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. After organizing the Jornadas Intensivas de Discusión Arte y Fotografía in 1971, the CAYC opened Fotografía tridimensional in January 1972, the exhibition at which visual artists sought to transform and mobilize “the static figures of traditional two-dimensional photography.” This is the origin of the idea of the incorporation of photography into objects and installations. The exhibition showed works by local and international guest artists such as Christo, Dan Graham, Allan Kaprow, Joseph Kosuth, Sol Lewitt, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol.
Members of the recently created “Grupo de los Trece” showed their work at Fotografía Tridimensional (1972). These artists, who had all been associated with the center since it was founded but had not yet come together as a group at this point, showed their work alongside a number of guest artists. The exhibition sought to outdo its predecessors in the experimental poetics of photography, which the CAYC understood as a “process,” a “system” unto itself. The center had very recently hosted an exhibition about experimental photography in Poland [see GT-100 (doc. no. 1476356) and GT-101 (doc. no. 1476357)].
Luis Pazos (b. 1940)—a member of the “Grupo de los Trece,” the group formed by Glusberg and collaborator since its inception—showed his work Volumen. Pazos’s project consisted of a photo of himself printed on a T-shirt that he wore to the opening of the exhibition. In this work, he claimed to have “broken away” from photography’s traditional two-dimensional space and added volume, movement, and direct interaction with viewers.
