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.
A new cultural scene flourished after Salvador Allende’s election as president, making Chile an ideal place for an exchange of art projects from one side of the Andes mountains to the other. Under the new government of the Unidad Popular party (1970–73), socialist artists and intellectuals sought to show their works beyond traditional circuits and introduce the general public to social spaces that had hitherto been off limits to them.
Thanks to Glusberg’s connection to Nemesio Antúnez—a painter, printmaker and, at that time, the director of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago de Chile—several of the CAYC’s exhibitions were offered to the MNBA. The offering was inspired by common goals: on the one hand, to promote art from the Southern Cone on the world stage; and, on the other, to present international work to a Latin American audience.
Due to the military coup d’état in Chile, plans to show Arte de sistemas and Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano were cancelled. (See the exhibition catalogue, Mariana Marchesi y Sebastián Vidal Valenzuela, CAYC: Chile | Argentina | 1973-1985-2022. La exposición olvidada y una lectura a cuatro artistas chilenos, 2022). The coup, which happened on September 11, 1973, sent shockwaves around the world. The CAYC presented the first version of the exhibition Homenaje a Salvador Allende (GT-285; doc. no. 1476428, GT-288; doc. no. 1476430) that included works by contemporary Chilean artists.
This newsletter published instructions for those who wished to take part in a new (traveling) exhibition-tribute. This initiative relied on the same production method that had been used for Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano: using heliographic prints as supports for submitted works. This was a low-cost process that made it easy to copy works. As Glusberg said, “This was no random discovery; it was a result of our inability to compete with technological media and with much deeper pockets than we had.” The ability to copy works for very little money made it possible to circulate images more widely and exhibit them in multiple places at the same time.
