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” 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 early 1973. The objectives described in the newsletters that announced the school’s creation at the CAYC (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 (both technical and interdisciplinary), as well as in the art produced by artists associated with the center.
Raúl Orayen (1943–2003) was a specialist in the philosophy of logic, science, and mathematics. He was a professor at several universities in Argentina and Mexico. He was a founding member of the Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico (SADAF, the Argentine Society of Philosophical Analysis), one of the civil associations that welcomed university professors who had resigned their positions after the military takeover of universities during the military coup d’état perpetrated by General Onganía (1966). Following the model of the American Philosophical Society, the SADAF set out to organize groups and events devoted to the discussion and exposure of philosophical analysis. At the first event organized by the SADAF as part of the EAE’s program, Gregorio Klimovsky (1922–2009), Jorge Bacqué (1922–2014), and Orayen debated the implications of the concept of “logical truth” (GT-246; doc. no. 1478792). At the CAYC, these initiatives sought to encourage new possibilities, especially in the practice of art and the creation of an institutional poetics of its own that would project a geopolitical identity.
