Marta Minujín, who turned 80 last year, burst onto the postwar art scene in her native Buenos Aires in the late 1960s and has since carried on her fiercely prolific career through trials of dictatorship, censorship and pandemic-induced lockdowns. Her singular artistic vision holds strong even as her practice across painting, sculpture, installation and performance has taken on new, imaginative shapes—always resistant and reactive to volatile realities as they unfold across the globe. The Jewish Museum in Manhattan’s Upper East Side breaks new ground with a survey of Minujíin’s vigorous development, spanning from the 1950s to the present day. Organised by chief curator Darsie Alexander and associate curator Rebecca Shaykin, Arte! Arte! Arte! sheds ample light on the artist’s often-overlooked influence on Pop, feminist and Latin American art.

A roving heap of plushy limbs, plastered with intersecting technicolour striations, stands sentry just beyond the exhibition’s double doors. The artist’s efforts to push the senses to the point of utmost intensity is seen in one of many works repurposed from old mattresses, roused from rest with bright colour and elaborate alterations. Minujín’s iconic stripes and colourways find their way into every corner of the gallery, from a series of concept drawings for her most recent soft sculptures (2019-23) to exhibition prints of the artist surrounded by her earliest experiments with mattresses (1963), in canvases of densely layered fabric strips and finally in an independent room containing her 2023 installation Implosion!, in which 3D animations descend on the viewer from projectors. Through this playful procession of self-referencing motifs, Implosion! demonstrates how Minujín’s interest in interactive materiality has evolved to embrace the digital plane.

“Half of your life takes place on a mattress. You are born, you die, you make love, you can get killed on the mattress,” Minujín has said of her obsession with the medium, one she first discovered in the 1960s and returned to in 2007. Before her foray into more daring palettes, Minujín’s early works of the 1950s were influenced by Argentine Informalism, a movement that sought out humble materials to channel the unidealised reality of everyday life. Moving from assembling austere cardboard works to painting second-hand mattresses, Minujín realised both the symbolic resonance of the domestic human object and its inherent versatility—that it could be touched, destroyed and reconfigured.

The exhibition draws attention to one of the artist’s first experimental public performances with a slideshow of 1962 black-and-white photographs, displaying documentation of La Destrucción, during which Minujín assembled mattresses along the Impasse Roussin in Paris only to invite an entourage of other artists to light them on fire. With this work, Minujín pushed her practice beyond the confines of static objects in favour of immediate experiences: ephemeral work leaving a permanent mark in the memories of spectators through bombastic public events. The flood of “happenings” that followed in her career—chaotic gatherings that challenged participants to interact and improvise—drew on similar dichotomies of construction and deconstruction, at once playful and political.

After travels that immersed her in the Pop, counterculture, and avant-garde scenes of Europe and the United States, Minujín returned to Buenos Aires on the cusp of a military dictatorship (the Junta, which spanned 1976-1983). Facing a new environment of cultural repression, Minujín sought to deepen the social implications of her participatory experiences in La caída de los mitos universales (The Fall of Universal Myths), a series of installations that fashioned architectural forms from commonplace objects—namely books and bread, only to be demolished and redistributed to the public. The back corner of the exhibition offers video documentation, drawings, and a wall installation inspired by El Partenón de libros (The Parthenon of Books), wherein Minujín staged a replica of the Greek temple and covered it with banned books after the Junta fell in 1983. She revived the work in Kassel in Germany for Documenta 14 in 2017, a testament to its staying power as part of an exhibition that spanned its home city and Athens. Also on display are the artist’s miniature replicas of other toppled monuments, including the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben and the Obelisk of Buenos Aires. With unfettered imagination, Minujín scaled down these tangible power structures to call them to attention—and even licked ice cream off of the Obelisk in a sensational, suggestive public display reported in a headline from the 1967 print of Panorama: Witness of Our Time magazine.

It’s fitting that this survey harnesses the scope of Minujín’s influence with archival media, in raucous photographs and videos of the artist surrounded by rapt participants in her “happenings,” or in posters declaring the cutting-edge force of her Frozen Sex exhibition in 1973 before it was censored for explicit content during its run at the Arte Nuevo-Galería de Arte in Buenos Aires. A typewritten correspondence between Minujín and the McDonald’s corporation is on display from when she imagined a version of the Statue of Liberty covered in burgers, as well as a questionnaire she distributed in periodicals to gather participants for one of her immersive multi-room installation projects, MINUCODE. By staging encounters with television and radio technologies, in which invitees were made to interact with their own recorded image, Minujín strove to harness the influential power of mass media.

Arte! Arte! Arte! is not an exhaustive retrospective of Minujín’s work, yet this selection of under 100 objects brings forth the artist’s spirit with glowing potency, just as it meticulously records how she’s succeeded at infiltrating public consciousness for the past 60 years. Foregrounding the ever-relevant presence of mass media, The Jewish Museum’s survey bestows Minujín with another platform for causing a commotion. Closing the exhibition is a display of videos gleaned from the artist’s Instagram account. While quarantined during the COVID pandemic in 2020, she amassed hundreds of thousands of followers taken by her trademark comic relief and fluorescent aesthetics. Wearing animal masks and performing improvisational movements she’d developed in 1973, the artist chants the exhibition’s title. Repeated thrice in Minujín’s full-throated voice, “art” becomes a rallying cry—a feral, incantatory exclamation with force enough to gather together masses, tear down institutions and twist the very fabric of everyday life.

The exhibition Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte! will be on view from November 17 2023 - March 31 2024 at the Jewish Museum, NY.