Marta Minujín’s Leyendo Las Noticias en el Río de la Plata emerged as part of the Argentinian avant-garde art of the 1960s and respond to the climate of the unstable governments and military dictatorships that occurred prior to and during this period. Generally concerned with the role of mass media as performance, Leyendo Las Notices commented on the Argentinian media and its displacement of women, with Minujín’s body literally consumed by newspaper. Her body was freed only after she finished reading the news and entered into the river, where the newspaper slowly dissolved.
In this reperformance, the change of site from the grand Rio de la Plata to a shower shifts this work to a narrative of autobiography; intimate and unspectacular. Covered in a spanish-language newspaper (a language the artist is expected to know, but is not fluent in), the body is consumed and then defeated by the action of attempting to read it.
Medium
9 pigmented inkjet prints (2019)
For more on Minujín’s work see Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012), which this description draws from.
