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 artist Fred Forest (b. 1933) specializes in video art and uses different materials and mediums to create works with critical and social undertones. In 1971 Forest—along with Hervé Fischer (b. 1941) and Jean-Paul Thenot (b. 1943)—created the Collectif d’art sociologique (Sociological Art Collective), which they proposed as a category. At the time, this French group was in synch with other art actions that were expressing a more aggressive critique of art directed at distribution circuits and their ideological representations. They published their Primer manifiesto del arte sociológico (1974) in Le Monde (the major newspaper in France), which identified the inevitable link between art, society, and life as the fundamental axis of the practice of art. Given such parameters, sociological art relied on scientific methods by putting in practice its artistic actions as a privileged field of research for the exploration of social theories.
Some months after the publication of the Primer manifesto, mentioned above, this newsletter announced Forest’s presentation of Autopercepción electrónica (1974), describing the action to be performed via the CAYC’s closed circuit television.
In Buenos Aires during the 1960s, reflections on the mass media led to a variety of works that were driven by semiotics, in some cases, and by sociology in others. A genre emerged, “media art,” which was jointly proposed by Eduardo Costa (b. 1940), Raúl Escari (1944–2016), and Roberto Jacoby (b. 1944); they sited “immaterial” works—such El happening del Jabalí difunto (1966) and Oscar Masotta’s happening El mensaje fantasma (1967)—which occured during the transmission of information. The Academia del fracaso (1975) by Marta Minujín (b. 1943), another work that was also presented at the CAYC, was influenced by sociological theories applied to a subject that the artist explored in her usual playful, ironic style.
