Similarly, the act of destroying is implicit in the cutting and faceting that Minujín effects on her sculptures from these years. Indeed, it was in Medellín that Minujín’s sculptures first enjoyed a warm reception. She created a number of works in bronze to finance Carlos Gardel de fuego, all of which were sold in Colombia. She saw these works as a means of subsistence. Thus, at her next exhibition at CAyC in November of 1981, Minujín would present drawings and sculptures that dealt with the need to disassemble universal myths. In terms of sculpture, Minujín fragmented Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Michelangelo’s Dying Slave and, on the basis of her readings of Marguerite Yourcenar, the Greek Youth. Finally, in December of 1983, Minujín would create what was possibly her most monumental and ambitious project, El Partenón de libros [The Parthenon of Books] [p. 120], which, for six months, she had been planning as a Partenón de turrones, a food typically eaten during the holiday season. Minujín comments that while she was working on the project, the owner of the Georgalos turrón factory gave her a book on the Parthenon in Athens. And I was enlightened! I said, ‘it has to be a Parthenon of books!’ During the dictatorship, I had lived in a state of fear. I threw out 300 books from the house on Humberto Primo, including books by Marcuse. I had seen with my own eyes when Romero Brest threw his books into the incinerator. For six months I had been trying to get authorization from the military to make a Partenón de turrones. Of course, I was never going to get it. At the same time that this woman gave me the book, Pacho O’Donnell, who was the minister of Culture under Alfonsín, gave me the authorization and we rushed ahead, getting the Chamber of Books to participate69.
252
And thus El Partenón de libros was inaugurated on 9 de Julio Avenue, the main artery of the City of Buenos Aires, on December 19, 1983, one week after the restitution of democracy in Argentina (December 10), a symbol of its return. The artist built a replica of the Parthenon in Athens, the surface of which she later covered with 20,000 books—many of them works that had been confiscated during the dictatorship—; she was able to acquire them quickly through the Argentine Chamber of Books, that mobilized thirty-eight publishing houses to donate them. El Partenón could be visited for a number of days, until on December 24 in was put on its side, in keeping with Minujín’s interest in making universal myths horizontal. Finally, the event culminated with the distribution of the books. Some 12,000 volumes were distributed to the expectant crowd, 8,000 of which were sent to public libraries in the city. In building and then dismantling the work, Minujín realized her objective of having it “return to the public70.” This exhibition thus closes with the film documenting this major work as well as two other works that entailed mass participation which Minujín organized on 9 de Julio Avenue—Operación perfume [Operation Perfume], from 1987, and Rayuelarte, from 2009. These projects do not mark, though, the end of Minujín’s production. She still works in her studio, and is currently planning her next monumental intervention. One of her “unrealized” projects, La Torre de Babel de libros [The Tower of Babel in Books], which the artist had planned for the 1986 edition of the XLII International Venice Biennial, will, we hope, finally be created in Buenos Aires during the next year. **** The idea of coming to a conclusion about Marta Minujín is almost a sacrilege; it goes against the vertiginous nature of her production which we hope to have duly presented. Thus, rather than closing, I would like to leave another door open to the future and recall what, in an interview after her legendary Partenón de libros, she said to a journalist: “I believe that Marta Minujín will not be remembered for a certain work at a museum, but for her overall attitude, for her art spectacles, for the way that she brought a sense of show and joy into an excessively sacralized intellectual terrain71”.
Conversation with the author, Buenos Aires, August of 2010. Orlando Barone, “Todo es posible para Marta Minujín,” Río Negro, General Roca, January 8, 1984. 71 Ibid. 69 70