Marta Minujín: MINUCODEs — curated by: Gabriela Rangel and José Luis Blondet:: March 2 – April 30, 2010 :: Opening Reception: March 2; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue on 68th Street, New York City.

Marta Minujin is a prominent voice of the Argentinean avant-garde art scene in the 1960s and 70s, with a brilliant international career that helped define the discussion about media, performance, and participation. Minujin is often mentioned as one of the pioneers of happenings.

MINUCODEs revisits an early project developed by the artist in 1968 at the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR), now Americas Society. For the Minucode, Minujin collected social data through a series of cocktail parties attended by readers who responded to questionnaires she posted in the press.

Drawing from strategies akin to the happening, and cinema verite, Minujin staged an immersive electronic environment in the gallery using footage from the parties, and set a series of “light and sound environments” created by selected guests in an adjacent room. The light environments were a collaboration between Minujin and artist Tony Martin.

Through original footage recently recovered and digitalized and archival documents, MINUCODEs illuminates this early work by a fundamental voice of the neo-avant-garde scene in Latin America in the 1960s. Additional documentation on Circuit (1967) and Simultaneidad en Simultaneidad (1966), collaboration with Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostel, will also be on display.

UPCOMING PUBLIC PROGRAMS

March 2. 6:00 pm :: Exhibition walk-through with the artist Marta Minujín and curators Gabriela Rangel and José Luis Blondet. Marta Minujín will provide a background and context for Minucode in this exclusive exhibition tour. The program will be introduced by Gabriela Rangel and Jose Luis Blondet who will discuss their curatorial vision and other relevant issues with the artist. This program will be followed by the exhibition opening reception.

March 22, 6:00 pm :: VIS-À-VIS SERIES: Javier Tellez and Doris Salcedo; Dialogues between artists, curators and critics from the Western Hemisphere: Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogota, Colombia; where she continues to live and work. Salcedo is one of the most internationally reputed contemporary artists, her work has been seen in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including: Tate Gallery, London (2007); Museu Serralves, Porto (2006); 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003); Documenta XI, Kassel (2002); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999) and the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo (1998) amongst many others. Salcedo received a grant from the Penny McCall Foundation in 1993, and a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Grant in 1995.

Javier Téllez was born in Valencia, Venezuela, in 1969, and currently lives and works in New York. A key and respected figure in the contemporary art world, Téllez’s work has been shown at solo and group exhibitions including: Whitney Biennial, New York (2008); Baltic Art Centre, Visby, Sweden (2007); Aspen Art Museum (2006); The Power Plant Gallery, Toronto (2005); Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2005); Bienal Iberoamericana de Lima, Peru (2002); and the 49th Venice Biennale (2001).

March 30. 6:00 pm :: Media a la Minujin: some notes; Lecture by Judi Rodenbeck (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sarah Lawrence College) and José Luis Blondet (Co-curator): The restaging of Marta Minujin’s Minucode provides the occasion to reconsider some of the ways in which media art and mediation have been thought through since the 1960s. Deeply engaged with thinking about exchange, whether through the light social tinkle of cocktail chatter or through the flutter and tweet of the satellite signal, the radical presentness of MINUCODEs in its contemporary relevance shows the artist also to have been something of a temporal medium, too.

April 13. 6:00 pm :: The World is so Boring: Panel Discussion with Alexander Alberro (Virginia Bloedel Wright Associate Professor of Art History, Barnard College, Columbia University), Carolee Schneemann (artist), Jenni Sorkin (Faculty and Graduate Committee, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College). Moderated by Gabriela Rangel (Co-curator)