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.
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. 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.
Along those same lines, Pazos made a number of suggestions that called for a “decolonized” and “sensible” form of Latin American art that could be achieved by re-embracing popular culture, although also through inevitable violence. His reflections, in fact, acknowledged the rapid dissemination throughout Latin America of the Theory of Dependence, which explained that the poverty the region’s countries were experiencing was a result of the oppression of the great world powers. In the specific case of Argentina, violence arose during the early 1970s, a period that was vividly marked by the multiple elections held after a number of de facto governments (Onganía, Levingston, and Lanusse), the legalization of political parties, the armed organizations movement, the return of Juan Domingo Perón from his long exile, and the brief peronista government of Héctor J. Cámpora.All these factors combined to launch a mass mobilization at all levels and, in some cases, to encourage the use of armed violence as a way to change Argentinean society.
Luis Pazos was a member of the original Grupo de los Trece, together with Jacques Bedel, Luis (Fernando) Benedit, Gregorio Dujovny, Carlos Ginzburg, Victor Grippo, Jorge González Mir, Jorge Glusberg, Vicente Marotta, Alberto Pellegrino, Alfredo Portillos, Juan Carlos Romero, and Julio Teich. The exhibition Hacia un perfil… was the first time the members of the group had presented their works together under that name in Buenos Aires, after an initial appearance at the III Bienal Coltejer in Colombia.
[Para mayor información al respecto del perfil ver GT-125 (doc. no. 1476409)].
