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.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s in Buenos Aires, a debate took place among those who questioned the artistic nature of a photographic image and the possibilities of experimentation that the medium provided.
The exhibition Arte de Sistemas II (September 1972) was 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) and included performances of experimental music. An article in this newsletter identifies the photographs that were chosen for the exhibition (images from Arte de Sistemas II), based on a competition jointly organized by the center, the construction company Dintel S. C. A., and the magazine Fotografía Universal. Directed by Miguel Ángel Otero (b. 1945), who introduced a semiotic approach to photography, the magazine revived the debate about the potential of the genre, its future possibilities, and its recognition at an institutional level. Otero became associated with the CAYC as a result of a mutual interest in a kind of militant photography that portrayed the sociopolitical situation in Argentina.
The CAYC organized the competition with several goals in mind, as spelled out in this newsletter: “the dissemination of systems art and its role in national and Latin American culture to provide art with a sense of community; the task of providing support for artists who seek to raise the ideological awareness of art in Latin American society; and a call to photographers to join artists in the reclamation and recreation of a national kind of art.” (Daniel Merle, “Procesos forzados. Experimentación técnica y fotografía documental en Argentina entre 1967 y 1972”, unpublished.)
