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 1969, at the first Arte y Cibernética exhibition, the CAYC demonstrated that its experimental work was in line with ideas that had been presented previously on the international stage. With this exhibition, presented at the Galería Bonino in Buenos Aires (which has branches in Rio de Janeiro and New York), the center sought to illustrate the possibilities offered by new creative technologies. There was an underlying interest in promoting a form of interdisciplinary activity “that reflected the time in which we are living.” In March a group of Argentinean artists, assisted by a number of programmers, engineers, and systems analysts from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Escuelas Técnicas ORT, explored creative possibilities generated by technologies that were available at the time.
The CAYC’s participation in Tendencies-5, the exhibition at the Zagreb Gallery of Contemporary Art (Zagreb is now the capital of Croatia), included some names that had not been on the list of participants at previous exhibitions, presented with a different title, at the Bonino gallery in 1969 and in Chicago in 1971 [GT-63 (doc. no. 1476298)]. The CAYC frequently made changes to the list of participants in its exhibitions when they were presented at other institutions. The center’s presentation in Zagreb—a city which, at the time, was part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—was significant under the circumstances, given the Cold War and the introduction throughout Latin America of the Theory of Dependence, which explained that the poverty the region’s countries were experiencing was a result of the oppression of the great world powers. The eagerness to create links between Latin American and Eastern European art was a fundamental part of the CAYC’s strategy for international exchange. The center advocated a “unity of strengths” among local art scenes in what were considered Third World countries. That is, what Glusberg saw as a form of art that expressed the specific problems the countries had in common.
