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.
1972 was a pivotal year in the establishment of “arte de sistemas” as the CAYC’s institutional promotional strategy. This newsletter includes a list of the Argentinean and international artists, and their works, who took part in Arte de Sistemas at the Encuentro Internacional de Arte de Pamplona, in Spain, after the exhibition had been shown a month earlier at the III Bienal de Arte Coltejer (Medellín, Colombia) and the Salón de la Independencia (Quito, Ecuador).
This exhibition was presented for the first time in Europe at Spain’s largest and most consequential international avant-garde festival. Inspired by the idea of combining art and life, these events took on an ephemeral nature, providing an opportunity to subvert General Francisco Franco’s authoritarian rule in the final years of his dictatorship. These Encuentros sought to position Pamplona on the international circuit that included the Festival de Spoleto and the Venice Biennale (both in Italy), and documenta in Kassel, Germany. Over the course of eight days, the event in Pamplona presented the latest examples of process art, thus placing the CAYC at the heart of Latin American conceptualism.
The CAYC once again presented Arte de Sistemas together with Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano, with different participants each time the exhibition was shown. The center gathered a variety of works under the umbrella term “arte de sistemas.” These works—each one considered a system of signs—addressed the artist’s political, environmental, conceptual, and/or cybernetic concerns, among many others. A constant feature was each work’s essential “system” which, in the center’s opinion, was what made it possible to reproduce or multiply the piece, thus focusing on the process involved in its production rather than on the finished product.
