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, 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” 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) in January 1973 (GT- 201; doc. no. 1478752). Though gatherings of this kind had happened before—some of them were associated with the Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico (SADAF)—the EAE created a formal space that included academics and intellectuals where ideas could be shared.
This newsletter includes a text in which Carlos Espartaco (1933–2014) discusses semiotics, an integral part of the promotional strategies for the EAE’s activities, which began in May of 1973. Semiotics was the dominant approach used to analyze art production at the CAYC during the 1970s. Structuralist semiotics, like Marxist theory, used terms like “ideology” and “systems” that played a key role in curatorial and promotional texts produced by the center, and in the artists’ discourse as well. Some months earlier, in October 1972, Espartaco had given a seminar on the subject (GT-185; doc. no. 1478741).
Espartaco had been close to Glusberg ever since the CAYC’s early years (Argentina Inter-Medios, 1969; CAYC al aire libre. Arte e ideología [GT-159; doc. no. 1477987]). He continued to work with him throughout the 1970s and 1980s, both within the institution and as a member of the Asociación Argentina de Críticos de Arte (Argentine Association of Art Critics), where Glusberg served two terms as president: 1978–86 and 1989–93.
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.
