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Roll Over and Live!

webmaster 27-12-2010

Over a hundred artworks by Marta Minujin, the author of the paradigmatic ¡Revuélquese y viva! (Roll Over and Live!) are being displayed at the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires (MALBA).

The goal behind this effort is to “bring a broader public closer to Marta Minujin’s critical thinking,” explains Victoria Noorthoorn, curator and researcher of this flashback exhibit (1959-1989) that includes pieces hailing from both public and private collections, twenty film shows, major documents from the artist’s archives, and a selection of sculptures and recreations of historic works, such as “Revuélquese y viva” (1964), “La Menesunda” (1965), “El Batacazo” (1965), “Simultaneidad en Simultaneidad” (1966), among others.

Marta Minujin (1943) has been a banner-bearer of “the kind of art everybody can understand,” something that has been defined as “a happy, comic ending.” Back in the 1960s, she started creating traditional structures, covered with mattresses found in the wastes of Parisian hospitals. Thus, she came up with her first happening called The Destruction (1963) and the guest “destroyers” were such artists as Christo, Élie-Charles Flamand, Lourdes Castro, Mariano Hernandez and Paul Gette.

Minujín is penciled in as one of the harbingers of the happening representation in her country, alongside members of the Instituto Di Tella de Artes.[1] Faithful to her own conceptions, in Roll Over and Live spectators are supposed to walk into a huge tent of cloth, polystyrene and wood teeming with motley mattresses only to lie down in bed, roll over and fulfill the objective expressed in the work’s title.

A representative of the pop movement, a friend of Andy Warhol’s, with whom she shared her work, Marta Minujin won a scholarship in Guggenheim back in 1966 and the Rockefeller Foundation Scholarship two years later. In 1986 she attended the Sidney and the Venice biennials.