Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
The desire to forge close ties between Latin American and Eastern European artists was a basic component of the CAYC’s strategy for international exchange. This tactic assumed or aspired to a “joining of forces” between art scenes in what were considered Third World countries which, in Glusberg’s opinion, would lead to the creation of art that reflected something of fundamental importance: the problems these countries had in common. The inclusion in this exhibition of these Argentinean artists, who had received international acclaim at the Venice Biennale and other exhibitions, can be seen as a forced attempt to establish other kinds of links with countries that, at the time, were under socialist rule. This was particularly significant within the context of the Cold War and the rapid spread of the theory of dependence, thus explaining the endemic economic and cultural poverty in countries living under the oppressive thumb of the great powers.
The choice of artists whose work was identified as “geometric and constructivist” was based on the fact that abstraction was, at the time, the most successful trend in the international modernist movement. In the case of Argentina, it harkened back to the 1940s and 1950s. The names included in the “Computer Graphics” category suggest that the works had been shown at Arte y Cibernética (Galería Bonino, Buenos Aires, 1969), where artists worked with engineers and systems analysts from the UBA (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and ORT technical schools to adapt their ideas to the possibilities offered by IBM software to illustrate works using plotters.
