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.
This newsletter includes a reproduction of a work by the Argentinean artist Armando Durante and notes that he would take part in América Latina 76 (Latin America 76), the exhibition presented in February 1977 at the Fundació Joan Miró. The works presented at that event in Barcelona were similar to the ones that were shown at the various editions of Arte de Sistemas in Latin America. The change in the name shows that the concept of “arte de sistemas” was no longer as important to the CAYC’s institutional discourse as it had once been. This happened as a result of the evolution of the international art scene in the late 1970s, where structuralism was yielding to a renewal in semiotic discourse that was closely aligned with postmodernity. Though the prologue in the catalogue kept the title “Arte de sistemas en Latinoamérica,” the content provided by Glusberg suggests a historicization of the term whose political significance no longer carried the weight it once did, reducing it to one of its many manifestations. This new direction should also be understood within the context of the censorship and repression imposed by the recently installed military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–83). Another, parallel context was the delicate situation created in Spain by the democratic transition begun after the death of the “Leader by the Grace of God,” General Francisco Franco, in November 1975.
Armando Durante (1934–1997) started his art career in Buenos Aires, where he won the National and International Prizes at the Instituto di Tella (1965) and at Materiales, nuevas técnicas, nuevas expresiones (1968), the highly regarded exhibition at the MNBA. He then moved to Paris where he encountered the Groupe de Recherche d´Art Visuel (GRAV), the group founded by the Argentinean artists Julio Le Parc and Horacio García Rossi, among others. Durante joined forces with Le Parc and other European artists to explore the possibilities of including luminous, chromatic, and Kinetic effects in works of art. They experimented with visual effects and movement in works that called for the viewers’ involvement. In November 1975, when he decided to return to Argentina, the CAYC hosted a solo show of his work (GT-584; doc. no., GT-585, GT-586). After spending twenty months there, the military coup d’état in 1976 prompted him to return to Europe. He settled in Spain where he continued reinventing his conceptual language in experimental screenprinted works. The work reproduced in this newsletter includes a portrait of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and a quote (in Spanish and French) from the Irish writer’s essay, The Soul of Man under Socialism, written in 1891.
The CAYC’s use of a grid to standardize contributions from various artists allowed the center to optimize the scope of the pieces used to promote its group exhibitions.
