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.
Going back to the CAYC’s very early years, showing films and videos was an important part of the center’s exhibition programs, in keeping with its goal of positioning itself as a space for experimental work, especially for projects that sought to combine art, technology, and communication. Activities of this sort became a regular part of the CAYC’s programs in 1974, when Glusberg took part in Open Circuits:An International Conference on the Future of Television, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and then in the Encuentros Internacionales Abiertos de Video presented at the center in Buenos Aires and in London, Paris, Ferrara, Antwerp, Caracas, Barcelona, Lima, Mexico City, and Tokyo.
Víctor Grippo (1936–2002) started taking part in the CAYC’s activities in 1971 and, the following year, became one of the original members of the Grupo de los Trece. This newsletter, which contributed to the campaign to promote the VI Encuentro Internacional Abierto de Video, held at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, published a reproduction of a drawing-diagram that is part of his Analogías series. Grippo often produced this kind of sketch in preparation for the production of his final works. He began working on this series in 1970 and referred to it as “potatoes and wiring,” suggesting an analogy between the potato (a food native to the Americas) and awareness.
Conciencia de la energía shows a circuit that creates an electro-chemical reaction through two electrodes (one copper, one zinc) that are inserted into a tuber to produce an electric current, turning the potato into a “vegetable battery.” In its original versions, the Analogías series demonstrated a “contained energy,” which was a metaphor for the revolutionary conditions created by military and civilian dictatorships throughout the Americas.
The following pieces from the Analogías series—Analogía I (1970 and 1977), Analogía IV (1972), Algunos oficios (1976), and Valijita de Panadero (1977)—create a system of opposites that mainly fluctuate between presentation and representation; two opposite poles, life and art, crops and culture, food for the body and the spirit—a concept that held Grippo’s attention at that critical time. In Argentina and in other places where repression was a constant, the function of art could only be articulated implicitly and the viewer was charged with interpreting its meanings and messaging.
