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. The center’s catalogues functioned as complementary and standalone components of each of their exhibitions. As part of the production process, squared sheets of paper were sent to each artist, who could use them to create something that may or may not have anything to do with the work to be shown at the exhibition. Those sheets of paper become artworks in and of themselves, which might enjoy wider circulation by virtue of being included in the newsletter mailing envelope. The catalogue was a loose-leaf documents folder. This standardized modular format made it possible to adapt and rearrange the content by collecting other artists’ pages based on their travels or the different versions of each exhibition.
