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 exhibition Arte de Sistemas en Latinoamérica traveled to a number of European cities from 1974 to 1976, showing a range of recent Latin American works associated with the original concept of systems art.
The SÚM group started as an art collective in 1965 with an exhibition presented by the Ásmundarsalur gallery and the Café Mokka (both in Reykjavik), which featured a number of different trends, such as Neo-Dadaism, new realism, and Pop. When the SÚM gallery opened, in February 1969, the group became established as its members made direct contact with worldwide experimental movements, especially those linked to Fluxus and Conceptualism. (Halldór Björn Runólfsson, “SÚM - The Fluxus in Iceland,” in The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950–1975 [Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2016].)
Guðbergur Bergsson (1932–2023)—a prominent figure in Icelandic postmodern literature—was a member of the SÚM group and is mentioned here as a presenter at the exhibition. His involvement made it easier to connect with the CAYC, since he was one of the major translators of Spanish works into Icelandic.
Heiða Björk Árnadóttir has noted that the term hugmyndalist—currently the word most often used to refer to “Conceptual art” in Icelandic circles—appears for the first time in a series of newspaper reviews of the CAYC’s presentation at the SÚM gallery, one of which is included in this newsletter. It was originally published in the Social Democratic Party newspaper Alþýðublaðið, on May 21, 1974. (Heiða Björk Árnadóttir, The Conceptual, the Romantic, and the Nonhuman: The SÚM Group and the Emergence of Contemporary Art in Iceland, 1965–1978, 2019.)
