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.
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 “arte de sistemas.”
As part of the campaign to promote the third edition of this exhibition at the ICA in London, this newsletter includes pictures of works submitted by members of the Grupo de los Trece and an image of a demonstration in Argentina produced by Ediciones Tercer Mundo. This cooperative, created in 1973 by Glusberg, Pedro Roth, and Danilo Galasse, encouraged the production of Latin American videos, the publication of various materials, and the organization of festivals for “non-commercial format” films.
The newsletter also includes an excerpt from the introductory essay written for the catalogue, in which Glusberg refers to previous definitions of “arte de sistemas” and tries to explain the distinctive features of his idea. He claims there is a need for art that addresses the social conditions in the vast region, calling for a “Latin American” form of systems art in which the production of art is part of a commitment to political action. He returns to the idea that “there is no Latin American art as such, but the region’s individual countries do share a common problem in terms of their revolutionary situation.” Referring to the Theory of Dependency and the concept of the Third World, all very much in vogue in European art circles at that time, Glusberg proposes an art of liberation in response to an art of domination. It should be noted that Arte de Sistemas en Latinoamérica established Arte de sistemas as a movement that positioned the CAYC as the institutional focal point for the exposure and promotion of Latin American Conceptualism.
