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 scenes in what were considered Third World countries. Glusberg saw it as an art that was part of the world scene while still reflecting the problems they had in common. The organization of this exhibition of works with the help of the Polish embassy in Argentina can be seen as a strong move to strengthen links that were of particular significance during the Cold War. The Theory of Dependence was being introduced in Latin America at that time, which explained the poverty of countries under the oppression of the imperial forces of the great world powers. On another level, within the Soviet Bloc, Poland stood out in those days for its experimental film production and for poster design.
In his introductory essay to an exhibition of works by Polish photographers at the CAYC, Glusberg reviews the experimental nature of photography in Poland from just after the Second World War to the critical decade that saw the Warsaw Pact and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968). He suggests that collaboration between artists and scientists was the source of photography’s emancipation from naturalism and its conversion to more contemporary practices (thanks to advertising) such as photo reporting. Glusberg also discusses the distancing from pictorialism, especially the “negative influences of social realism.” Also, in line with “systems photography,” the author calls the discipline “the creator of ideological objects,” classifying “transparent signs” as any images that present the subject clearly, as it is. Ideas shrouded in a veil are “opaque signs.”
