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 South American and international institutions that were involved with experimental practices. These institutions offered similar programs to encourage the production and exhibition of Conceptual works in a contemporary circuit created by new cultural spaces and centers.
The Halvat Huvit gallery, also known as “Cheap Thrills,” was one of those institutions. It was active from 1973 to 1977 in Helsinki’s Ullanlinna neighborhood. The artist, critic, and editor Jan-Olof Mallander (b. 1944), who founded the gallery as an experimental space, brought together the art group Elonkorjaajat (Sami Sjöberg, “J.O. Mallander and the Nordic Neo-Avant-Garde,” in The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries Since 1975, 2022.) About seventy exhibitions were organized at the gallery during that period; one of the most important ones was A Head Museum for the Eighties (1974), which featured 400 artists from all over the world who submitted their works by mail. Among them were the works produced by members of the Grupo de los Trece that are listed in this newsletter.
Similar strategies were often used for exhibitions organized by the CAYC and by foreign institutions. Based on the concept of “mail art,” the goal was to achieve a measure of standardization—an idea derived from industrial production—in order to promote a kind of art that could be copied anywhere, without too much work, and with no need for the artist’s presence. The fundamental intent was efficient communication, with an emphasis on “works in progress” and their contents. This meant that images could be circulated more widely as part of the promotion of the CAYC’s initiatives in other parts of the world.
