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.
Luis Fernando Benedit (1937–2011) had been a regular participant in the CAYC’s activities ever since the center was founded. Beginning in 1968, the Argentinean architect and artist produced a series of artificial environments and habitats in which viewers could observe the behavior of plants, insects, and small animals. In these labyrinths the living creatures encountered a variety of obstacles that helped to foster a range of different relationships prompted by stimuli and reactions. In 1970, with Glusberg’s help and support from a team of scientists, Benedit represented Argentina at the 35th Venice Biennale—which explored the links between art and science—with Biotrón, an artificial habitat for bees. During that same year he took part in the exhibition De la figuración al arte de sistemas, in which he presented different structures that were representative of the systems art that the CAYC was beginning to promote. The study of how vegetables and/or animals behave would be the main focus of Benedit’s work during that period, for which he would draw from different disciplines that were in vogue at the time, such as communication theory, structuralism, and cybernetics. His artistic habitats and labyrinths functioned like “small-scale models,” a characteristic that the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw in art, which he considered to be a small-scale model of the world. Fitotrón (1972) and Laberinto para ratas blancas (1971)—which were presented in November–December 1972 at MoMA—were part of the large-scale structures for live organisms that significantly expanded the parameters of the real/artificial dialectic. While there were many ways in which these works could be interpreted, there was clearly an impulse to create alternative social systems.
