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 art and scientific thinking. The articulation of theory and artistic practice was, in Glusberg’s proposal, crucial to social change.
In November 1971, in the wake of an encounter with Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski (1933–99), the founder of “poor theater,” meetings took place at the CAYC to discuss the aims and operations of the artists’ collective the Grupo de los Trece (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 Jorge Glusberg). (See ICAA Digital Archive doc. no. GT-125; doc. no. 1476409, GT-196; doc. no. 1478750).
The rebellious figure of David Cooper (1931–86) was central to the formation of that group (see ICAA Digital Archive doc. no. GT-213-A; doc. no. 1476423). Cooper was a major advocate of antipsychiatry , a marginal current of thought that challenged traditional psychiatry as the realm where entrenched relations of domination were reproduced. If mental illness is nothing other than an instrument of repression exercised by illegitimate holders of power, then schizophrenia, or simply madness, could well be understood as a “revolutionary act.” Cooper’s proposal, then, was in keeping with many practices and disciplines that were, at the time, questioning institutions deemed to exercise oppressive power in inequitable fashion. The interest in these ideas in Buenos Aires must be understood in relation to the spread in Latin America of dependency theory, which saw unequal political and economic relations with developed countries as responsible for the region’s poverty. In the case of Cooper, that theory is applied to the sociocultural sphere.
