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. In addition to the exhibitions, a program of different activities provided viewers with a greater chance of seeing the latest innovations in scientific thought. According to Glusberg, the coordination between theoretical thinking and artistic practice was a key factor in the achievement of social change.
Alfred Mac Adam (b. 1941) is a professor, essayist, and translator (an expert on twentieth-century Latin American literature); he has lectured at Princeton, Yale, Virginia, and Columbia universities in the United States. A few years after his presentation at the CAYC in Buenos Aires, Mac Adam wrote Modern Latin American Narratives: The Dreams of Reason (1977). In his book he claimed that the paradigmatic novels that were part of what came to be known as the “boom” in Latin American literature (in the 1960s and 1970s) should be understood as satirical works that were inherent to a period of authoritarian rule in the region. He argued his point by referring to the classification of “literary genres” proposed by Northrop Frye (1912–1991) and the Marxist theories about the relationship between literature and history suggested by the Hungarian György Lukács (1885–1971). Based on both these sources, Mac Adam concluded that satire is the product of certain circumstances, such as what was happening in Latin America, where a direct connection cannot be made between historical evolution and progress. (John Gledson, “Review of Textual Confrontations: Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature by Alfred J. Mac Adam, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 7, no. 1 (1988): 157–59).
