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 growing conflict and forceful challenges by the revolutionary movement. Under those circumstances, debates about the role of art and the artist became increasingly urgent as politics became more radicalized and there was widespread violence, in Argentina in particular, but also in the region as a whole.
In the early days of his career, in the 1960s, Antonio Dias (1944–2018) favored a Pop art style in works that addressed the sociopolitical conditions created by the Brazilian military regime that was in power for two decades (1964–85). In 1968—after he had been exiled from his country and was living in Europe (mainly in Milan and Cologne)—his work changed course to explorations into the nature of art combined with ideas about territoriality that created a unique conceptual universe. After his work was shown at the group exhibitions Arte de Sistemas (1971) and Arte de Sistemas II (1972), this newsletter announced the opening of a solo presentation of three of his films in the series La ilustración del arte in November 1973.
This series, which was produced from 1971 to 1978, was an eclectic collection that included paintings, objects, installations, discs, photographs, and films in which Dias presents thematic and formal elements that would play a key role in his later practice. As the title of the series indicates, Dias was concerned with exploring the methods underpinning the language of art, thus inviting critical reflection. He questions the idea of “nationality in art” because he believes in artistic autonomy, regardless of which country a work comes from, as expressed in the Declaração de princípios básicos da vanguarda (1967), in which a group of Brazilian artists (Lygia Clark, Rubens Gerchman, Anna Maria Maiolino, and Hélio Oiticica, among others) and critics (Frederico Morais, Mário Barata) identify the anti-institutional and anti-market foundations of their work [See doc. no. 1110371].
The films presented at the CAYC were shot on Super 8, and Dias edited them while he was in New York. Using different approaches, he questions the nature of art and the tension that exists between the cultural world’s ownership of the works and his resistance to it.
