‘La Menesunda’, an immersive art experience – Martina’s goosebump moment

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‘La Menesunda’, an emblematic work by Marta Minujín

‘La Menesunda’, an emblematic work by Argentine plastic artist Marta Minujín and an unusual exhibition that in the 1960s revolutionized cultural norms through provocation and ephemeral art, returned to Buenos Aires, half a century after its creation.

Synthesizing a fragrance with the smell of frying, manufacturing two hundred and fifty meters of polyethylene tubes and producing the sound of functioning intestines were some of the tasks necessary to recreate one of the great milestones of modern art in Argentina.

The experience of ‘La Menesunda’ begins by climbing a steep staircase to find the first of the environments, a hallway with seven televisions, two of which reproduce the image of the visitor in closed circuit, something that half a century ago surprised and appealed to the excessive progress of technology and media.

Then, the visitor must choose whether to go down into a neon tunnel or continue to the next space, where he or she will find a couple on a bed who will show him or her how to reach the inside of a huge woman’s head where a make-up artist and a masseuse will offer their services.

Another space to highlight is the narrow corridor with walls covered by huge “intestines” that leads to an orifice through which you can contemplate a series of scenes from Ingmar Bergman’s films that will make you go through a refrigerator with sub-zero temperatures.

An intense smell of dentist leads to a corridor occupied by various shapes and textures that passers-by cannot avoid if they want to reach the end of the route that ends in an octagonal room with mirrored walls and the smell of frying with black lights and fans that caused a whirlwind of shredded paper.

A massive success

In 1965, when Minujín presented ‘La Menesunda’, a total work of art that appealed to all the senses of the participant through a provocation with images of the intimacy of Argentine homes and their everyday life, she achieved both media scandal and massive success.

Fifty years after the authentic representation that Minujin made together with Ruben Santantonin at the Torcuato Di Tella Institute, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires recovers the set of material, sensorial and symbolic relationships that made its existence possible.

Its creator says that she came to this planet “to create unusual things for people to intensify their lives through art”.

Half a century ago, the exhibition of this work attracted a large number of visitors, who waited up to three and four hours to see the exhibition, but the pop artist’s creation disintegrated after two weeks, and its trace was only reflected in the newspapers and in the minds of those who visited it.

Having the artist’s presence and being able to rummage through her memories has made the reconstruction of the project possible which, without blueprints and without too many documents on its development, has managed to faithfully reflect the original piece of fifty years ago and whose name, in lunfardo, means “mixture” and “confusion”.