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.
Exposición Internacional de Proposiciones a realizar. Investigaciones poéticas, the exhibition organized by Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1928–1997) with assistance from Elena Pelli and Clemente A. Padín, the Uruguayan artist associated with mail art, brought together a group of international artists who shone a light on the contemporary experimental poetry scene.
Guillermo Deisler (1940–1995) was a key figure in Latin American avant-garde poetics. A set designer, visual poet, woodblock printer, graphic designer, teacher, mail art producer, editor of artists’ books and other publications, he was actively involved in promoting group projects. He used these projects to create other avenues for the circulation of art beyond traditional channels. In 1963 he launched the Ediciones Mimbre project, through which he published more than fifty books and chapbooks of poetry and stories illustrated with woodblock prints. He also published artists’ books and short print runs of handcrafted, experimental editions of visual poetry.
Deisler kept up a regular exchange with many Latin American artists and poets who, like him, were involved in group initiatives focused on the publication, circulation, and exchange of experimental works. He contributed to what he called “off-center” and alternative publications, such as Diagonal Cero and Hexágono ’71, magazines published by Vigo in the city of La Plata, Argentina, and OVUM 10, published by Padín in Montevideo, Uruguay. In 1966 Vigo produced a series of chapbooks illustrated with woodblock prints under the seal of Diagonal Cero, whose first issue featured Deisler.
Deisler’s contribution to the Exposición Internacional de Proposiciones a realizar. Investigaciones poéticas was Instrucciones para llevar a cabo esta proposición, an installation made with matchsticks that encouraged viewers to create a structure. The object, Exclusivo, hecho para usted, was printed on cardboard with an element which, when activated by a viewer, generated an optical effect. There was also another object designed to be activated by viewers: a male torso with an arrow indicating that it could be lifted up. In the place where the genitals should be, there was a bird.
In that same year Deisler published his Poemas visivos y proposiciones a realizar, in which the poems were replaced by a set of instructions or “proposals to be carried out” by the reader. He thus challenged the integrity of the “work” while redefining the traditional roles of the artist and the audience. It was a form of questioning that, more than a mere poetic transgression, was a device that demanded the active participation of readers to set in motion a potential transformation beyond the realm of art.
