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.
In keeping with its goal of positioning itself as a space for experimental work—especially for projects that sought to combine art, technology, and communication—the CAYC organized different activities, motivating the avant-garde as it sought to explore mass media.
In its early years the center organized a variety of activities with intellectuals that contributed to the circulation of ideas from different disciplines (analytic 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 early 1973. The objectives described in the newsletters that announced its creation (GT-201; doc. no. 1478752, GT-201-A; doc. no. 1478753, GT-224; doc. no. 1478771, GT-219; doc. no. 1478755) were apparent in the activities organized by the EAE (some of which were of a technical nature while others were of an interdisciplinary nature), as well as in the work produced by artists associated with the center.
Born in Villa María, in the Argentina province of Córdoba, Jorge Bonino (1935–1990) graduated with a degree in architecture and began giving performances in which he spoke in a language that he invented. He started staging his solo shows—routines that drew from theater and performance and were inflected with humor—in the mid-1960s at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. After living and acting in various cities in Europe and the United States, he returned to Argentina in 1974. The following year he appeared at the CAYC in the production, Bonino trata de actuar pero no tanto…, (GT-566-567; doc. no. 1478997) accompanied on the guitar by Carlos Viale. Soon afterward he acted in a short film by Marta Minujín, and in the film Piedra libre (Free Stone) directed by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson.
