The CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación) was intended as an interdisciplinary collective and functioned as one from the moment it was founded. That vision was expressed in the choice of artists and scientists—from Argentina and beyond, who regularly took part in the Center’s activities over the years—that its promoter, Jorge Glusberg, invited to the first exhibitions, and in the official creation of the Grupo de los Trece in 1972. The group of experts from a wide range of disciplines and fields of knowledge all working together toward a common goal was one of the CAYC’s most appealing features. Its first exhibition, Arte y cibernética, in 1969, brought together engineers, analysts, computer programmers, and artists. In that setting, a group of visual artists experimented with the new technology that had been introduced in Argentina in the 1960s when the first computers arrived in the country.

The exhibition Argentina Inter-medios, also organized in 1969, presented the concept of “intermedia,” which Dick Higgins had been using in the international Fluxus group since the mid-1960s. The concept was described as a return to the overlap of disciplines that a wave of artistic and social processes had interrupted before the advent of European modernism. [1] Automation and the changes being wrought by the mass media and computers envisioned a contemporary urban landscape that blurred the boundaries between disciplines, one that art should embrace as its own. In keeping with those ideas, Glusberg used the Argentina Inter-medios catalogue to call for a new kind of communication between art, science, and the social environment, an interdisciplinary partnership that would break with traditional forms and lead to the involvement of the community “to improve and expand the current scenario of human concerns.” [2]   

The CAYC also encouraged viewers to get involved, inviting them to take part in artistic processes as they unfolded, especially when exhibitions and performances were being staged in public spaces such as plazas and theaters. Exhibitions like Escultura, follaje y ruido, which was installed in the Plaza Rubén Darío in Buenos Aires in 1970, created environments in which works “ceased to be closed systems and became part of the social system.” [3] The idea was to foster a popular culture that avoided elitist bastions like galleries and museums, and to create works at the intersection between visual art and theater that triggered an action, a political event. These goals were in step with the highly politicized climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The prime example of those visions that included the repurposing of urban space was CAYC al aire libre. Arte e ideología, the exhibition that was organized in 1972 at the Plaza Roberto Arlt, also in Buenos Aires. This event crystallized the CAYC’s concept of artistic interdisciplinarity in which visual artists, dancers, musicians, and performers interacted in the areas between installed works where visitors mingled. The event also prompted political censorship of works that, more or less blatantly, criticized the social and political situation at the time. The CAYC saw public spaces as venues for social exchange based on certain systemic rules it sought to expose and, eventually, challenge. These reflections, which inspired its exhibitions, took shape at the EAE (Escuela de Altos Estudios), an interdisciplinary organization created by the CAYC in 1973. The EAE promoted innovative theories based on structuralism and the concept of systems, seeking to infuse poetic thinking with the methods and approaches used in sociology, epistemology, social psychology, semiotics, planning, architecture, and the political theories that were viewed as the challenge of the moment. The goal was to introduce artistic practices to contemporary intellectual and political thinking in order to renew them and bring them up to date. [4] The resulting model was, therefore, an artist-agent, a self-conscious producer of symbols and actions.

The CAYC was especially attuned to the revisions being made to the various disciplines that emerged in the mid-1960s during the intense politicization of Argentine culture. Thinking about art in terms of the social, economic, political, and cultural ideologies of the time put the CAYC in touch with the leftist movements that were flourishing in Latin America and beyond. That was an option that the Center offered as an alternative to the one-way discourse and censorship imposed by the dictatorship in power from 1966 to 1973. Later, during the brief democratic period that blossomed from 1973 to 1976, the Grupo de los Trece and some of the scientists at the EAE warmed up to revolutionary Peronism. There was an attempt to take a scientific approach to planning the future for Argentina, but those efforts were thwarted by the coup d’état in 1976. The CAYC’s factions that were more interested in “rupture” continued to express themselves through exhibitions and events organized abroad. In Argentina, a surreptitious realism was on the rise, steeped in metaphors for the violence that had become a way of life.

Translated by Tony Beckwith

NOTES

1. Dick Higgins, “Intermedia.” In: Steve Clay and Ken Friedman, Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press. Selected Writings by Dick Higgins (Catskill, New York: Siglio, 2018), pp. 24-28. Originally published in Something Else Newsletter, year 1, n° 1, 1966.

2. Jorge Glusberg, “¿Qué es el CAYC?” (What is the CAYC?). In: Argentina Inter-medios, exhib. cat. (Buenos Aires: Centro de Arte y Comunicación, 1969), n/p.

3. That is how Néstor García Canclini referred to them in his article, “Vanguardia y arte popular” (Avant-garde and Popular Art). In: Transformaciones (Buenos Aires: CEAL, 1973),257.

4. Jorge Glusberg, Argentina Inter-medios., np.