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 1970s ushered in a period of accelerating conflict, which included strong challenges from the revolutionary movement. Under those circumstances, arguments about the role of art and the artist became increasingly heated as politics became more radicalized and violence became widespread, in Argentina in particular, but also in the region as a whole.
Following the exhibition of works by Haroldo González (b. 1941) at Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano (1972), the newsletter announced that four of his audiovisual productions would be shown at the CAYC. González was active in the Uruguayan Conceptual art scene and worked in several disciplines: drawing, painting, printmaking, audiovisuals, installations, mail art, and artists’ books. He worked with Jorge Caraballo and Clemente Padín to create mail art pieces among a large network of correspondents in other countries. His presentation in Buenos Aires consisted of a number of works that reflected on the sociopolitical situation in Latin America where, at the time, several countries were under authoritarian regimes; it had been just a few months since the imposition of a military dictatorship in Uruguay. As a member of the El Dibujazo group he explored connections between experimentation and drawing, and audiovisuals and language. Dibujo en cinco lecciones (1972) is an interactive installation that teaches the basics of drawing in lessons that parody current restrictions on freedoms. Thirteen slides, which describe the basic elements of drawing, are accompanied by a soundtrack featuring sounds of applause, typing, gunfire, and laughter. El gran Zoo (1973) is a free adaptation of the Poemas del Gran Zoo, by the Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén (1902–1989), with illustrations of gorillas drawn on a map of South America. A clearly political statement, the work is a condemnation of what dictatorships in the region were doing at the time, with a focus on Operation Condor, a plan for widespread torture and political oppression coordinated by the military authorities in the Southern Cone and the American CIA.
