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.
The year 1972 was pivotal in the establishment of "arte de sistemas" as an international promotional strategy for the CAYC. The May exhibition Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano at the III Bienal de Arte Coltejer in Medellín, Colombia, launched it on a journey to several cities in Latin America and Europe. The event also provided a model for the CAYC’s later exhibitions. The common factor was the use of heliographic copies, a low-cost process that made it easy to copy works. As Glusberg said, “This was no random discovery; it was a result of our inability to compete with technological media and with much deeper pockets than we had.” The ability to copy works for very little money made it possible to circulate images more widely and exhibit them in multiple places at the same time.
Hacia un perfil… showed works in which Argentinean and international artists reflected on the political situations that were common to their respective countries. The exhibition presented an overview of the Grupo de los Trece’s art and ideology, providing insights into the contemporary art of the region. According to the CAYC, “systems art” no longer referred only to international process art; the political undertones that had crept in over the course of many productions gave it an identity of its own and a certain local flavor. In his introduction to the exhibition, Glusberg claimed that: “There is no Latin American art as such, only Latin American problems that are consistent with the region’s revolutionary situation.”
The Grupo de los Trece—an art group that represented the CAYC—made their official debut in Colombia. The members of the original group were Jacques Bedel, Luis (Fernando) Benedit, Gregorio Dujovny, Carlos Ginzburg, Víctor Grippo, Jorge González Mir, Jorge Glusberg, Vicente Marotta, Luis Pazos, Alberto Pellegrino, Alfredo Portillos, Juan Carlos Romero, and Julio Teich. Horacio Zabala and Clorindo Testa, who are listed on this occasion as guests, joined the group later on.
