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 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 list of the participating Argentinean and international artists. In the prologue to the catalogue for the edition presented in Antwerp (see GT-356 [doc. no. 1476508]), Glusberg explained the distinctive characteristics of his idea. 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.
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.
