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.
1972 was a pivotal year in the establishment of “arte de sistemas” as the CAYC’s institutional promotional strategy. This newsletter announces the opening of the exhibition Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano at the Amadis gallery in Madrid in February 1973. In his essay in the catalogue, the director of the gallery, Juan Antonio Aguirre, noted that: “we were particularly keen to introduce our supporters to one of the world’s best-known groups working in this field” [of Conceptual art]. The CAYC was thus launching a new phase in its activities, gaining greater exposure for its projects in the European art circuit. This event reaffirmed the center’s efforts to make its mark abroad by means of, for example, its travels to Medellín and Quito (both in May 1972), and Buenos Aires and Pamplona, Spain (both in June 1972).
Hacia un perfil… showed works in which Argentinean and international artists pondered the political situation that was common to all their countries. The exhibition provided a perspective on art and the Grupo de los Trece’s ideology in a concise overview of contemporary regional art. Arte de sistemas not only referred to international process art; its political stance, absorbed over the course of its many productions, gave it an identity of its own and associated it with a regional identity. In his introduction to the exhibition, Glusberg said: “There is no Latin American art as such, but the region’s individual countries do share a common problem in terms of their revolutionary situation.”
This show also set a precedent for the CAYC’s subsequent exhibitions, whose works all relied on the heliographic technique to produce images printed on paper, a resource that, in Glusberg’s words, “was not a random choice, but a direct consequence of our inability to compete with technological mediums and operating budgets that we do not yet have.” (Cat. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Buenos Aires, Madrid: Galería Amadis, 1973).This technique’s reproductive potential and low cost made it possible to circulate images more widely and exhibit them in several places at the same time.
The Grupo de los Trece, a group of artists affiliated with the CAYC, had officially introduced itself in Colombia. The group originally consisted of Jacques Bedel, Luis (Fernando) Benedit, Gregorio Dujovny, Carlos Ginzburg, Víctor Grippo, Jorge González Mir, Jorge Glusberg, Vicente Marotta, Luis Pazos, Alberto Pellegrino, Alfredo Portillos, Juan Carlos Romero, and Julio Teich. Horacio Zabala and the architect Clorindo Testa, who are listed here as guests, joined the group at a later date.
