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 1970s ushered in a period of growing conflict, which was energetically challenged by the revolutionary imperative. Under those circumstances, debates about the role of art and the artist became increasingly urgent as politics became more radicalized and there was widespread violence, in Argentina in particular, but also in the region as a whole.
Hacia un perfil… showed works in which Argentinean and international artists pondered the political situation that was common to all their countries. The exhibition provided a perspective on art and the Grupo de los Trece’s ideology in a concise overview of contemporary regional art. The CAYC’s version of arte de sistemas not only referred to international process art; its political stance, absorbed during its many productions, gave it an identity of its own and associated it with a regional identity. In his introduction to the exhibition, Glusberg said: “There is no Latin American art as such, but the region’s individual countries do share a common problem in terms of their revolutionary situation.” [GT-133 (doc. no. 1476312)]
The travels referred to in this newsletter provide insight into the changes taking place at the CAYC during a promising period in its association with critics, cultural promoters, institutions, and circuits in various different places in Europe and the Americas. The inclusion of the quote from the text in which Glusberg uses the first person singular to position himself as the spokesperson for the group is indicative of the personal tone of many of the center’s communications at that time when it was becoming increasingly well known in international circles. The list of participating artists from Argentina and other countries varied from one version of the exhibition to another, but the conceptualization referred to in the title remained constant without modification from that year to the next.
