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 1960 the German artist Hans Joachim Dietrich (b. 1938) and Bernd Ebeling cofounded the publishing house Verlag Kalender in Wuppertal, Germany. In addition to their colleagues’ writings and anthologies, they published a homonymous magazine (Calendar Publishing) that, like an artist’s book, included their own drawings, prints, and gouaches. As a result of these activities, Dietrich came to know many members of the Fluxus movement (during its early years in the Swabia region of southwestern Germany) such as Nam June Paik, Dieter Roth, George Brecht, Stanley Brouwn, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams. In the early 1970s Dietrich created works with electrical and electronic parts.
The exhibition at the CAYC was announced in a text authored by Glusberg, who traced the genealogy of the connections between art and technology that have, since then, been part of the international avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. Parallels can also be found in the nineteenth century, in the works of John Ruskin (1819–1900) and William Morris (1834–1896), who started the Arts and Crafts movement. In his closing words, Glusberg explains the relevance of Dietrich’s work based on his concept of art as a model for social change.
