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 proposal for a joint “action” between Argentina and the United States indicates not just the interest in addressing the advances in communication technology that made such an event possible, but also the CAYC’s eagerness to position Buenos Aires as an essential stop on the international contemporary art circuit. There was a precedent for experiences of this kind in the happenings that took place during the previous decade, including those organized by Arte de los Medios, a group that had been active since the mid-1960s (Eduardo Costa, Raúl Escari y Roberto Jacoby).
The mention of nitinol as a material that could be used in innovative ways in the field of sculpture was symptomatic of the CAYC’s focus on the possibilities created by combining art with science. There was an attempt to involve the public in the action by letting them take home an object that was part of the experience.
Geny Dignac, from Argentina, started working with light, fire, and temperatures following a visit to Washington, D.C. One of her most important exhibitions was the E.A.T.’s first presentation at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; she also showed two of her sculptures at Tierra, aire, fuego, agua: elementos artísticos, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work was shown at several editions of the CAYC’s Arte de Sistemas. At about that time, one of her sculptures won the prize at the Cali Biennial in Colombia, 1969. She loved the Sonora desert and settled in Arizona in 1978, where she created works with experimental elements for what she called “igneous gestures.”
Hugo de Soto is a Cuban artist (b. 1928) who lives in the United States. His paintings have been commercially shown from the postwar years until now. His work explores Geometric Abstraction’s alternatives.
José (Ygnacio) Bermúdez was another Cuban artist (1922–1988) who lived in the United States. His major works are in the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C.
