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 Mirta Tocci and notes that she 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 en Latinoamérica. The change in the name shows that the concept of “arte de sistemas” was no longer as important to the CAYC’s institutional discourse as it had once been. This happened as a result of the evolution of the international art scene in the late 1970s, where structuralism was yielding to a renewal in semiotic discourse that was closely aligned with postmodernity. Though the prologue in the catalogue kept the title “Arte de sistemas en Latinoamérica,” the content provided by Glusberg suggests a historicization of the term whose political significance no longer carried the weight it once did, reducing it to one of its many manifestations. This new direction should also be understood within the context of the censorship and repression imposed by the recently installed military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–83). Another, parallel context was the delicate situation created in Spain by the democratic transition begun after the death of General Francisco Franco, in November 1975.
Mirta Tocci (b. 1949) is an Argentinean visual artist and set designer. In the late 1970s, seeking to escape from the military dictatorship in her country, she emigrated to Barcelona, Spain, and later settled in the United States. In 1972 she was awarded the Gran Premio de Honor in the Drawing category at the Salón Municipal de Artes Plásticas Manuel Belgrano in Buenos Aires. Some years later she was chosen to compete in the Premio Marcelo de Ridder (1977), an event organized by the MNBA, also in Buenos Aires. After taking part in the exhibition Gráficos argentinos ‘74 (GT-357; doc. no. 1476511), she became a regular at the CAYC’s activities, taking part in several of the center’s international exhibitions.
The CAYC also publicized América Latina 76 in its other publications (see GT-721 [doc. no. 1477376]). The CAYC’s use of a grid to standardize contributions from various artists allowed the center to optimize the scope of the pieces used to promote its group exhibitions.
