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.
The exhibition announced in this newsletter, Arte de Sistemas (1971), sparked a tireless effort to establish and legitimize the term. Glusberg therefore appealed to a broad assortment of local and international artists who were involved in the practice and research of a number of trends and movements: art as an idea (or Conceptual art), ecological art, Arte Povera, cybernetic art, proposal (or process) art, and blatantly political art. This illustrates the enormous range of creative possibilities gathered together based in what was internationally known as Jack Burnham’s “systems esthetics,” a term mentioned three years earlier in Artforum magazine (September 1968). In this context, “arte de sistemas” was understood as a kind of artistic practice associated with an understanding of the systems and processes that are used to organize the contemporary world’s experience. This definition nonetheless comes close to “systems esthetics,” the term coined by the North American art critic. The exhibition was presented at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires in the Teatro Municipal General San Martín building that was opened to the public in 1960.
