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.
In November 1971, as a result of their encounter with the Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999), the founder of what was called “poor theater,” members of the CAYC met to discuss the goals and organization of the Grupo de los Trece (Group of Thirteen), to include Jacques Bedel, Luis Fernando Benedit, Gregorio Dujovny, Carlos Ginzburg, Víctor Grippo, Jorge González Mir, Vicente Marotta, Luis Pazos, Alberto Pellegrino, Alfredo Portillos, Juan Carlos Romero, Julio Teich, and Jorge Glusberg. The recently formed group thus paid tribute to the small theater-laboratory in Opole where Grotowski developed his theory about the dramatic arts. The goal of the Theatre of 13 Rows was to encourage—in a socialist country like Poland—creative activities produced with scant (“poor”) resources, inspired by the interdisciplinary idea of freedom as the ultimate resource for the creative act.
The constant changes to the makeup of the artists’ collective made it difficult to classify the group under any single heading’ just as the inclusion of a pair of artists-architects, Horacio Zabala and Clorindo Testa. Also, the military dictatorship under which the country was living at the time prompted heated technical discussions and passionate aesthetic confrontations. The founding of the group and its custom of welcoming guest artists created an open space for reflection and production whose goal was to promote the development of “arte de sistemas,” a multifaceted art fed by quite different sources. The group’s distinctive personality thus embraced technological, process, and political art, including art focused on social issues. This was the CAYC’s institutional promotional strategy during the 1970s.
In this document, Luis Pazos (b. 1940) uses a diagram to present his thoughts on the nature of freedom and the possibility of changing existing conditions.
