Marta Minujín, El Obelisco de Pan Dulce, 1979
Marta Minujín
El Obelisco de Pan Dulce

Marta Minujín (*1941, Argentina) played a key role in the avantgarde in Argentina in the 1960s and 70s. In 1963, she staged her first joint happening in Paris, "La Destrucción", in which she and fellow artists burned the sculptures they had made during their stay in Paris in an impressive action. Since then, she has performed numerous, large–scale happenings and actions, sometimes spanning various continents, and has broken new ground working with new telecommunication media. She uses soft, impermanent materials and focuses on the participation of the audience and the release of collective energy. “The work of art is the instant, in which the individual lives, not the thing. The advent of development, and not of forms, which end up relegated to the level of accessories. A society’s art in constant change cannot be by any means a static image.” (Marta Minujín)

El Obelisco de Pan Dulce (The Obelisk in Sweet Bread) is a metal structure built in the shape of the obelisk erected in 1936 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Buenos Aires’ founding. Minujín covered the 118-feet patriarchal, national symbol with over ten thousand wrapped cakes and installed it at the Feria de Las Naciones (Fair of Nations) in Buenos Aires. The anti-monument was exhibited for eleven days and then toppled down and eaten.

Courtesy Marta Minujín

Document media
10 b&w photographs

Issue date
1979

To be seen in
Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, 7 October 2011 – 15 January 2012

Relations
Marta Minujín (MIN 2)

Tags
extended body, happening, participation, pleasure, public space, state oppression