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. 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” (The Night of the Long Sticks) 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 (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 it (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 more technical than interdisciplinary), as well as in the art produced by artists associated with the center. This initiative was an expression of the spirit of openness fostered by the “Cultural Spring” that flowered during the brief democratic presidency of Héctor J. Cámpora, which lasted forty-nine days in 1973. It was seen as putting an end to a seven-year period of military dictatorships first (Onganía, then Levingston, and, finally, Lanusse), after Perón had been exiled for eighteen years.
The center used these interdisciplinary events to explore what recent linguistic theories might be able to do for artistic activity, especially those that supported the CAYC’s program of activities and the creation of an institutional poetics of its own that could project a Latin American identity.
Rosa María Ravera (1932–2021) studied philosophy and was a researcher, professor, art critic, and a specialist in the semiotic analysis of art. In 1974 Umberto Eco invited her to the “Primer Congreso de Semiótica Internacional” (First International Conference on Semiotics) in Milan. She was a member of the editorial board of the Revista de Estética (Aesthetics Magazine), founded in 1983 as part of the EAE. In 1993 she became the president of the Asociación Argentina de Estética (Argentine Association of Aesthetics); from 1993 to 1997 she served as president of the Confederación Latinoamericana de Estética (Latin American Confederation of Aesthetics) and vice president of the Asociación Argentina de Críticos (Argentine Association of Critics). She was president of the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Academy of Fine Arts) from 2001 to 2006.
