La Menesunda: An Encounter with 1960s Experiential Art in Buenos Aires
My last week in Buenos Aires with Remote Year, I reached out via Facebook to the Museo de Arte Moderno, asking if I could speak to someoneone during my visit for use in writing about the museum.
I was an (unintentional) art history major in college, and I’ve found myself integrating my unexpected passion for art & its story into every job and life experience since college. With Remote Year, I’ll live in 12 countries over 12 months, so I’m visiting and writing about museums & art in each city.
In less than an hour, the museum’s Facebook account wrote back and let me know that Germán would be waiting for me at the entrance. I didn’t know exactly what to expect from my visit in general or what Germán’s role was at the museum, but I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised.
I wanted to write first about La Menesunda as I encountered it, totally unaware of what it entailed and why. Following my experience is a brief backstory of the original & reimagined exhibit.
My Experience in La Menesunda
Germán walked by the ticket counter as I was stumbling through my Italian-Spanish at the front desk, saving the associates, my friend, and me from any more awkward communication failures. He suggested that we go through La Menesunda on our own first and then meet him in 20–30 minutes to discuss our experience.
All he told us before we entered the exhibit was that we’d need to put my purse in a locker so we were free to move through the experience and noted that it was one of the first art experiences created, ever. So we headed up the museum’s unusual black iron staircase to a thankfully empty line and waited our turn to enter La Menesunda.
The exhibit’s entry was a large, two-story pane of hot pink plastic with a cutout of a person for visitors to walk through.
Behind the pink facade, flashing neon lights created a busy, pulsing pattern on three surfaces of the first floor room.
A narrow stairwell to the left led to a small second floor room with six or so old 1960s televisions in the wall.
The guard instructed us that only one person could enter at a time and only 8 people were allowed in the exhibit at once.
He told us to go in through the pink facade, take a left up the stairs, and walk through the door on the right (Entrada 1), which would lead us back to the entrance. Then we should go back up the stairs again and take the door on the left (Entrada 2), from which point everything would lead in a single path, though somewhat of a labyrinth. At some point, we would encounter something to crawl through, and we would have to turn something to go down different pathways.
After we established the flow of the exhibit, though I was still feeling pretty in the dark about what to expect, it was my turn to enter.
I followed instructions and went upstairs, passing the TVs on the second floor — some showed fuzzy black and white footage of me in the space, thanks to a couple cameras placed in the room, while others played footage of the news or something else. There wasn’t a placard explaining the footage, and I felt like I shouldn’t dillydally since the next visitor was waiting on me to be allowed entrance.
To my surprise, Entrada 1 took me down a small stairwell adjacent to a bedroom setup — two live people, actors I suppose, lay in bed together talking softly to each other while records played.
I wanted to look more at the room and its decor and get a better sense of what they were doing, but I felt too voyeuristic to stop and watch.
I quickly went down the stairs and back in the neon flashing entryway, looking through the pink glass at my friend waiting to enter. I went up the stairs again, facing myself as a fuzzy black and white image, and turned to Entrada 2.
The stairwell had a curved ceiling and the entire passageway was hot pink and covered with sponges. I could see that it opened into a pink-everything room with makeup and beauty products glued to the wall. A sign proclaiming “Miss Ylang” sat glowing on the floor.
I descended into the room and was faced with a young woman sitting in a white lab coat next to an open makeup kit with blush, lipstick, and eyeshadow galore. She looked at me, asked “English or Spanish?”, and instructed me to climb the small pink stepladder and look through the hole. I did, wobbling a bit on the uneven ground, and peered through to see a huge papier-mache face with giant blue eyes staring back at me. Oh, hello.
I exited the room into a small, dark hallway that ended with a doorway to a circular room lined by a large circular metal structure with plastic colored bands wrapped around it. My friend caught up to me, and we continued through the exhibit together.
I pushed a bar and the structure began to rotate, so I turned it until the opening lined up with my doorway and allowed us to enter the space. We stood in the middle and began to turn the structure around us until the opening aligned with another doorway.
As the entrance opened up, we heard gurgling sounds and saw shiny, puffy pink tubes intertwined and lining the walls of a dark spiraling hallway. We walked along slowly, and the ceiling got lower and lower as we neared the center of the spiral. I crouched down to duck through the 3 ft entrance and stood up in a round enclosure with video of a lake.
Suddenly my perception shifted from the sound being internal stomach noises to water noises in nature — reminding me yet again that “reality” is more of an assembly of context clues than a set truth.
We turned around, ducked back into the intestine spiral, and followed it back to the circular room. We spun the structure to the remaining unknown entrance option and stepped into a greenish hallway with a padded floor and green styrofoam packing peanuts coating the walls. Partway down our moonwalk, we saw a hole in the wall and peeked through to see the same giant face from a different angle. Hello, again.
I exited into a small room with a giant 60’s style telephone dial looming overhead and a small door beneath it. Instructions (in Spanish) said something about needing to dial the right number to exit. I shrugged at my friend and started pushing buttons. I hit on one that buzzed, and the door popped open. We stepped through and saw a short, porcelain white refrigerator door.
I pulled the handle and squinted as bright light hit my eyes. The room was small and blindingly white with another refrigerator door to exit through.
We stepped inside, shut the door, and stood in sensory overload for a few moments, wondering at the sensation of being in a silent, bright, white room with the added suggestion that we were being preserved for later consumption.
Through the second refrigerator door, we entered a room full of giant tubes hanging from the ceiling like huge sausages made of carpet. It smelled a bit musty and in spite of the dry fabric, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being surrounded by slippery meat casings.
After pushing our way through to another door, we found ourselves in an octagonal room with mirrors on every wall. Confetti sat in clusters on the floor and fans stood still, waiting. In the center of the room was a clear glass box with a platform inside. I opened the door and stepped in.
As my weight hit the box, the lights shut off, black lights came on, and the fans whirred confetti around the room. My friend reached out and turned the box around me (no obvious purpose why that moved).
I stepped out, the lights came on, the fans stopped. He stepped in and we were in a purple darkness again. I kicked a pile of confetti towards a fan and watched the white-turned-black-light-purple pieces flurry around me.
We opened the door and discovered ourselves in the back of a museum hallway. We turned the corner and encountered a bright red gallery room with images from the original exhibit and the plan of the reimagined Menesunda that we’d just experienced.
When we emerged to the central area of the museum, Germán was waiting for us.
About La Menesunda
Germán asked us what we thought of the exhibit. I was pretty blown away. Although I’d worked for a digital design agency in Brooklyn and been in incredible modern installations we made with the latest and greatest technology, this tactile, sensory exhibit captivated and enthralled me more.
But perhaps that’s exactly why it so delighted me — instead of encountering another screen like my phone or laptop, I was interacting with a very analog experience that was familiar and tangible yet unexpected at every turn.
Germán explained that this current exhibit is called “La Menesunda según Marta Minujín” — the Menesunda according to Marta Minujín because she was one of several artists that collaborated to create the original experience. This is her modern vision & interpretation of the earlier project — not a perfectly faithful recreation of the somewhat improvised original build.
“Menesunda” means mixture or confusion: the eleven situations stimulate the visitor’s senses in myriad ways.
The experience moves visitors first through new media (televisions), daily life (neon light tunnel of Agenda Corrientes — a cultural area like Times Square), to the intimacy of a couple in their bedroom.
Then visitors descend into the world of feminine beauty products and see the woman’s head, lose their bearings in the rotating basket before squeezing through intestines, then back through the rotating basket into a swamp.
Dial a telephone to enter a refrigerator and then emerge in a forest of textures. Finally, the room of mirrors provides a final illusion before visitors return to the familiar world.
The original project in 1965 created a scandal because it was innovative and disturbing for its time. Imagine then the experience of seeing oneself on a screen — today this is a mindlessly common occurrence, but in the 60s, it was rare and probably evoked reactions ranging from shock to discomfort to delight.
Each situation of the Menesunda provokes a similarly wide array of responses and upsets any brief adjustment a visitor may have achieved in the previous situation.
According to Germán, La Menesunda was one of the first shows that changed the basis of what art was and who saw it — it was installed at an experimental art center in a factory that an industrial family let avant grade artists use.
For two weeks, according to Minujín, it “revolutionized all of Buenos Aires. It was a journey through situations that sought to surprise and sensitize the viewer to become a participant.”
While elements of the exhibit are certainly less shocking to a modern audience, La Menesunda still surprises and accomplishes the rare feat of truly engaging visitors, making them both react to and participate with the experience — and reconsider what “art” is.
La Menesunda según Marta Minujín exhibit runs until May 22, 2016 at the Museo de Arte Moderne de Buenos Aires.
Katherine is a digital nomad, working remotely while she travels the world — living on the road since June 2014. She’s a member of Remote Year 2 Battuta, living around the world with 75 other digital nomads from February 2016 to January 2017.
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