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 November 1971, as a result of their encounter with the Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999), the founder of what was called “poor theater,” members of the CAYC met to discuss the goals and organization of the Grupo de los Trece (Group of Thirteen), to include Jacques Bedel, Luis Fernando Benedit, Gregorio Dujovny, Carlos Ginzburg, Víctor Grippo, Jorge González Mir, Vicente Marotta, Luis Pazos, Alberto Pellegrino, Alfredo Portillos, Juan Carlos Romero, Julio Teich, and Jorge Glusberg. The recently formed group thus paid tribute to the small theater-laboratory in Opole where Grotowski developed his theory about the dramatic arts. The goal of the Theatre of 13 Rows was to encourage—in a socialist country like Poland—creative activities produced with scant (“poor”) resources, inspired by the interdisciplinary idea of freedom as the ultimate resource for the creative act.
The constant changes to the makeup of the artists’ collective made it difficult to classify the group under any single heading. Also, at that time, Argentina was split trying to organize itself between the military dictatorship and a 1973 transition to democratic elections; a time that prompted heated technical discussions and passionate aesthetic confrontations. The founding of the group and its custom of welcoming guest artists created an open space for reflection and production whose goal was to promote the development of “arte de sistemas,” a many-sided art fed by quite different sources. The group’s distinctive personality thus embraced technological, process, and political art, including art focused on social issues. This was the CAYC’s institutional promotional strategy during the 1970s.
In January 1972, after presenting a one-man show at the CAYC as a member of the Grupo de los Trece, Alberto Pellegrino (b. 1940) drew in this “gacetilla” a diagram to express thoughts and ideas about the human condition in today’s world. It indicates a change in the discourse coming from the center and its art collective that, in its early years, was focused on the promising relationship between art and technological development. As part of this radical change, the artist’s role now consists of pointing out “the conflicts caused by the unjust social relationships that are so prevalent in Latin American countries.” Art stands out as a form of ideology that, after forfeiting its autonomy, performs a function: to make us “perceive” our sociopolitical and economic conditions, thus encouraging a desirable transformation achieved through action.
