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 eagerness to create links between Latin American and Eastern European art was a fundamental, somewhat politicized aspect of the CAYC’s strategy for international exchange. The center advocated “unity of strengths” among national art scenes in what were considered Third World countries. Glusberg saw the result as a form of art that was a contender in the world scene while still reflecting the specific problems these countries had in common. The organization of this exhibition with the support of the Polish Embassy in Argentina can be seen as a determined effort to strengthen ties that were of particular significance during the time of the Cold War. The Theory of Dependence was being introduced in Latin America at that time, which explained the poverty those countries experienced under the oppression of the great world powers.
The experimental nature of these photographs is inspired by the photographers’ search for a language of their own, seeking creative autonomy and distancing themselves from the pictorial tradition that had dominated the medium since the dawn of photography. This article includes a brief review of the groups that explored this experimental approach in Poland while the country was living under the crushing yoke of the Soviet regime during the 1960s. In the next edition of this newsletter (GT-101, doc. no. 1476357) Glusberg discusses the pictorialism of photography, which he calls the heir to the “disastrous influences of socialist realism.” The critic underscores photography as producer of “ideological objects” at the kernel of the ongoing coups d’état that Argentina endured.
