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.
During the 1970s Glusberg developed a collaborative network of international institutions that were involved with experimental practices that offered similar programs designed to encourage the production and exhibition of Conceptual works at a time when Latin American countries, especially, were governed by violent dictatorships
The MUCA, run by the visual artist and agent Helen Escobedo (1934–2010), was one of those institutions. Assisted by advisors such as Juan Acha and Néstor García Canclini (who moved to Mexico in 1976), Escobedo organized projects that encouraged a Latin American approach to the arts and an emphasis on group art activities.
This newsletter announces the presentation of Conceptual art facing the latin american problem, a version of Hacia un perfil… The exhibition showed works in which Argentinean and international artists explored the political situations their countries all had in common. It presented the Grupo de los Trece’s view of art as ideology and a brief overview of contemporary art in Latin America. In his introduction to the exhibition, Glusberg wrote: “There is no Latin American art as such, but the region’s individual countries do share a common problem in terms of their revolutionary situation.”
The use of heliographic copies was 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.
Escobedo and Glusberg organized the exchange of exhibitions between the MUCA and the CAYC in the 1970s, contributing to the expansion of a transnational dialogic territory (GT-500 (doc. pending) and GT-811-812; doc. no. 1477593).
