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.
Leopoldo Maler (b. 1937) is an Argentinean artist who has lived in London and Buenos Aires since the early 1960s, when he began his career as an artist working in theater, film, and installation. In the mid-1960s, in Argentina, he was involved in the happenings and sundry projects that took place at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella. In England, meanwhile, he worked for the BBC as a choreographer and a director of experimental ballet. He started working with the CAYC in 1971, giving a talk illustrated with slides about his activities overseas. At the end of that year, he became one of the original members of the Grupo de los Trece. His work was therefore shown at multiple editions of Arte de Sistemas and Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano, the exhibitions that the CAYC presented in a number of different cities in the Americas and Europe.
Signos en ecosistemas artificiales was the installation that the Grupo de los Trece presented at the XIV São Paulo Biennial in 1977. It sought to condense the members’ individual poetics in a complementary way that was conducive to a group reading. According to Glusberg—who was involved as both curator and artist—“artificial ecosystems” was an alternative term that could be applied to art objects. Similarly, Marotta claimed that “the sum of artistic discourse constitutes a ‘language’ of art; that is, a paradigm that can present portrayals by means of a web of relationships.” (Jorge Glusberg, The group of thirteen. XIV Biennial of São Paulo, [Buenos Aires: CAYC, 1977]) The group’s installation at the São Paulo Biennial was awarded the Grande Prêmio Itamaraty by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations.
Maler’s contribution to the installation, La última cena, took the classic religious theme and added certain signifiers that were unavoidably political: plastic lambs hanging from a waterwheel in perpetual motion set on an empty table with thirteen places blocked off by rolls of barbed wire.
