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.
Luis Fernando Benedit (1937–2011) had been a regular participant in the CAYC’s activities ever since the center and the Grupo de los Trece were founded (GT-181; doc. no. 1476353, GT-255; doc. no. 1476447, GT-694; doc. no. 1477338, GT-745; doc. no. 1477395). 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 the CAYC who fully expressed the principles of “systems art.” (Cf. Benedit. Obras 1968-1978 [Buenos Aires: Fundación Espigas, 2020].)
Benedit designed labyrinths, containers, and circuits for animals, vegetables, and liquids with which he sought to reflect on connections such as: nature/culture, organic/artificial, stimulus/reaction, art/science, individual/society, freedom/authority. In the mid-1970s Benedit started researching the building blocks of Argentinean identity, identifying el campo (the rural sections of the country) as an integral part of that identity. The work published in this newsletter, Juego del pato, is part of that initiative, providing an explanation of the rules and goals of the equestrian exercise that originated in rural areas of Argentina. A presidential decree issued by Juan Domingo Perón in 1953 declared it the national sport.
Benedit’s works, along with others by the other members of the Grupo de los Trece, were shown at the XIV São Paulo Biennial in October 1977 as part of the installation Signos en ecosistemas artificiales, which won the Grande Prêmio Itamaraty. The work shown here was published in the catalogue that the CAYC produced to acknowledge this notable participation.
