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.
Like many of his contemporaries, the Californian artist John Baldessari (1931–2020) began his career as a painter. In the mid-1960s he started adding text and photographs to his paintings, which reflect the influence of film and advertising. His interest in language was also apparent as he explored games of chance, which he applied in his works. In 1970 he burned all the paintings he had produced from 1953 to 1966; some years later they would become part of a new work, The Cremation Project (1970).
As part of the promotional campaign for the exhibition that opened in August 1974 at the CAYC, this newsletter is illustrated with a page from Ingres and Other Parables (1971), an artist’s book, originally published by the Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf, that was later included in Book as Artwork 1960 / 1972, the publication produced by Germano Celant (see GT-450 [doc. no. 1476545]).
In his book, which is arranged like a calendar, Baldessari presents photographs and texts from the art world; the texts are written in either English, German, Italian, or French, implying an element of chance in the pairings of image and writing. Ingres and Other Parables includes ten panels, each with a black-and-white photograph and a brief story. The photographs depict a variety of objects: a nail, an airplane, a man’s ear, the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. The texts, for their part, are stories about art. None of the images or texts enjoy any priority over the others, none reflect or illustrate their companion piece; instead, in their random way, they each enrich one another.
