Taken directly from the catalogue for Arte de Sistemas, the exhibition organized by the CAYC at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (now Moderno), this text suggests a distinctive term for what the institution understood in those days as “systems esthetics.” Based on the range of responses prompted by the newsletters articles, this term can be considered comparable to the one that was coined by the North American art and technology writer Jack Burnham in Artforum (September, 1968).  

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.

When he was getting ready to launch his project, Glusberg used the term “arte de sistemas,” which had originally referred to the Conceptual art practices that were being developed in international art circles at that time. It was, in fact, at the exhibition De la Figuración al Arte de Sistemas (1970) (doc. no. 761141) that he used the term for the first time to describe a kind of art that “refers to processes rather than to the finished products of good art.” Glusberg invited a cross section of local and international artists to the exhibition Arte de Sistemas (1971), which was when the term became well established in Argentina.

This document includes a reproduction of the catalogue text, which defines “arte de sistemas” as an art practice fueled by an understanding of the systems and processes that are used to organize our experience of our contemporary world. The brief definition is similar to “systems esthetics,” which was coined by the critic Jack Burnham. “Arte de sistemas” therefore was used locally as an umbrella term for different forms of Conceptual art, such as land art, performance, Arte Povera, body art, and political art, whose development—in the midst of authoritarian regimes and military coups d’états—took place where art, science, and technology come together. In Glusberg’s opinion, an understanding of the systems underlying society show a “revolutionary potential” that, according to him, could lead to “radical social change” (exh. cat. for Arte de Sistemas).