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.
The critic introduced the art category that “is about processes rather than the finished products of good art” in Argentina at the exhibition De la Figuración al Arte de Sistemas (Museo Emilio Caraffa, Córdoba, 1970) (doc. no. 761141). In this context, art is not about the creation of objects but about an expression of reality, a process which becomes one of the artist’s materials. Researching events, taking part in social and cultural occasions, developing new ways to question the world, expressing oneself in political terms (which was the focus in the Southern Cone in those days), concerned a sector of these artists.
1972 was a pivotal year in the establishment of “arte de sistemas” as the CAYC’s institutional promotional strategy. That was when the Grupo de los Trece came together as a group and when the “arte de sistemas” category took on a different, multifaceted connotation that ultimately became associated with a regional Latin American identity.
This newsletter, which was distributed in April 1972, includes a breakdown of the exhibitions that the CAYC had organized up to that time and how they were shared with the center’s network of local institutions. It also provides detailed reports on openings of the exhibitions that were organized in a number of cities in Latin America (Medellín, Quito, Lima, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Santiago) and further afield—in Pamplona and Madrid, and in Milan and Rome—with lists of participating artists and directors of the institutions that made this sort of cultural support possible. Some North American artists showed their works at these events, but at that stage the exhibitions did not travel to the United States. The newsletter article explains that “dissident” First World artists submitted their works to these exhibitions as a way to show their support for the Third World. The text provides a schedule of the exhibitions to be presented at the center’s premises in Buenos Aires that “aim to document the CAYC’s position regarding the problems it seeks to address in Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano.”
