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.
Victor Grippo (1936–2002) became involved in the CAYC’s activities in 1971. The following year he joined the original lineup of the Grupo de los Trece, the group that included the center’s director and became its standard bearer. In his series Analogías, Grippo draws parallels between the potato (a food item that is native to the Americas) and consciousness (displayed through Eurocentric models of thinking). The original version, which was presented at Arte de Sistemas (1971), consisted of forty potatoes pigeonholed in a wooden grid and connected to each other by electrodes. In the center, a voltmeter monitored the resulting electric current, demonstrating the energy contained in these tubers. This scientific proof of the presence of that energy allowed Grippo to draw parallels with human consciousness, the dynamic driver of social change.
Part of this series is a set of graphic works in which Grippo combines the image of a potato (and other plants and vegetables) with scientific diagrams and plans of an electric circuit (GT- 695; doc. no. 1477339, GT-699; doc. no. 1477343). In the text published in the newsletter, Glusberg reviews works in this series that reflect on the interaction among natural phenomena, their scientific interpretation, and their effect at a social level. In addition to other pieces in the Analogías series, the text discusses the art action titled Construcción de un horno popular para hacer pan, which was jointly presented by Grippo and Jorge Gamarra (b. 1939) at the exhibition CAYC al aire libre. Arte e ideología that took place at the Roberto Arlt plaza in Buenos Aires in 1972. The text also mentions the theme that held Grippo’s attention in the late 1970s: trades and the tools created to work in them.
