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.
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, a local approach driven by the authoritarian regimes and military coups d’états that South America was being forced to endure.
At the CAYC premises, Glusberg organized solo exhibitions of works by the forerunners of Conceptual art from the United States, such as Joseph Kosuth. El arte como idea como idea, which took place in June 1971, and 9 días con Dennis Oppenheim, presented in August and September of the same year. The latter show included works that relied on photography, film, and video to document the artist’s actions. In these works, the author uses the landscape and his own body (in somatic projects with artistic components known as body art) to address a range of subjects that include ecology, the exchange of energy between the body and matter, and paternity as “an extension of oneself.” The CAYC also published a bilingual catalogue to present the latest trends and promote the Argentinean center in international circles.
