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.
1972 was a pivotal year, when "arte de sistemas" began to be promoted at an international level as the CAYC’s signature trend. This newsletter announces the opening of Arte de sistemas II, at the CAYC, and provides a list of participating artists.
The exhibition Arte de Sistemas II (Buenos Aires, September 1972) was presented at three different venues: Arte de Sistemas Internacional (Museo de Arte Moderno), Arte de Sistemas Argentina (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), and CAYC al Aire Libre. Arte e Ideología (Plaza Roberto Arlt). There was also a performance of experimental music. The complex logistics involved in organizing three exhibitions led to the inclusion of a greater variety of trends and movements, which were mainly reflected in gestural, participatory, and ephemeral art, and strictly contemporary works of a political nature.
"Arte de sistemas" thus came to be understood, in Argentina, 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. This definition is quite similar to “systems esthetics,” the term coined in 1968 by the North American art critic Jack Burnham. “Systems art” became an umbrella term for a wide variety of trends and movements, such as idea art, environmental art, arte povera, cyber art, proposal art, and political art.
The opening ceremony for Arte de Sistemas Argentina included a performance by the local dancer Ana Kamien (b. 1935) (see GT- 158 [doc. no. 1476342]; GT-167 [doc. no. to be confirmed]).
