Marta Minujín's 1963 Happening The Destruction Analyzed for Its Critique of Spectacle and Authorship

Argentine artist Marta Minujín staged her inaugural happening, The Destruction, on June 6, 1963, at Paris's Impasse Ronsin, a site renowned for housing modern and neo-avant-garde figures. This performance engaged with the mediatization of Nouveau Réalisme, particularly responding to Niki de Saint Phalle's Tirs, by interrogating Marcel Duchamp's ideas around authorship, originality, and authenticity—concepts pivotal to Modernism and art market valuation. Minujín employed Brechtian tactics and repetitive actions to undermine the ritualistic, immediate, and collaborative aspects that defined the emancipatory potential of happenings as practiced by Jean-Jacques Lebel in France and Allan Kaprow in the United States. Through a self-aware examination of the relationship between performative art and spectacle culture, The Destruction established a critical inquiry that later Argentine avant-garde artists of the 1960s would further pursue. The article, published by ARTMargins Online on July 6, 2020, and authored by Michaëla de Lacaze Mohrmann, is accessible via MIT Press under a subscription model.