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.
Architecture and design were both fundamental components of the CAYC’s interdisciplinary approach from the very beginning. In its early years, the center was affiliated with the Fundación de Investigación Interdisciplinaria (Foundation for Interdisciplinary Research), an organization that included a group of dissident professors from the Facultad de Arquitectura y Ciencias Exactas at the Universidad de Buenos Aires following the occupation of Argentinean universities prompted by the coup d’état orchestrated by General Onganía (1966). All those experiences left their mark on various aspects of the CAYC’s operations, such as the description of many of its initiatives as “projects;” the use of heliographic copies in its exhibitions (a reproduction technique usually used for plans of all kinds); the center’s collaboration with the industrial sector in exhibitions and contests; and the presence of several artist-architects among the members of the Grupo de los Trece, including Clorindo Testa and Luis Fernando Benedit.
As explained in this newsletter, events such as Contemporánea 76 were conceived as opportunities for exhibition and exchange that would contribute to the evolution of disciplines that were seen as having been ignored in Argentina in the 1970s. Progress, in the field of “utility goods,” was not judged based on success in the marketplace but on design qualities, particularly an item’s formal resolution and use of novel materials. They were seen as contemporary art, and the term “architectural interiors” gained greater currency than other, less prestigious terms, such as “interior design” or “interior decoration.”
Exhibitions and competitions of this type frequently enjoyed the support of companies engaged in the production and marketing of industrial products. A case in point was the involvement of Norenplast S.A. (a supplier of plastic materials) in the exhibition Escultura, follaje y ruidos in 1970 (GT-08; doc. 1477957, GT-17; doc. no. 1477959), or the competition organized by Aurora, the appliance company (GT-41; doc. no. 1478063, GT-42; doc. no. 1478064, GT-47; doc. no. 1478075) in 1971. Glusberg had connections to the manufacturing and design sector through his own company, Modulor S.A., which sold lighting fixtures.
