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 art and scientific thought. According to Glusberg, the coordination between theoretical thinking and artistic practice was a key factor in the achievement of social change.
The meeting with Grotowski took place in November 1971, a few months after the opening of the exhibition Arte de Sistemas I at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (GT-54; doc. no. 1476292), where Glusberg tried to draw parallels between local Conceptual art and international Conceptual works. A group of artists associated with the CAYC met with the Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999), the founder of “poor theater.”
As Glusberg mentioned in “El grupo CAYC,” Del pop art a la nueva imagen (The CAYC Group, from Pop Art to the New Image, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Gaglione, 130), that meeting prompted the founding of the Grupo de los Trece. There were subsequent meetings where the group’s goals and methods were discussed by Jacques Bedel, Luis (Fernando) Benedit, Gregorio Dujovny, Carlos Ginzburg, Víctor Grippo, Jorge González Mir, Vicente Marotta, Luis Pazos, Alberto Pellegrini, Alfredo Portillos, Juan Carlos Romero, Julio Teich, and Glusberg. This newsletter lists the short-lived original lineup; Horacio Zabala and Clorindo Testa joined the group at a later date. The group’s name, “Los Trece” (The Thirteen), was a tribute to the small theater-laboratory in Opole where Grotowski developed his concept: the goal of the Theater of 13 Rows was to produce creative works with “minimal” resources that, paradoxically, enriched the idea of freedom as the last resource of the creative act.
Using the bodies and voices of actors and an “empty” stage, “poor theater” established direct links to performance practices, one of the experimental trends that Glusberg promoted and introduced in Argentina. The Grupo de los Trece had its debut exhibition, Hacia un perfil del Arte Latinoamericano, at the III Bienal de Arte Coltejer in Medellín, Colombia (GT-125; doc. no. 1476409). The mention of Fotovisión magazine’s sponsorship of the meeting with Grotowski illustrates the collaborative strategies that were employed among disciplines that supported art and were committed to social interaction under an authoritarian government.
