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 world scene.
Luis Fernando Benedit (1937–2011) was a regular participant in the CAYC’s activities from the moment the center was founded. Beginning in 1968, the Argentinean architect and artist produced a series of artificial environments and habitats in which viewers could observe the behavior of plants, insects, and small animals. In these labyrinths, these living creatures encountered a variety of obstacles that helped foster a range of different relationships prompted by stimuli and reactions. In 1970, with Glusberg’s help and support from a team of scientists, Benedit represented Argentina at the 35th Venice Biennale—which explored the links between art and science—with Biotrón, an artificial habitat for bees. During that same year he exhibited De la figuración al arte de sistemas (doc. no. 761141), in which he presented different structures that were representative of the systems art that the CAYC was beginning to promote. The study of how vegetables and/or animals behave would be the main focus of Benedit’s work during that period, for which he would draw from different disciplines that were in vogue at the time, such as communication theory, structuralism, and cybernetics. His artistic habitats and labyrinths functioned like “small-scale models,” a characteristic that the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss applied to art, which he saw as a small-scale model of the world. Fitotrón (1972) and Laberinto para ratas blancas (1971)—which were presented in November–December 1972 at MoMA—were part of the large-scale structures for live organisms that significantly expanded the parameters of the real/artificial dialectic. While there were many ways in which these works could be interpreted, there was clearly an impulse to create alternative social systems.
Benedit was interested in the concept of “dematerialization” that circulated at that time in the local Buenos Aires scene in the el Manifiesto del arte de los medios [Manifesto for a Mass Media Art] (Costa, Escari, Jacoby, 1966); in Oscar Masotta’s Happenings (1967) and Conciencia y Estructura [Consciousness and Structure] (1968); and in Lucy Lippard and R. Chandler’s “The Dematerialization of Art” (1968) on the international level. Benedit continued his experimental efforts, now focused on his Laberinto invisible.
On the subject of Benedit as a member of the Grupo de los Trece, see GT-255 (doc. no. 1476447).
