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.
During the 1970s Glusberg created a network of South American and international institutions that were involved in experimental practices. These institutions shared similar programs to encourage the production and exhibition of Conceptual works in a contemporary circuit formed by new cultural spaces and centers.
Gérald Minkoff (1937–2009) was an important figure in the experimental art scene in Switzerland. In 1973 he joined Ecart, which consisted of a group of artists, an independent space, and a publishing house founded in 1969 in Geneva. Ecart became a focal point in Europe that was devoted to organizing exhibitions and publishing artists’ books—a meeting place for an international network of artists working in the fields of performance, video art, and mail art. Its program and the projects it encouraged were in line with the CAYC’s ideas, both in terms of their experimental nature and their goal of creating opportunities for circulation and exchange. Minkoff and Muriel Olesen (1948–2020) (GT-729; doc. no. 1477384, GT-776; doc. no. 1477439, GT-779; doc. no. 1477441) worked together to create projects based on photography, film, and video. Both artists took part in the Encuentros Internacionales Abiertos de Video in Ferrara, Italy, in 1975 (GT-S/N) and in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1976) (GT-606; doc. no. 1477317). The CAYC subsequently kept promoting their work in its newsletters.
Palindromes—such as the title of the work mentioned above (ego l´eloge)—were a constant in Minkoff’s work. They can be found in his written works printed on ceramic or marble, in neon letters, or embroidered on fabrics and everyday objects. The same is true of MizzUnderStanding, which allowed him to introduce ambiguity through the idea of misunderstandings.
The text in the newsletter describes an action that cannot be completed, in which the artist tries to draw his hand drawing on a monitor that repeats the image of his hand on closed circuit video. In the following newsletter (GT-720; 1477378), there is a back view of the artist imitating the gesture of God extending his hand to give life to Adam as depicted in the fresco on the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. There is a quote at the bottom of the image, a paragraph from Primitive Religion: Its Nature and Origin, the book by the anthropologist Paul Radin (1883–1959).
