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.
An article in this newsletter includes a list of the Argentinean and international artists and the works they submitted to Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano, the exhibition scheduled to open at the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Emilio Caraffa, in Córdoba (Argentina). This title—which had been used at events in Medellín, Quito, Pamplona, and Buenos Aires as early as that May—signaled a change in the discourse endorsed by the CAYC, whose first exhibitions had focused on the promising relationship between art and technological development. In the newsletters published for the openings of the exhibitions in Buenos Aires and in Córdoba, Glusberg wrote: “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.” The artist’s role now consisted of highlighting “the conflicts caused by the unjust social relationships that are rampant in Latin American countries.” [See newsletter GT-133 (doc. no. 1476312).]
This change of direction in the CAYC’s strategies (in mid-1972) took place concurrently with the Grupo de los Trece’s earliest presentations. The original group incuded Jacques Bedel, Luis Fernando Benedit, Gregorio Dujovny, Carlos Ginzburg, Víctor Grippo, Jorge González Mir, Jorge Glusberg, Vicente Marotta, Luis Pazos, Alberto Pellegrino, Alfredo Portillos, Juan Carlos Romero, and Julio Teich. Horacio Zabala and the architect Clorindo Testa, who are listed here as guest artists, joined the group at a later date. The list of artists was not a repeat of the one in Buenos Aires some months earlier; within the same exhibition format, therefore, the content of each exhibition somehow managed to be relevant to its particular circumstances.
