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.
The issue of regional identity had been a subject of constant discussion, a problem that Glusberg had been calling attention to ever since the founding of the Grupo de los Trece. It was expressed as an objective in the title of the exhibition Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano (1972), while the introductory essay claimed that “There is no Latin American art as such, only Latin American problems,” at an event that included works by artists from all parts of the Americas.
An exhibition titled Los mitos del oro was presented in August 1978 at the CAYC, where the issue was addressed again, after being featured as part of the presentation at the XIV São Paulo Biennial (1977). In the corresponding essay, Glusberg discusses the Spanish expedition to find gold in Peru that was undertaken from 1529 to 1532 by Juan Pizarro and a group of individuals that history refers to as “los Trece de la Fama.” The rumored mother lode of precious metals and fabulous treasures sparked the fascination and greed of adventurers in the sixteenth century who were convinced that there was a place called El Dorado in the New World, a mythical place of unimaginable riches that became a legend that was told and retold for centuries. The Grupo de los Trece’s group exhibition was based on Pizarro’s adventure.
The Grupo de los Trece presented a large installation based on “the myth of gold” at the CAYC. Each member of the group exhibited works that reflected the theme, all of them made with gilded materials.
Previous consequence newsletters (GT- 868-69; doc. no. 1477767; GT-870-76; doc. no. 1477827) published lengthy historical and cultural articles that discussed the “myths of gold” that had been addressed previously in meetings at the School of Advanced Studies. “Gold was the relentless driving force behind the conquest of the Americas, but it was also an integral part of many pre-Colombian rites and rituals. In the 1970s it was still an imaginary standard of value for money in contemporary societies. Then, as always, it was seen as a guarantee of prestige and incorruptibility.” (Graciela Sarti, Grupo CAyC [Buenos Aires: Centro Virtual de Arte Argentino, March 2013], http://www.cvaa.com.ar/02dossiers/cayc/03_intro.php.)
In November of that year the exhibition was part of the First Latin American Biennial of São Paulo, reflecting the theme of the invitation “Myths and Magic in the Americas.” A reproduction of the print created by Louis Jean Désiré Delaistre (1800–1871) as an illustration of the famous poem by John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) was used as the front page of the Grupo de los Trece’s presentation in the catalogue produced for the competition.
