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.
Anthony Frederick Blunt (1907–1983) was a renowned British professor of art history at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. He worked as a critic for a newspaper called The Spectator and was a member of the Warburg Institute, which specialized in the study of the interaction among ideas, images, and society.
The CAYC took an interdisciplinary approach to its activities, which included organizing exhibitions and presenting seminars headlined by the most distinguished contemporary figures who discussed current art and politics. From its very early days, the CAYC sought to foster free-flowing communication with critical and creative circles in other parts of the world. For example, the opening of the center included an auction of works donated by artists, an event designed to attract foreign critics, such as Jasia Reichardt, assistant director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts; Charles Spencer, director of the Camden Arts Centre (both of which were in London); Willoughby Sharp; and Charles Harrison. Thus began a period of transnational exchanges that, like the newsletters, defined much of the 1970s. In August 1970 the CAYC opened Arte y cibernética. San Francisco-Londres-Buenos Aires, a traveling exhibition that included works by Argentinean, British, and North American artists, as well as some by the Japanese group CTG (Computer Technique Group).
