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.
At the first Arte de Sistemas exhibition, presented in 1971 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, Glusberg defined “arte de sistemas” as an art practice based on an understanding of the systems and processes that are used to organize the contemporary world’s experience. This definition was close to “systems esthetics,” the term coined in 1968 by the North American critic Jack Burnham. Over time, in Argentina, for a variety of reasons, the term was used to refer to several dissimilar trends and movements, such as idea art (or Conceptual art), ecological art, poor art (Arte Povera), cybernetic art, proposal art, and blatantly political art, a local approach driven by the authoritarian regimes and military coups d’états that South America was forced to endure.
The exhibition Arte de Sistemas en Latinoamérica toured Europe from 1974 to 1976, visiting several cities and showing a selection of recent regional works that reflected the concept of what Glusberg called “arte de sistemas.” As part of the CAYC’s promotional efforts in support of the second edition of this exhibition, which was presented at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, this newsletter published a brief review of a work by the Argentinean artist Liliana Porter (b. 1941), written by James Collins (1939–2021), that originally appeared in Artforum, the international art magazine. Porter worked as a critic for several publications and was also a Conceptual artist and a photographer. She took part in 2.972.453, the exhibition presented at the CAYC in December 1979, curated by Lucy R. Lippard (see GT-20 [doc. no. 1476278]).
Liliana Porter trained in the field of traditional printmaking in Buenos Aires and Mexico City, then settled in New York in 1964. She was a member of the NYGW (New York Graphic Workshop), with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo, from 1965 to 1970, a group that explored the possibilities of printmaking within the confines of the Conceptual art movement. In the early 1970s, her works challenged the ambiguous border that separated fiction from reality, often combining printing techniques and languages. In the piece mentioned above, she superimposed a triangle (a geometric shape) on a photograph of hands. According to Collins, she thus included the work in the category of “systems art”—placing it outside the realm of the abstraction/figuration dichotomy—and pitched it beyond the clichéd genres that had defined the discourse about art in previous decades.
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.
