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 an important role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists provided an introduction to the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
This newsletter announces a new exhibition in Buenos Aires of works by the German artist Otto Piene (1928–2014), who was involved in the systems art movement that the center promoted [GT-145 (doc. no. pending), a flexible category that the CAYC used as an umbrella term for a variety of styles and movements, including idea art, Environmental art, Arte Povera, cybernetic art, proposal art, and political art. At the first Arte de Sistemas exhibition (1971), Glusberg described “arte de sistemas” as a type of artistic practice that involved an understanding of the systems and processes that organize our experience of the contemporary world. That definition was close to “systems esthetics,” the term coined by the North American critic Jack Burnham in 1968.
Piene was a founding member of the ZERO group and a pioneer in the field of multimedia art. In the 1970s he was appointed director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, where high-tech experimentation played a part in his artistic and scientific projects. In his works, the German artist explored the interfaces of art, technology, and the environment using light, air, fire, and motion to produce works that incorporated the power of nature as an integral part of art.
