Urban Folklore Marta Minujín’s Postwar Assemblage and the Modern City

This chapter focuses on Minujín’s experimentation with assemblage as it developed and expanded into environmental forms following her sojourn in Paris, and its particular relation to the city of Buenos Aires. If assemblage was the emerging art form to make visible the concrete reality of a new and accelerating modernity, city was a central trope. In addition to giving form to Buenos Aires’ physical environment, the copious presence of television sets in La Menesunda seems to make reference to contemporaneous changes in urban culture, primarily the proliferation of new media. The installation of private bedroom, occupied by a heterosexual couple in bed listening to the sounds of the Beatles hinted at shifting urban social values, such as the liberalization of sexual mores. Unlike the sociological study, La Menesunda is less a detailing and theorization of urban environment as it is an attempt to reconstitute the sensorial experience of Buenos Aires’ modernization, familiarizing the visitor with city and its everyday encounters.