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 critic introduced the art category that “is about processes rather than the finished products of good art” in Argentina at the exhibition De la Figuración al Arte de Sistemas (Museo Emilio Caraffa, Córdoba, 1970) (ICAA doc. no. 761141). In this context, art is not about the creation of objects but about an expression of reality, a process which becomes one of the artist’s materials. Researching events, taking part in social and cultural occasions, developing new ways to question the world. The emphasis of a sector of the art milieu in the Southern Cone expressing in political terms was just one of the ways in which to perform this task.
At the first Arte de Sistemas exhibition, presented in 1971 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, Glusberg defined “arte de sistemas” as an art practice based on an understanding of the systems and processes that are used to organize the contemporary world’s experience. This definition was close to “systems esthetics,” the term coined in 1968 by the North American critic Jack Burnham. Over time, in Argentina, the term was used to refer to several dissimilar trends and movements, such as art as an idea (or Conceptual art), ecological art, poor art (Arte Povera), cybernetic art, art propositions, and blatantly political art in the context of authoritarian regimes and military coups d’états that South America endured.
On this occasion Dennis Oppenheim (1938–2011) presented works that relied on photography, film, and video to document his actions to/on the landscape; the objective was to explore the relationship between the body and nature. The North American artist had shown similar works at Information (1970), the paradigmatic exhibition that the Museum of Modern Art, New York devoted to the experimental avant-garde a year earlier. One way or another, that exhibition was a forerunner to Arte de Sistemas, the CAYC´s exhibition.
