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.
Going back to the CAYC’s very early years, showing films was an important part of the center’s exhibition programs, in keeping with its goal of positioning itself as a space for experimental work, especially for projects that sought to combine art, technology, and communication. The CAYC thus continued doing the work that the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella had been doing in Argentina in the 1960s, motivating the avant-garde as it engaged with the logic of the mass media, encouraging an exploration of interdisciplinary approaches, and supporting visual artists who were trying their hands in the fields of radical theater, fashion, design, and film. In Glusberg’s view, collaborative works of that kind provided a way to promote a new social order.
Activities of this sort became a regular part of the CAYC’s programs in 1974, when Glusberg took part in Open Circuits. An International Conference on the Future of Television, at MoMA in New York, and then in the Encuentros Internacionales de Video presented at the center in Buenos Aires and in London, Paris, Ferrara, Antwerp, Caracas, Barcelona, Lima, Mexico City, and Tokyo. The Festival de formatos no comerciales (Nonccommercial Format Festival) announced in this newsletter was a forerunner of those programs and was similar to other events that were being organized around the world in the latter half of the 1960s. (Glenn Phillips and Sophia Serrano, “Encounters: CAyC and the International Encuentros,” in Encounters in Video Art in Latin America, Getty Research Institute, 2023.) The term “noncommercial” in the title of the event was a reference to films that were shot on Single 8, Super 8, and 16 mm film by amateur filmmakers, as distinct from the 35 mm film used in commercial productions.
The festival’s “C Series” consists of videos produced by international and Argentinean artists. Two of the latter group were produced by the CAYC; they were filmed with the Sony Portapak camera that Glusberg bought in New York in 1969. Cameras of that nature—which artists all over the world were using in their experimental works—were not available in Argentina at that time and were therefore brand new tools in the local market.
Marta Minujín, the Argentinean artist who was living in New York at the time, used video to record her Kidnappening (a neologism that combined the words “kidnap” and “happening”), the action she organized at MoMA in September 1973. This newsletter, which was published that month, announced that the video, entitled Kidnapping would be shown at the CAYC in December. It was clear that Glusberg sought to present events in Buenos Aires that echoed what was going on at the great art centers of the world, as in the case of Minujín’s work.
