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.
Benedit had been a regular participant in the CAYC’s activities ever since the center and the Grupo de los Trece were founded. (GT-181; doc. no. 1476353, GT-255; doc. no. 1476447, GT-694; doc. no. 1477338, GT-745; doc. no. 1477395). Beginning in 1968, the Argentinean architect and artist produced a series of artificial environments and habitats in which viewers could observe the behavior of plants, insects, and small animals that were faced with a variety of obstacles. The relationship between stimuli and behaviors would be the main focus of Benedit’s work during that period, for which he would draw from different disciplines that were in vogue at the time, such as communication theory, structuralism, and cybernetics. His artistic habitats and labyrinths functioned like “small-scale models,” a characteristic that the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw in art, which he considered to be a small-scale model of the world.
In Furnarius rufus (1976)—the scientific name for a red ovenbird, the “hornero”—an acrylic container holds the embalmed body of one of these birds and its nest made of mud. Named the national bird of Argentina, this species is associated with a new line of research that Benedit conducted in the mid-1970s, when he claimed that the rural regions of Argentina were fundamental components in the construction of the country’s national identity. His other work, 50 + 50 = 100 (1976), consists of two sealed acrylic tubes that were filled with water, each with an air bubble trapped inside, representing a “level,” the tool used by bricklayers to confirm the bricks are even. Each tube is fifty centimeters long; together they measure one meter. They are part of a series of works in which Benedit explores the interaction between the behavior of bodies and the material with which they are made.
In the months before the Grupo de los Trece took part in the XIV São Paulo Biennial in September 1977, the CAYC organized solo exhibitions for some of the group’s members (GT-737, GT-738; doc. no. 1477390, GT-757; doc. no. 1477397, GT-758; doc. no. 1477398, GT-759; doc. no. 1477399, GT-761; doc. no. 1477419, GT-764; doc. no. 1477431, GT-765; doc. no. 1477432, GT-766; doc. no. 1477433, GT-772; doc. no. 1477435, GT-773; doc. no. 1477436, GT-774; doc. no. 1477437, GT-775; doc. no. 1477438, GT-785; doc. no. 1477448, GT-786; doc. no. 1477449).
These works, along with the ones produced by the other members of the Grupo, were part of the installation Signos en ecosistemas artificiales that was presented at the 1977 São Paulo Biennial, for which the group received the Grande Prêmio Itamaraty.
