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 first edition of this exhibition, which was presented at the ICC in Antwerp, this newsletter published an essay by the Colombian artist, critic, and curator Jonier Marín (b. 1946), who started his career in the late 1960s. He showed his work at documenta 5, the event curated by Harald Szeemann, in Kassel, Germany, in 1972. From that point on, he started producing art that sought to erase all distinctions between high and low culture. He stayed in touch with some of the artists who were also at that event and who had similar points of view, such as Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Christo, among others.
El título de este escrito, probablemente alude a la obra de Carlos Ginzburg en Medellín, el señalamiento de la Piedra del Peñol, a la que pintó la palabra “piedra”, en una operación tautológica propia de la que primaba en el conceptualismo internacional.
The title of this text probably alludes to the work of Carlos Ginzburg in Medellín—a marking on the Piedra del Peñol, onto which he painted the word “stone,” a tautological operation typical of that kind that prevailed in international conceptualism.
In his essay, Marín reflects on the existence of a Latin American style of art and discusses the CAYC’s efforts to identify it. He draws a line to connect this exhibition to the first edition of Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano, the exhibition that, as it happens, was presented in his native Colombia in May 1972 as part of the III Bienal de Arte Coltejer in Medellín. Marín firmly believes that “idea art” is the most suitable way to approach the subject matter that, for him, defines Latin American art, as opposed to more traditional techniques and languages that he dismisses as “gimmicks for museums.” But he also claims that, in order to avoid defaulting to Anglo-Saxon conceptualism, a purely Latin American style should include an intuitive, random, spontaneous, humorous, and playful quality.
