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.
1972 was a pivotal year in the establishment of “arte de sistemas” as the CAYC’s institutional promotional strategy. This newsletter announces the exhibition of documents and photographs related to Arte de Sistemas II, all part of a competition jointly organized by the CAYC, the construction firm Dintel S.C.A., and the magazine Fotografía Universal. The magazine, directed by Miguel Ángel Otero (b. 1945), who introduced semiotic reading as applied to the interpretation of photography at a local level, fostered discussion about the scope or possibilities of photography, its future, and its institutional acknowledgement. (Daniel Merle, “Procesos forzados. Experimentación técnica y fotografía documental en Argentina entre 1967 y 1972,” unpublished.) Otero and the center shared a mutual interest in an unconventional sort of photography that reflected a militant view of the social and political situation in Argentina.
The exhibition Arte de Sistemas II (Buenos Aires, September 1972) was split into three events that were presented at three different locations: Arte de Sistemas Internacional (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires), Arte de Sistemas Argentina (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), and CAYC al Aire Libre. Arte e Ideología (Plaza Roberto Arlt), as well as a performance of experimental music. All three events were included in the competition.
In line with another of the CAYC’s strategies for promoting its events, the center organized the competition with several objectives in mind, as announced in the newsletter: “to introduce people to systems art and explain the role it plays in our national and Latin American culture in order to imbue artistic events with a sense of community; the task involves supporting artists who seek to raise an ideological awareness of art in Latin American society, and appealing to photographers to join artists in the reclamation and re-creation of our national art.” This initiative thus prompted the creation of a documentary record of one of the institution’s major projects by calling on a number of cultural figures to make a political commitment.