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.
Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos (1939–1992) was a visual artist, singer, poet, and performer. He started showing his paintings in the 1960s after traveling around Argentina and Latin America. When he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1968, he used the money to organize La última cena (The Last Supper, 1968), a performance/dinner for his closest friends at the luxury Hotel Alvear in Buenos Aires. In his opinion, the end of contemplation and the fusion of art and life were imminent. At a time of growing military authoritarianism and political conflict, whose effects were being felt in cultural circles, the 1972 edition of the Salón Nacional canceled Investigaciones Visuales (Visual Explorations), the experimental section of the event that included modernist approaches based on kinetic machines, objects, and a variety of mixed disciplines. The Salón that year was therefore limited to the traditional sections devoted to painting and sculpture. In the Buenos Aires art milieu, this decision was seen as a blatant act of censorship.
Jorge Glusberg then invited Peralta Ramos to show the work that had been rejected by the Salón: El objeto es el sujeto (The Object is the Subject). In this piece, the artist presented himself as a work of art with the caption “I’m Coming to Visit” painted on a ten-meters-long strip of paper. From that point on, he considered himself to be the art object, thus following in the steps of Gilbert & George, the British artists who had been billing themselves as “living sculptures” since 1969. In addition to his visual production, Peralta Ramos also worked in other disciplines, singing and performing in local night spots where he was a regular. He would recite poems and sing his “nonfigurative” songs with strange titles, or versions by the renowned made Jorge de la Vega, such as “The Little Worm” and “The Magician’s Hour.”
The review in the newsletter by Jasia Reichardt includes a photo of the artist with Nosotros afuera, a 1965 work that was shown at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella.
