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 a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
Though the reason for the withdrawal is not explained, the exhibition referred to here had agreed to be part of the XI Bienal de São Paulo in 1971. The organizers of the international event asked the director of the CAYC, Jorge Glusberg, to curate the selection, and he traveled to the United States to invite artists to the show. But, given the Brazilian dictatorship’s growing authoritarianism, censorship, and repression, a group of Latin American artists and intellectuals living in New York City organized a boycott of the event. The magazine Contrabienal provided them with a vehicle to articulate their refusal to take part in the São Paulo competition and condemn any violation of human rights. The previous (tenth) edition had suffered a similar boycott in Paris by a group whose slogan was “Non à la Biennale.” Following this announcement—which was clearly endorsed by some of his guests— Glusberg decided to withdraw the exhibition from the original program proposed in São Paulo. As a coda, many of the selected works were subsequently shown at Arte de Sistemas, the exhibition organized by the CAYC at the Museo de Arte Moderno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires in July later that year.
The instructions in the invitation reveal the CAYC’s strategy for promoting Argentinean art overseas. Recipients of the newsletter are invited to participate and can read practical advice about shipping costs and international customs red tape. Production methods for these traveling exhibitions were, on the whole, innovative in the way that they standardized submissions in formats and techniques that were designed to be transmitted through networks in ways that were reminiscent of mail art, whose international launch was at about this time. Objects made with “poor” materials and papers/original sheets reproduced by heliographic printing were simple, cheap resources that encouraged those travels. This standardization—a concept borrowed from industrial production—sought to create a kind of art that could be replicated in any context, without undue intervention and, even, without the author being present. Communication was the main idea; thus, it remained effective by underscoring the idea that it was about proposals in progress with an emphasis on contents.
