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 exhibition Gráficos argentinos ’74 (see GT-357 [doc. no. 1476511]), which was organized in early 1974 and presented at the Illinois Bell Telephone Company in Chicago, was one of the many initiatives undertaken by the CAYC to display Argentinean art on the international stage. This particular show featured artists who explored a range of different printmaking techniques and took place in a city with a long tradition in this field. The list of participating artists includes some who worked with the center on a regular basis, such as Jacques Bedel and Luis (Fernando) Benedit—both of whom were members of the Grupo de los Trece—and Nicolás García Uriburu. Others were included for the first time in this event: Pablo Obelar, Sergio Camporeale, Delia Cugat, and Daniel Zelaya, who were members of the Grabas group (Grabadores de Buenos Aires).
These new additions to the roster of participants showed that the CAYC was reaching out to include the figurative trends (realism, Neo-Surrealism, and Photorealism, among others) that were emerging at that time at major international exhibitions such as documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972) and the Paris Biennale (1971). Events of that nature were soon matched in Buenos Aires: the Panorama de la pintura argentina joven (1971) was presented by the Fundación Lorenzutti at the Museo de Arte Moderno, and the Marcelo De Ridder (1973–77) and Benson & Hedges (1977–84) competitions were both directed by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.
For many of its exhibition catalogues, the center distributed a sheet with a set grid where artists could sign up. With this method the CAYC could reproduce each artist’s work across several supports and formats, including newsletters and publications that were independent of the CAYC, such as Héxagono 71, the magazine published by Edgardo Antonio Vigo. This led to a greater circulation of images on a broader scale through the CAYC’s campaigns to promote its various initiatives in other parts of the world.
Luis F. Benedit (1937–2011) trained as an architect and worked in the offices of Alberto Prebisch, a forerunner in the field of modernism in Argentina. Benedit took part in the CAYC’s earliest exhibitions and was a member of the Grupo de los Trece (1971). In 1972 he became a pioneer in “arte de sistemas” when he installed the Fitotrón, a plant environment like a hydroponic greenhouse, at MoMA in New York. His work was considered bio art, and also made its mark in the history of Conceptual art. In 1968 Benedit started creating artificial habitats in which viewers could observe the behavior of plants, insects, and small animals. To create those works, he adopted and adapted methodologies from different disciplines that were then in vogue, such as communication theory, structuralism, and cybernetics, the latter focused on the study of communication systems controls in machines and living beings (see GT-181 [doc. no. 1476353]). The work shown here is related to those explorations.
