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 1974 the CAYC began focusing a great deal of its attention on this project, promoting a variety of initiatives in exhibitions that traveled around a contemporary circuit consisting of new cultural spaces and centers that were emerging in Europe at the time. The exhibition Arte de Sistemas en Latinoamérica was presented in a number of cities until 1976, providing an overview of recent regional works that were compatible with the approach to “arte de sistemas.”
As part of the CAYC’s promotional efforts in support of the first edition of this exhibition presented at the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum (ICC) in Antwerp, Belgium, this newsletter published a list of Argentinean and international participating artists. In the prologue to the exhibition catalogue (see GT-356 [doc. no. 1476508]), Glusberg restates his earlier definitions in a bid to clarify the distinctive characteristics of what he calls “arte de sistemas.” He suggests that there is a need to define “production models” that address the social situation in Latin America, underscoring his concept of a “Latin American systems art” in which the production of art is part of a commitment to political action. He returns to the idea that “there is no Latin American art as such, but the region’s individual countries do share a common problem in terms of their revolutionary situation.” Quoting from the Theory of Dependency and referring to the term Third World (which was very much in vogue in Europe in those days), Glusberg proposes the CAYC’s poetics as an art of liberation in response to an art of domination.
It should be noted that the exhibition Arte de Sistemas en Latinoamérica established “arte de sistemas” as a movement that came to define the CAYC, positioning the center as an institutional point of reference in terms of the exposure and promotion of Latin American Conceptual art.
