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.
This newsletter includes a reproduction of a work by the Argentinean artist Luis Fernando Benedit (1937–2011) and notes that he would take part in América Latina 76 (Latin America 76), the exhibition presented in February 1977 at the Fundació Joan Miró. The works presented at that event in Barcelona were similar to the ones that were shown at the various editions of Arte de Sistemas in Latin America.
Benedit had been a regular participant in the CAYC’s activities ever since the center was founded. Beginning in 1968, the Argentinean architect and artist produced a series of artificial environments and habitats in which viewers could observe the behavior of plants, insects, and small animals that were faced with a variety of obstacles. The relationship between stimuli and behaviors would be the main focus of Benedit’s work during that period, for which he would draw from different disciplines that were in vogue at the time, such as communication theory, structuralism, and cybernetics. His artistic habitats and labyrinths functioned like “small-scale models,” a characteristic that the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw in art, which he considered to be a small-scale model of the world. According to Mari Carmen Ramírez, Benedit was the only representative of CAYC who fully implemented the principles of “arte de sistemas.” (Cf. Benedit. Obras 1968–1978 [Buenos Aires: Fundación Espigas, 2020.])
The standardization of contributions from various artists allowed the CAYC to optimize the scope of the pieces used to promote its group exhibitions.
