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 an important role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists provided an introduction to the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
Activities of this sort became a regular part of the CAYC’s programs in 1974, when Glusberg took part in Open Circuits. An International Conference on the Future of Television, at MoMA in New York, and then in the Encuentros Internacionales de Video presented at the center in Buenos Aires and in London, Paris, Ferrara, Antwerp, Caracas, Barcelona, Lima, Mexico City, and Tokyo. One year earlier, Glusberg joined forces with Pedro Roth and Danilo Galasse to create Ediciones del Tercer Mundo (Third World Publications), a collective that promoted the production of Latin American publications and videos and organized festivals for non-commercial films. The term “non-commercial” was a reference to films that were shot on Single 8, Super 8, and 16 mm film by amateur filmmakers, as distinct from the 35 mm film used in commercial productions.
The artist, theorist, critic, educator, and writer Douglas Davis (1933–2014) played an active role in the field of contemporary art ever since the 1960s. A pioneer in experimental video in the following decade, his performance pieces and “live” satellite videos relied on interactive technology, a medium that was conducive to art and communications. Following his first one-man show at the Everson Art Museum in Syracuse, New York, and organizing Open Circuits. An International Conference on the Future of Television for MoMA in New York City, this newsletter announces the screening of some of his videos and a show of his silkscreen prints [GT-484 (doc. no. 1476684). The EAM started a Video Department in 1971, with David Ross (b. 1949) as curator. Ross wrote the text that appears in this newsletter, which gives some idea of the CAYC’s network of connections among the forerunners who worked to promote and institutionalize video in those early days.
In these works, produced in the early 1970s, Davis explores video’s potential and possibilities as a communications medium, seeking to stimulate a dialogue with the public as they look at the screen. Davis invites viewers to exchange the conventional “passive receptor” role that has been imposed by a one-way style of communication for an alternative kind of interaction.
