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.
Víctor Grippo (1936–2002) started taking part in the CAYC’s activities shortly after it was founded (1971) and became one of the original members of the Grupo de los Trece the following year. The exhibition Conciencia de la energía opened at the CAYC on August 26, 1977, which was a pivotal year for him. By that time, Grippo had changed his approach and returned to some of the ideas that had influenced him when he started working on the subject of “analogies.” He began working on this series in 1970, and usually referred to it as “potatoes and wiring,” drawing an analogy between potatoes (a native American food) and awareness.
In Analogía I (1970–71), Grippo shows a circuit that creates an electrochemical reaction through two electrodes (one copper, one zinc) that are inserted into a tuber to produce an electric current, turning the potato into a “vegetable battery.” In its original versions, produced in the early 1970s, the work demonstrated a “contained energy,” which became a metaphor for the revolutionary uprisings taking place throughout the Americas, especially in the Southern Cone. In another piece in the series, Analogía IV (ca.1972), Grippo presents a plate of real potatoes on a table with the appropriate cutlery, and on the other side, a replica of the original elements chiseled in transparent acrylic. Síntesis (1972), for its part, consists of a potato and a piece of coal, a combination that evokes the artist’s interest in the transmutation of energy.
The pieces in the Analogías series create dialogues between what is natural and what is artificial, suggest oppositions between luxury and austerity, pose contradictions between black and white, and so on. Incidentally, Analogía I. Segunda versión (1977), larger in this second version than the original—together with Energía vegetal o Naturalizar al hombre, humanizar a la naturaleza (1977) and other works by members of the Grupo de los Trece—was part of the exhibition Signos en ecosistemas artificiales presented at the XIV São Paulo Biennial that year, where it was awarded the Grande Prêmio Itamaraty.
In the months prior to the Grupo de los Trece’s participation in that event in São Paulo, the CAYC organized solo exhibitions for some of the group’s members. (See GT-737 [doc. no. 1477389], GT-738 [doc. no. 1477390], GT-746 [doc. no. 1477396], GT-757 [doc. no. 1477397], GT-758 [doc. no. 1477398], GT-759 [doc. no. 1477399], GT-764 [doc. no. 1477431], GT-765 [doc. no. 1477432], GT-766 [doc. no. 1477433], GT-772 [doc. no. 1477435], GT-773 [doc. no. 1477436], GT-774 and GT-775 [doc. no. 1477437], GT-785, and GT-786 [doc. no. 1477448].)
