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 time, the Grupo de los Trece expanded its ranks beyond its original thirteen members. The group’s artistic approach combined corporate team dynamics—from which it borrowed the “brainstorming” technique—with psychoanalytical group therapy procedures and tactics used by political cells. A forerunner of this approach at an international level was the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG), started in 1969 by the New York artists Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche. This group staged events in public spaces that combined performance and theater in an attempt to reach viewers beyond the confines of the art community.
The 1970s ushered in a period of accelerating conflict, which included strong challenges from the revolutionary movement. Under those circumstances, arguments about the role of art and the artist became increasingly heated as politics became more radicalized and violence became widespread, in Argentina in particular, but also in the region as a whole.
After the artist and printmaker Juan Carlos Romero (1930–2017) showed his work at the group exhibitions Arte de Sistemas (1971), Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano (1972), and Arte de Sistemas II (1972), this newsletter announced the opening of his show Violencia in April 1973. The article introduced Romero as a member of the Grupo de los Trece. His work, which was described as a graphic installation, occupied all three floors at the CAYC and consisted of a complex arrangement of texts on the subject of violence taken from various sources and periods, newspaper images and headlines, and posters on the walls and floor in one of the rooms, with the word “VIOLENCIA” printed in large letters. Opened a few weeks before Héctor J. Cámpora took office as president of the Republic of Argentina—thus bringing to an end a period of seven years of military dictatorship (Onganía-Levingston-Lanusse) and an eighteen-year ban on Peronism—the exhibition of Romero’s work focused on the use of violence as a tool for dominance, as well as for the social transformation of the have-nots.
This article includes a reproduction of one of the artist’s works and a text, written in a semiological and sociological code, in which by Gillo Dorfles (1910–2018) identifies the distinguishing features of Latin American Conceptual art. The CAYC leadership had already expressed its view on the subject: “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.” [Jorge Glusberg, GT-133 (doc. no. 1476312)]. The Italian critic’s comments highlight both aspects of the Buenos Aires center’s successful achievement of its goals, one of which was to provide legitimacy for the region’s Conceptual art in terms of its diametrical differences from the evolution of Conceptual art in the United States and Western Europe. The other was to position the CAYC as the worldwide center for the exposure and promotion of such practices in Latin America.
