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.
Rafael Hastings (1945–2020) was a Peruvian multidisciplinary artist and pioneer in the field of video art in Latin America. He began producing his audiovisual work at seventeen years of age when he emigrated to Europe to study. At that time his interests included film, literature, and choreography; he was influenced by his friendship with and closeness to three internationally known artists: Maurice Béjart (who breathed new life into contemporary choreography), François Weyergans (the writer and film director), and Jean-Luc Godard (the film director, screenwriter, and critic). In those days the artistic use of images in motion was all the rage and Hastings started producing experimental short films that consisted of close-ups of faces. In the early 1970s he became involved in several audiovisual production projects. Thanks to the introduction of the Sony Portapak camera—which provided greater accessibility and made it easier to edit and reproduce images in motion—Hastings became interested in video’s potential for abstract work.
He met Jorge Glusberg in 1971 and took part in Arte de Sistemas at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires. In 1973, following the international exposure of Latin American video facilitated by the CAYC’s Ediciones Tercer Mundo (Third World Editions), Glusberg offered to support his production of What do you really know about fashion?—a black-and-white short film shot in 16 mm, in which Hastings took the viewer “behind the camera” to see things that are never visible during a fashion show. The film is a highly irregular documentary that (using cuts and editing techniques) focuses on the models’ missteps and imperfections, highlighting close-ups of different parts of their bodies, almost as though they had been dismembered. Some years later, Andy Warhol produced the series TV Fashion (1979), which similarly portrayed the manufacture of beauty and scenes of everyday life in the modeling world. (José Carlos Mariátegui, “El trabajo de cine y video de Rafael Hastings,” Revista del Instituto de Investigaciones Museológicas y Artísticas de la Universidad Ricardo Palma, 2020.)
In his works, Hastings uses the term antologías (anthologies) to refer to the process of communication and divides it into three stages: attitude, phenomenon, and its connotations, as outlined in the text published in this newsletter. The title of his video Antologías (1973–74), a sort of video clip also produced with the CAYC’s help, is a clear allusion to that idea. Hastings showed this work from 1974 to 1976 at Arte de Sistemas en América Latina, the exhibition that sought to create an alternative method for international distribution in order to reset existing impressions concerning Latin American art. He went on to be actively involved in the CAYC’s various activities and extensive international networking.
