festival forms, experienced as the ‘utopian realm of community’ (1984, 8 and 9). Yet we might also want to bear in mind Fredric Jameson’s definition of ‘utopian space’ as an ‘an aberrant by-product […] a kind of eddy or self-contained backwater’ (2007, 15), a phrase that recalls the sequestering effect of Minujín’s early Colchones. The sabotaging impulses that recur throughout Minujín’s practice oscillate constantly between self-destruction and communal intervention, immersion and expulsion, rupture and failure, entrapment and liberation, but the violence and aggression that fissure her work need to be understood as more than mere spectacle, revealing a productive tendency for provocation which consistently contests social restrictions and limitations.
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