"PICCOLOS" Postales '04/05: gennaio 2012

Omaggio a Marta Minujìn e a Luca Prodan.

Due artisti argentini molto diversi tra di loro. Sono usciti insieme nel disegno, per caso.

A tribute to Marta Minujin e Luca Prodan.

Two very different argentinian artists. They came together in the design, by accident.

Who was Luca Prodan?

(17 May 1953 – 22 December 1987) was an Italian musician.

He was the son of an Italian father and a Scottish mother, born in Rome after the return of the Prodan family from China, where Luca's father had set up a prosperous business becoming an expert in ancient Chinese pottery, because of the Japanese invasion. Prodan attended Gordonstoun School, a private boarding school in Scotland, and for some time drifted in Manchester and London. In 1981, after aheroin crisis in the late 1970s London, he moved to an old anglo-Argentine (Timmy McKern) friend's farm in the central hills of Córdoba Province Argentina seeking peace to try kicking his heroin addiction.

After some time at the farm in the Traslasierra valley, he settled in Hurlingham (a suburb of Buenos Aires), where he founded and led Sumo and the Hurlingham Reggae Band.

Prodan died either of a heart attack or cirrhosis of the liver in Buenos Aires shortly before Christmas 1987.

After his death, he became one of the most recognized icons of Argentine rock culture. Graffiti stating "Luca Not Dead" have been spotted around the world, especially in South America and Europe.

After Luca Prodan's death, two bands were formed from former Sumo members: Divididos and Las Pelotas. These names were taken from Luca's comments about Sumo's dissolution, when he said "Divididos, las pelotas".

He was the older brother of film actor and composer Andrea Prodan.

Sumo - Estallando desde el ocèano

Sumo - Hello Frank

Who is Marta Minujín?

(born January 30, 1943) is an Argentine Conceptual artist.

She was born in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

A student in the National University Art Institute, she first exhibited her work in a 1959 show at the Teatro Agón. A scholarship from the National Arts Foundation allowed her to travel to Paris as one of the young Argentine artists featured in Pablo Curatella Manes and Thirty Argentines of the New Generation, a 1960 exhibit organized by the prominent sculptor and Paris Biennale judge.

She earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, by which she relocated to New York. The coup d'état by General Juan Carlos Onganía in June of that year made her fellowship all the more fortuitous, as the new regime would frequently censor and ban irreverent displays such as hers. Minujín delved into psychedelic art in New York, of which among her best-known creations was that of the "Minuphone," where patrons could enter a telephone booth, dial a number, and be surprised by colors projecting from the glass panels, sounds, and seeing themselves on a television screen in the floor. She was on hand in 1971 for the Buenos Aires premiere of Operación Perfume, and in New York, befriended fellow conceptual artist Andy Warhol.

She returned to Argentina in 1976, and afterwards created a series of reproductions of classical Greek sculpturesin plaster of paris, as well as miniatures of the Buenos Aires Obelisk carved out of panettone, of the Venus de Milo carved from cheese, and of Tango vocalist Carlos Gardel for a 1981 display in Medellín. The latter, a sheet metal creation, was stuffed with cotton and lit, creating a metaphor for the legendary crooner's untimely 1935 death in a Medellín plane crash. She was awarded the first of a series of Konex Awards, the highest in the Argentine cultural realm, in 1982.

The return of democracy in 1983, following seven years of a generally failed dictatorship, prompted Minujín to create a monument to a glaring, inanimate victim of the regime: freedom of expression. Assembling 30,000banned books (including works as diverse as those by Freud, Marx, Sartre, Gramsci, Foucault, Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, and Darcy Ribeiro, as well as satires such as Absalom and Achitophel, reference volumes such asEnciclopedia Salvat, and even children's texts, notably The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry), she designed the "Parthenon of Books," and following President Raúl Alfonsín's December 10 inaugural, had it mounted on a boulevard median along the Ninth of July Avenue. Dismantled after three weeks, its mass of newly-unbanned titles was distributed to the public below.

A conversation with Warhol in New York regarding the Latin American debt crisis inspired one of her most publicized "happenings:" The Debt. Purchasing a shipment of maize, Minujín dramatized the Argentine cost of servicing the foreign debt with a 1985 photo series in which she symbolically handed the maize to Warhol "in payment" for the debt; she never again saw Warhol, who died in 1987.

Minujín has continued to display her art pieces and happenings in the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, the National Fine Arts Museum, the ArteBA festival, the Barbican Center, and a vast number of other international galleries and art shows, while continuing to satirize consumer culture(particularly relating to women). She is well known for her belief that "everything is art."

Marta Minujín - Entrevista

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

What do you think about their work?