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.
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 exhibition Brasil 74, announced here, was a forerunner of those encounters and was similar to other events that were being organized around the world in the latter half of the 1960s.
Though Brazilian artists were seldom included in the center’s activities during its early years, the desire to create a distinctly Latin American style of art became one of the CAYC’s main goals in 1971. In Glusberg’s opinion, that sort of unity was not based on formal aspects but on the “common problems” the region’s countries shared. A great intermediary played a key role in facilitating this process: during this period, the CAYC forged links with Brazil thanks to the efforts of the Brazilian critic, curator, and art historian Aracy Amaral (b. 1930).
