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.
Arte de Sistemas en Latinoamérica presented an overview of recent work from Latin America that expressed the CAYC’s concept of “systems art.” The exhibition traveled to several European cities from 1974 to 1976, visiting the new cultural spaces and centers that were emerging at the time.
As on previous occasions, the newsletter was used to announce the presence of a particular artist at a forthcoming event. In this case, the artist was Antonio Berni (1905–1981), who was widely known and whose work was featured in Arte de Sistemas en Latinoamérica, the event organized by the CAYC in 1974 to be shown at the ICC (Internationaal Cultureel Centrum), the Belgian cultural center in Antwerp (GT-354; doc. no. 1476507). The work in question was a collage in which Berni took a critical look at the relationship between Wall Street, the financial heart of New York, and the dictatorships in some of the countries in the Southern Cone.
The exhibition Arte de Sistemas en Latinoamérica established systems art as a movement that came to identify the CAYC, positioning the center as an institutional beacon of Latin American Conceptual art.
