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 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.
Horacio Zabala (b. 1943) took part in the group exhibitions Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano (1972) and CAYC al Aire Libre. Arte e Ideología (1972); following those events, this document announced the opening of his one-man show, Anteproyectos, where he appeared as a member of the Grupo de los Trece. He exhibited a number of works that addressed the relationship between space and freedom or its opposite, imprisonment. There were prison floorplans and maps of Latin America and an installation, Espacio represivo. Zabala suggests that art—the art system itself—is like a prison, which is not meant as a rejection of the institution of art, it is a commitment to continue to view it critically. His works portray prison from two different perspectives: as a space where the artist can be alone to create (like an ascetic or a hermit), or as a place where society has confined the artist because of his rebellious rejection of the system.
Opened just weeks before Héctor J. Cámpora took office as president of the Republic of Argentina—thus bringing an end to seven years of military dictatorship (Onganía-Levingson-Lanusse) and an eighteen-year ban on Peronism—this exhibition, with its themes of “art” and “prison,” reflected the antithesis of a political period marked by censorship, authoritarianism, and the absence of freedom.
Zabala considers this first exhibition at the CAYC to be the definition of a “work program” that was representative of the contemporary situation and remains current to this day. In the catalogue, he announces that he will create an “Anteproyecto for the design of a journey / the distortion of the Argentinean territory / the construction of a shanty town / the alteration of a chess set / the architecture of a prison / a playful and ideological monument / the design of trash / an act of freedom (…) the design of a soup kitchen / the destruction of a vegetable, an animal, and a mineral.” (CAYC, Anteproyectos, 1973) The latter item was a notably environmental message at a time (beginning in 1972) that saw the establishment of international environmental associations, including the one in Argentina.
