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 exposed attendees to the latest in scientific thinking. According to Glusberg, the coordination between theoretical thinking and artistic practice was an essential part of social change.
During the military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía, the CAYC became a cultural home for the Fundación de Investigación Interdisciplinaria (Foundation for Interdisciplinary Research), a space that welcomed a group of dissident professors from the Facultad de Arquitectura y Ciencias Exactas de la Universidad de Buenos Aires after the military takeover of the university in what came to be known as “La Noche de los Bastones Largos” (The Night of the Long Sticks) in June 1966.
In its early years the center organized a variety of activities with intellectuals that contributed to the circulation of ideas from different disciplines (analytical philosophy, mathematical logic, epistemological problems, psychology, semiotics, and linguistics), which had been excluded from official circles.
The center’s interest led to the creation of the Escuela de Altos Estudios (EAE, the School of Advanced Studies) in January 1973 (GT- 201; doc. no. pending). Though gatherings of this kind had happened before—some of them were associated with the Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico (SADAF, the Argentine Society of Philosophical Analysis)—the EAE created a formal space that included academics and intellectuals where ideas could be shared.
This newsletter presents the goals of the EAE again under a headline that explains what the school was created to do. Activities formally began in May of that year with a series of seminars and lectures. This took place when Peronism was once again in power, with Héctor J. Cámpora (1909–1980) in office at the beginning of a democratic period that seemed to be favorably disposed to new ideas. The text refers to the problems involved at a time when political affiliations were affecting all aspects of daily life in Argentina.
The center used this event to focus on an interdisciplinary approach and share the possibilities that recent social theories might offer for artistic activity, particularly those that supported the CAYC’s program of activities and the creation of an institutional poetics of its own that would establish the center’s identity.
