Marta Minujín celebrated her 80th birthday with a costume party, performers and more

The audience crowded at the entrance to receive Marta who, as soon as she entered, began to dance the typical wedding waltz in the center of the room, the “Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss, with the sheep-faced performer first, with Van Gogh later, and later with many of the guests, such as his son Facundo Gomez Minujinpresent during the celebration.

The figures with their faces painted -this is how several of the girls from the museum staff were also seen- were in homage to Pablo Picasso, for the 50th anniversary of his death, the same reasons he used for his famous “Kidnappening”, a performance which he made in New York in 1973.

After the “dance” -where you could see, for example, the head of a soccer ball dancing with the Statue of Liberty, the masks that Marta usually uses in her Instagram live- it would be time to greet the guests, photos and selfies . After walking around the room, as in any wedding, it was time for the cake, with ribbons, also black.

And there, the protagonist of the night took the floor: “I hope you enjoy it because this is a celebration with participation. It’s wonderful. This museum is my home, I did my first retrospective here. And this year there will be two other very large ones at the Pinacoteca Paul’s and the Jewish Museum in New York, and La Menesunda is going to tour England and Denmark,” said an enthusiastic artist in a grand tulle dress, a combination of white and pale pink, with her flammable mirrored glasses and her platinum hair.

Then, Minujín launched her bouquet to the public, an atypical specimen of black flowers, which was followed -after a brief flurry- the lacing of the tulle from the head, typical of any bridal accessory. “Bye”, the artist said goodbye -just to get off the stage- which was followed by more requests for photos, more greetings and more toasts, with black glasses.

Meanwhile, in the “living room” -on the ground floor of the museum- the actors began their act, walked among the guests, shot phrases, jumped on one leg. “You can’t bathe twice in the same river,” one of the performers whispered to a guest at one point during the night.

Volunteers dressed in masks shouted “time, time,” sometimes clapping their hands. “You can turn around yourself,” the person disguised as a giraffe’s head told this chronicler. Meanwhile, several tried the cake, chocolate with dulce de leche, and total black coverage, as tonight’s dress code. “A divine cake,” she said at a time when the artist who popularized her classic catchphrase “art, art, art” took the microphone to unthinkable levels.

“This is art”, “Time is an eternity”, “The model of time is eternity”, were other phrases that the performers were whispering among the guests. At times they applauded out of nowhere. Among the guests were artists such as Luis Felipe Noé, Guillermo Kuitca, Graciela Hapser, Adriana Rosenberg, Mariana Marchesi, Alicia Herrero and Delia Cancelaamong others.

At 9:30 p.m., Marta said goodbye to the moment that everyone repeated, this time shouting, the phrase “The model of time is eternity” and while they got on the bus of line 67 again to say goodbye behind the windows. The public applauded a performance in the best Minujin style. The clarinetists played their instruments from the steps of the museum. Marta sits in the first row and the driver drives off.

But the journey was short because the bus turned around and parked in front of the museum’s back door, where Minujín entered the museum’s Auditorium to talk with the journalists present.

“Eternity for me is something invisible, intangible, like a flying star’s comet. It has nothing to do with my person or with an object,” the artist responded to the first question this chronicler asked about what she thought they were. the sensations that left tonight.

Of the projects that 2023 holds for her, she said that “everyone excites her” and that the exhibition at The Jewish Museum will start with her works from the age of 12 and will go through mattresses, sculptures, ephemeral works, she reviewed. “The menesunda traveling through Europe excites me a lot,” she added.

In addition, Minujín revealed that for the 40 years of democracy he will once again carry out his Parthenon of prohibited books, on the same scale, and with the same books, in a place near the CCK, which will be inaugurated on May 25. Although he did not want to give more details about it.

And the figures with their faces made up? They asked the artist sitting on stage with the volunteers who participated in the night. “In New York I went out every day to have a drink with Dalí, and he hated Picasso, so when he died he had a big party to celebrate that Picasso had died. So I did my Kidnappening with their faces painted with his works”, the artist recalled about her work from 1973, the same year Picasso died.

At that happening, there were fifteen people in the audience with a silver button on their foreheads, a sign that they had previously given their consent to be “kidnapped” and taken to different destinations in the city: a loft in Soho, a hairdresser’s, the a critic’s house, a banquet in an elegant house, the Brooklyn Bridge, among others.

“I hope I don’t live the whole decade because it seems like a decline to me, after the 90s I don’t want to live anymore, I want to disappear,” reflected the artist whose birthday finds her again at the peak of a pioneering and avant-garde career. And she pointed out: “I always lived in art and tonight, people lived in art.”

By Mercedes Ezquiaga