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 announces a new exhibition in Buenos Aires, presenting works by the German artist Otto Piene (1928–2014), who was closely aligned with the systems art concept endorsed by the center (GT-328 [doc. no. 1476493]). The CAYC used this concept as an umbrella term for a variety of approaches, such as idea art, environmental art, arte povera, cyber art, proposal art, and political art. At the first edition of Arte de sistemas (1971), Glusberg described it as a kind of art practice that was based on an understanding of the systems and processes that create order in our experience of the contemporary world. That definition was originally meant as a reference to “systems esthetics,” the term coined in 1968 by the North American art critic Jack Burnham.
Piene was a founding member of the ZERO group and a pioneer in the field of multimedia art. In the 1970s he was appointed director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the prestigious center for technological experimentation where artists and scientists worked alongside one another. In his works, the German artist used light, air, fire, and movement to explore the interfaces of art, technology, and the environment. He came to be defined by his works that incorporate the force of nature as an integral part of art.
