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.
Going back to the CAYC’s very early years, showing films was an important part of the center’s exhibition programs, in keeping with its goal of positioning itself as a space for experimental work, especially for projects that sought to combine art, technology, and communication. The CAYC thus continued doing the work that the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella had been doing in Argentina in the 1960s, motivating the avant-garde as it engaged with the logic of the mass media, encouraging an exploration of interdisciplinary approaches, and supporting visual artists who were trying their hands in the fields of radical theater, fashion, design, and film. In Glusberg’s view, collaborative works of that kind provided a way to promote a new social order.
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. The second event took place at the Espace Pierre Cardin, an art center in Paris with a large theater, galleries, restaurants, and meeting rooms located in the Jardin des Champs-Élysées. Pierre Cardin (1922–2020), the fashion icon, acquired the space in 1970 and transformed it into a center with a focus on art, fashion, and interior design.
Janos Urban (1934–2016) was a pioneer of Conceptual art in Switzerland. In 1970 he started producing videos in the style of the British group Art and Language. Videos from his series Parallel Times had already been shown at the CAYC in Buenos Aires in early 1974 [see GT-350 (doc. no. 1476497)]. On this occasion, he also provides a didactic text in which he explains his work in formal terms. Urban explored video’s potential as an autonomous medium to address a variety of different space-time options, seeking to create a “comprehensive system” at the level of perception and of thinking.
