For the uninitiated, Marta Minujín is not your typical contemporary artist. Born in Buenos Aires in 1943, she was a key figure in the 1960s and ’70s avant-garde, known for blending performance, media, and large-scale happenings into something wholly new.
Her early works were literally explosive—in 1963, she famously set her own sculptures on fire in The Destruction, a spectacle of renewal and transformation. By the mid-1960s, she was experimenting with interactive, immersive environments, including The Long Shot (1964) and Mayhem (1965). Later, she became a pioneer of mass media art, launching projects like Simultaneity in Simultaneity (1966), which connected audiences in different cities through live satellite broadcasts.
Her most famous work, The Parthenon of Books (1983), was a monumental structure built entirely out of censored books, a powerful celebration of Argentina’s return to democracy.
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