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.
The philosopher and artist Hervé Fischer (b. 1941) began his career as a professor of sociology specializing in culture and communication; he went on to write a number of articles about art, science, and technology. In 1971 he teamed up with Fred Forest (b. 1933) and Jean-Paul Thenot (b. 1943) to start the Collectif d'art sociologique (Sociological Art Collective), which they presented as a category. This French group was in tune, at the time, with other art actions that were taking a more openly critical view of art and its distribution circuits and ideological representations. The collective published its Primer manifiesto del arte sociológico (First Manifesto of Sociological Art, 1974) in Le Monde (the most widely read newspaper in France), in which it claimed that the practice of art was rooted in the fundamental links that connect art, society, and life. Given these parameters, sociological art relied on scientific methods by approaching its art actions as a privileged sphere of research devoted to the exploration of social theories.
Fischer also published Art et communication marginale. Tampons d’artistes (Art and Marginal Communication: Artists’ Rubber Stamps) (Paris: Balland Éditeurs, 1974), an exploration of the use of rubber stamps in art. This project put him in touch with a number of Argentinean artists, including Carlos Ginzburg (b. 1946), Juan Carlos Romero (1930–2017), Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1928–1997), and Horacio Zabala (b. 1943). A year later, the CAYC invited him to present a solo exhibition of his work at the center in Buenos Aires.
This newsletter includes a text from Farmacia Fischer & Cía (1975), an itinerant art action designed to be performed in public places where the artist talked to people passing by. Relying on the methodology of the social sciences and the opportunity to communicate directly with people on the street, Fischer talked, listened to stories, and prescribed “pills” for a variety of conditions: to prompt a change of mind, to think, to free oneself, to be creative, etc. The pills were made of polyurethane and were packaged in little baggies inscribed with the message: “Life is in pills!” The text published in this newsletter is written in the style of a medical prescription, suggesting the need for a critical reflection on health in our contemporary society.
In Buenos Aires in the 1960s, explorations of the mass media phenomenon spawned a variety of different works that were influenced by semiotics or sociology. As a result, a new genre—“media art”— emerged, jointly introduced by Roberto Jacoby (b. 1944), Eduardo Costa (b. 1940), and Raúl Escari (1944–2016), who presented “immaterial” works, such as Un falso happening (1966) and El mensaje fantasma (1967), which addressed the transmission of information and its possible authenticity. Another such work, also presented at the CAYC, was Academia del fracaso (1975) by Marta Minujín (b. 1943), a project that was influenced by sociological theories as applied to subject matter that the artist explored in her customary playful, ironic style.
