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.
Going back to the CAYC’s very early years, showing films was an important part of the center’s exhibition programs, in keeping with its goal of positioning itself as a space for experimental work, especially for projects that sought to combine art, technology, and communication. The CAYC thus continued doing the work that the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella had been doing in Argentina in the 1960s, motivating the avant-garde as it engaged with the logic of the mass media, encouraging an exploration of interdisciplinary approaches, and supporting visual artists who were trying their hands in the fields of radical theater, fashion, design, and film. In Glusberg’s view, collaborative works of that kind provided a way to promote a new social order.
Activities of this sort became a regular part of the CAYC’s programs in 1974, when Glusberg took part in Open Circuits. An International Conference on the Future of Television, at MoMA in New York, and then in the Encuentros Internacionales de Video presented at the center in Buenos Aires and in London, Paris, Ferrara, Antwerp, Caracas, Barcelona, Lima, Mexico City, and Tokyo. The Festival de formatos no comerciales (Non-commercial Format Festival) announced in this newsletter was a forerunner of those programs and was similar to other events that were being organized around the world in the latter half of the 1960s. (Glenn Phillips y Serrano, Sophia, “Encounters: CAyC and the International Encuentros” in Elena Shtromberg y Glenn Phillips, Encounters in Video Art in Latin America, Getty Research Institute, 2023)
The British artist Ian Breakwell (1943–2005) worked in a variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, film, collage, video, audio tapes, slides, digital images, and performance art. The common thread that runs through his work is a focus on everyday events that go unnoticed or are looked down upon, presented in works that range from humorous to surreal. Breakwell worked with the Artist Placement Group (APG) in the 1970s. Founded in 1966 by Barbara Steveni (1928–2020) and John Latham (1921–2006), the APG connected Conceptual artists with government departments and companies in the hope that the resulting cooperation would change the decision-making process in those institutions, and sought to take art out of galleries and museums, hence the emphasis in the group’s name on the artist’s place (placement). David Hall, Barry Flanagan, Anna Ridley, and Jeffrey Shaw were also part of this initiative.
