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.
Leandro Katz (b. 1938) was born in Argentina and lives in New York; he is a key artist in Latin American Conceptual circles. He is a writer and a producer who is known for his films and photography installations, exploring aspects of South American history in works that combine historical research, anthropology, and the visual arts. After spending time in various Latin American cities, he settled in the United States, where he has produced works based on language. He claims that the project called “Las 21 columnas del lenguaje” was inspired by his reading of Elements of Semiology (1964), in which Roland Barthes describes language as a sort of architectural construction.
Using typewritten scrolls and installations of columns of words on monuments or actions involving them, Katz installed his “columns” in different cities across the continent. In Buenos Aires, the proposed action consisted of the artist standing in front of the Obelisk, , holding a poster that said, “For Sale.” In those days, this was a critique of the art system, playing on a popular local expression, “they sold you the obelisk,” an allusion to trickery or fraud. Katz therefore works at a creative crossroads between the academic study of language and its sociological uses, as Barthes himself noted. The monument—standing at the intersection of the two main avenues in the city (9 de Julio and Corrientes)—was built by the modernist architect Alberto Prebisch in 1936; since then, it has become a focal point for meetings, celebrations, and popular demonstrations.
