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.
All the questions that Zabala asked in this newsletter article were relevant to Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano, the exhibition that opened on June 22, 1972, at the CAYC in Buenos Aires. This was one of the first times that this title was used, after the exhibition had been presented at the III Bienal Coltejer in Medellín, Colombia (although this title did not appear in the catalogue for that event) and, subsequently, at the Salón de la Independencia in Quito, the capital of Ecuador; both of those events took place in May of that year.
When he announced the opening of the exhibition [see GT-133 (doc. no. 1476312)], Glusberg stated that: “There is no Latin American art as such, but the region’s individual countries do share a common problem in terms of their revolutionary situation.” This marked a change of direction in the center’s discourse which, in its earliest years, had focused on exploring the link between art and technological development.\. Nevertheless, art and cybernetics exhibitions were shown internationally in tandem with Hacia un perfil… on several occasions in the following years. The artist’s role now consisted of highlighting “the conflicts caused by the unjust social relationships that are rampant in Latin American countries.” There was no mistaking the veiled reference to the dictatorial regimes that held power in the region.
This was the context in which Zabala challenged the role that art was supposed to play. He questioned it from both a formal and a semiological perspective, as well as in terms of its undeniable social implications in an international environment riven by profound inequality and rising political tensions. He revived the discussion about the autonomy of art, which had left its mark on the discourses of the modernist movement, trying to address a subject that was of great importance at a global level, and of even greater importance at a local level: in other words, its revolutionary potential.
Zabala—an artist who, at that time, introduced in his works the representational system of cartography—is not listed as one of the original members of the group known as the Grupo de los Trece, at the CAYC, although he is mentioned as a “guest” in the CAYC’s busy schedule of exhibitions and activities in 1972. He would become an official member of the group in the latter part of that year.
