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.
New York artist Eleanor Antin (b. 1935) has worked in a number of different mediums, including photography, performance art, theater improv, installation, film and video, drawing, writing, and sculpture. She uses dry humor in several of her pieces to critically address complex subjects such as gender, race, culture, and the concept of identity. This made her a key figure in the development of a feminist approach in both Conceptual art and performance art.
For her Conceptual work 100 Boots, Antin took photographs of one hundred boots, arranging them in different patterns and settings to represent the “trip” such objects took from Southern California to New York City. She then used those photos to create fifty-one postcards which, from 1971 to 1973, she mailed to hundreds of people in art circles all over the world. Recipients were supposed to reconstruct the journey the boots had taken, based on postcards that were mailed at intervals that ranged from three days to five weeks. The project ended with an exhibition at MoMA that documented the entire process.
Antin had previously taken part in several exhibitions organized by the CAYC, such as 2.972.453, which opened at the center in December 1970 and was curated by Lucy R. Lippard (see GT-20 [doc. no. 1476278]); Arte de Sistemas in July 1971 (GT-54 [doc. no. 1476292]); and Arte de Sistemas II in September 1972 (GT 163-1 [doc. no. 1476343]), both of which were presented at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires when it was still in the building that housed the Teatro Municipal General San Martín, on Avenida Corrientes, the central thoroughfare in Buenos Aires.
