Categories
Editorial categories were developed by researchers for the CAYC Files to organize and facilitate meaningful research into the contents of the CAYC's newsletters. These are unique to this project. The categories make visible the breadth and variety of the Center's initiatives, including activities organized or promoted by the CAYC as well as theories and terms explored throughout the run of its newsletter program.
The CAYC Files is an ongoing project. Additional newsletters will be added to these categories as more files are published throughout 2023 and 2024.
Themes
Themes refer to the subjects that arise from the poetics of the CAYC’s art and exhibitions, and from the theoretical framework that the group has promoted over the years. They are the general constants that define and identify the institution’s activities in conceptual terms.
Arte de sistemas: From Cybernetics to Political Art
This term derives from the concept of “systems esthetics,” the theory coined in 1968 by the North American critic Jack Burnham, but its meaning changed over time in Argentina and especially in the CAYC. It was originally associated with international conceptual art, relating specifically to the fusion of art and technology, but was later used to refer to an essentially political kind of art that sought to represent the conflicts that beset Latin America at the time.
The CAYC and its Campaign for a New Art for the Region
This category tracks the evolution of the concept underpinning the exhibition Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano that was applied to other exhibitions with similar subject matter and different titles and to the public programs created to promote them (symposiums, lectures).
The definition of “a new Latin American art” was suggested by the CAYC, which also introduced a poetics defined by politics and the market; a commitment to consider the future construction of a regional identity.
Collective Participation in Social Space
Beginning in the late 1960s, a number of artistic practices sought to encourage viewer participation in the aesthetic experience. During the 1970s, inspired by the theoretical template of structuralism, many of the CAYC’s works, activities, and events were presented as “reduced (and/or symbolic) models” designed as a means to experiment with new forms of social organization.
In the early years, these efforts were focused on the great international art centers of the world, but over the course of the decade the network spread out to various places on the planet, creating a constellation that included prominent figures and large private and official institutions as well as spaces created independently by artists in small communities.
As the CAYC’s discourse became more political, it sought to foster ties—a “unity of strengths”—between Latin American nations and other so-called Third World countries such as those that, in those days, were behind the “Iron Curtain.”
The CAYC’s activities, exhibitions, seminars, and conversations promoted a spirit of collaboration between experts in various spheres of knowledge and encouraged artists to transcend the boundaries between disciplines in order to create hybrid works of art that took a fresh approach to addressing contemporary realities at a national and regional level.
Typologies
These categories classify the various events and activities that the CAYC produced from 1968 to 1979 in terms of their purpose and characteristics.
Competitions / Prizes / Calls for Submissions
Includes different ways to encourage artistic production sponsored by the CAYC and, on the whole, aided and supported by sponsors such as businesses and certain professional institutions.
Workshops / Seminars / Activities (Lectures, Concerts, Meetings, Performance)
Includes public programs that complement exhibitions with art related activities that stimulate discussion about a range of subjects proposed by artists and other guests, local, and international intellectuals.
Exhibitions (Traditional and New Formats)
Includes the exhibitions organized by the CAYC from 1968 to 1979. Provides a timeline for the various exhibitions, concepts, and disciplines that the Center contributed over the course of more than a decade of involvement at a national and international level.
The CAYC had always produced publications to back up its exhibitions. This category includes group and solo exhibition catalogues for events in Argentina or abroad, produced by the Center during the period mentioned above.
This category includes different publications that—within the newsletter’s thematic, formal, and conceptual spectrum—are not numbered as such. They present manifestos, surveys, and drawings created by artists for their group or solo exhibitions at the CAYC, in Argentina or elsewhere.
