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.
At the first Arte de Sistemas exhibition, presented in 1971 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, Glusberg defined arte de sistemas as an art practice based on an understanding of the systems and processes that are used to organize the contemporary world’s experience. This definition was close to “systems esthetics,” the term coined in 1968 by the North American critic Jack Burnham. Over time, in Argentina, for a variety of reasons, the term was used to refer to several dissimilar trends and movements, such as idea art (or Conceptual art), ecological art, Arte Povera, cybernetic art, proposal art, and blatantly political art, a local approach driven by the authoritarian regimes and military coups d’états that South America was forced to endure. In 1974 the CAYC began focusing a great deal of its attention on this project, promoting a variety of initiatives in a contemporary circuit of new cultural spaces and centers that were emerging in Europe at the time. The exhibition Arte de sistemas en Latinoamérica toured several European cities from 1974 to 1976, providing an overview of recent works from the region that reflected Glusberg’s definition of “arte de sistemas.”
As part of the CAYC’s campaign to promote the fifth edition of this exhibition in Italy (at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara), this newsletter includes pictures of works presented by some of the artists associated with the center and a complete list of participating artists. In addition to Álvaro Barrios (b. 1945) and Luis Fernando Benedit (1937–2011), Sergio Camporeale (b. 1937) is a more recent addition.
It is interesting to note that, though the works selected to promote exhibitions on previous occasions were solidly Conceptual, by the mid-1970s the center in Buenos Aires began to include other styles and movements in its shows. This exhibition showed that the CAYC was reaching out to include the figurative trends (realism, Neo-Surrealism, and Photorealism, among others) that were being shown at that time at major international competitions such as the Paris Biennale (1971) and documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972). Events of that nature were soon matched in Buenos Aires at the Panorama de la pintura argentina joven (1971), presented by the Fundación Lorenzutti at the Museo de Arte Moderno, and the Marcelo De Ridder (1973–77) and Benson & Hedges (1977–84) competitions, which were both organized by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires.
