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.
Nicolás García Uriburu (1937–2016) first became associated with the CAYC in 1970 at De la figuración al arte de sistemas (doc. no. 761141), the exhibition at the Museo Caraffa de Córdoba where the term “arte de sistemas” was first introduced. The center, under Glusberg’s leadership, invited Luis Fernando Benedit, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, and Uriburu to present this new approach at a time when art prioritized processes and works inspired by traditional views. Pierre Restany (1930–2003) together with Yves Klein, had coined the term “nouveau réalisme” (Milan, 1960). In the early 1970s Restany became interested in group art of a sociological nature.
In June 1968, during the 34th Venice Biennale, the Argentinean artist boarded a gondola with a photographer and poured thirty kilos of a harmless fluorescent substance overboard, turning the waters of Venice’s Grand Canal green. This Conceptual action was considered a pioneering work in Argentinean and international art, an artistic gesture that, at the time, was at the forefront of activities such as performance art, art actions, and body art. Uriburu was thus very much in step with similar experiments taking place elsewhere, especially in the United States, where artists were beginning to see the environment as a space in which to stage their works. As a result of such creative endeavors, the Land art movement suggested a new approach to the relationship between art and nature that was in keeping with a new environmental awareness that was emerging all over the world.
That “coloring” exercise was followed by others in different parts of Europe and America, according to the text by Restany, the French art critic and cultural philosopher who, beginning in the 1960s, was a regular visitor to, and commentator on, the Buenos Aires art scene. At the exhibition announced in this newsletter, Uriburu showed a series of silkscreen prints that relied on the techniques of cartography to identify the geographical location of each one of those actions. Another one of his maps addressed an issue that was of vital interest to the CAYC at that point in time: Latin American unity. He introduced one more variation on his performance art by dyeing his hair green for the opening of the exhibition.
