Paying off the Argentine Foreign Debt with Corn, “the Latin American Gold”, 1985-2011 (El pago de la deuda externa argentina con maíz, “el oro latinoamericano”).
Six photographs of a 12 shot photo-performance. C-Prints. 39 1/4 x 36 3/8 in. each. Edition of 5 + AP
Marta Minujín, Argentinian avant-garde and conceptual artist, invited Pop Art icon, Andy Warhol, to this New York performance in 1985, in which she paid off Argentina’s external debt using corn, the traditional Latin American food staple and most widely grown crop in the Americas.
Surrounded by 1,000 ears of corn, spray painted gold, Warhol and Minujín acted out the negotiation of the debt, symbolizing not only the interchange of merchandise, but also of artistic and cultural experiences. After 12 photographic shots taken in Warhol’s studio, The Factory, the artists signed and distributed the individual ears of corn to the public in front of the Empire State Building.
As such, this piece has become a symbol of the cultural relations between the United States and Latin America, undertaken by the greatest Pop Art exponents of each country. After the recent rediscovery of three of the lost shots, the expanded series of six photographs is now presented for the first time at Henrique Faria Fine Art.
Simultaneity in Simultaneity, Three country Happening, 1966 (Simultaneidad en simultaneidad).
October 13 and 24 1966. Installation: four simultaneous projections, map of the project and archival material.
Conceived within the framework of Three Country Happening, a collaboration between Minujín, Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell, in which the three artists held simultaneous performances in their cities of origin (Buenos Aires, New York and Berlin, respectively), Simultaneidad en Simultaneidad constituted of a two-stage happening taking place in the mythical avant-garde center Instituto Torcuato Di Tella aiming for the participation of the public through mass media.
Minujín gathered 60 personalities of different disciplines, selected according to their media visibility, filmed and photographed them while a closed-circuit television transmitted the event live. Ten days later, the guests were invited back to observe the results of the recording at the Di Tella. Simultaneously, another performance took place, Instantaneous Invasion, in which three other personalities were bombarded in their homes with interviews, telephone calls, and telegrams. All this was transmitted through different mass media, two of which aired the simultaneous happenings of Vostell and Kaprow. Additionally, 500 people received telephone calls and telegrams with the slogan “You are a creator.”
Marta Minujín was born in 1943. In 1963 she orchestrated her first happening, La Destrucción (The Destruction). In 1966 she followed up with Simultaneidad en Simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity), which was part of the greater event of the Three Countries Happening, with A. Kaprow (New York) and W. Vostell (Berlin).
She also created ephemeral works with the help of mass participation. These include C. Gardel de Fuego (C. Gardel on Fire)1981, El Partenón de Libros (The Parthenon of Books) 1983, and La Torre de Babel con libros del todo el mundo (The Tower of Babel with Books from all over the World) 2011. She has also worked throughout her career fashioning psychedelic frames, mattresses, performances, windows, etc.
Her works are featured in international public collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Art Museum of the Americas (Washington D.C.), Olympic Park (Seoul, Korea), the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, MALBA (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and private collections in France, Italy, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, the United States and Canada.
In 2011 she had an exhibition in New York and one of her mattresses was acquired by the Centre Pompidou to become part of their permanent collection. Minujín presented Fluododecaedro Multifacético Multidireccional at the arteBA art fair in Buenos Aires in 2012.
She is currently working on the preparation of La Torre de Babel con libros del todo el mundo (The Tower of Babel with Books from all over the World) to be staged in Paris in October 2013 as well as in New York in early 2014. New York’s Museo de Barrio is also planning a retrospective of her work that will coincide with the happening.
Marta presently lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.