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.
The philosopher and artist Hervé Fischer (b. 1941) began his career as a professor of sociology specializing in culture and communication; he went on to write a number of articles about art, science, and technology. In 1971 he teamed up with Fred Forest (b. 1933) and Jean-Paul Thenot (b. 1943) to start the Collectif d'art sociologique (Sociological Art Collective), which they presented as a category. This French group was in tune, at the time, with other art actions that were taking a more openly critical view of art and its distribution circuits and ideological representations. The collective published its Primer manifiesto del arte sociológico (First Manifesto of Sociological Art, 1974) in Le Monde (the most widely read newspaper in France), in which it claimed that the practice of art was rooted in the fundamental links that connect art, society, and life. Given these parameters, sociological art relied on scientific methods by approaching its art actions as a privileged sphere of research devoted to the exploration of social theories.
Fischer also published Art et communication marginale. Tampons d’artistes (Art and Marginal Communication: Artists’ Rubber Stamps) (Paris: Balland Éditeurs, 1974), an exploration of the use of rubber stamps in art. This project put him in touch with a number of Argentinean artists, including Carlos Ginzburg (b. 1946), Juan Carlos Romero (1930–2017), Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1928–1997), and Horacio Zabala (b. 1943). A year later, the CAYC invited him to present a solo exhibition of his work at the center in Buenos Aires.
This newsletter includes a text written by Fischer in which he discusses the concept of identity as “fiction” (1974). His thinking on the subject is supported by quotes from a range of authors, such as Ernest Fischer (1899–1972), Louis Althusser (1918–1990), Lucien Goldman (1913–1970), Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008), Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), and Roland Barthes (1915–1980). Fischer’s article calls for a critical reflection on the outdated matter of “personal identity.”
