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 talk announced in this newsletter was inspired by 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 this particular title was used, after being suggested earlier at the III Bienal de Arte Coltejer in Medellín, Colombia, and at the Salón de la Independencia in Quito, Ecuador; both these events took place in May of that year. Argentinean and international artists showed heliographs at these events as a way to discuss the political situations that were common in Latin American countries at the time, especially those in the Southern Cone that were under the thumb of military dictatorships. This revealed a remarkable about-face in the center’s discourse that, in its earlier years, focused on an exploration of the link between art and technological development. As is stated in this article, “every work, gesture, or word expressed by an Argentinean artist must seek to awaken and clarify his fellow Argentineans’ awareness of their current reality.” The use of the term “awareness” is significant here, not just because of its political implications, but also in terms of the growing popularity of psychoanalysis that would leave its mark in Argentina over the course of time.
The “regional” tone that the center’s political discourse adopted was obvious and undeniable. Its 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.
This change in the CAYC’s strategies coincided with the emergence of the group known as the Grupo de los Trece, whose original members were Jacques Bedel, Luis(Fernando) Benedit, Gregorio Dujovny, Carlos Ginzburg, Victor Grippo, Jorge González Mir, Jorge Glusberg, Vicente Marotta, Luis Pazos, Alberto Pellegrino, Alfredo Portillos, Juan Carlos Romero, and Julio Teich. The text is accompanied by a photograph of the group.
[For additional information about perfil, see GT-125 (doc. no. 1476409), GT-128 (doc. no. 1476410), GT-136 (doc. no. 1476334)].
