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.
Architecture and design were basic components of the CAYC’s interdisciplinary approach. In its early years, the center became affiliated with the Fundación de Investigación Interdisciplinaria (Foundation for Interdisciplinary Research)—an organization that included a group of dissident professors from the Facultad de Arquitectura y Ciencias Exactas at the Universidad de Buenos Aires—following the forced occupation of universities, the violation of social and educational norms that took place following the coup d’état orchestrated by General Juan Carlos Onganía in 1966. This early affiliation left its mark on various aspects of the CAYC’s operations, such as the approach to many of its initiatives as “projects;” the use of heliographic copies in its exhibitions; the center’s collaboration with the industrial sector in exhibitions and contests; and the presence of several artist-architects among the founders of the Grupo de los Trece: Clorindo Testa, Jacques Bedel, and Luis Fernando Benedit.
As noted in this newsletter, initiatives such as Contemporánea 76 (GT-511, 512, 635, 636, 658, 659, 663) were examples of exhibitions and exchanges that contributed to the development of disciplines that were thought to have been ignored or overlooked in Argentina during the 1970s. Even in the field of consumer goods, progress was not judged in terms of a product’s success in the marketplace, but in the qualities of the design itself: its formal resolution and the use of new materials. Hence the comparison to contemporary art and the use of the term “interior architecture” instead of the lesser known “interior design” or “interior decoration.”
Exhibitions and competitions of this type frequently enjoyed the support of companies engaged in the production and marketing of industrial products. As in, for example, the involvement of Noren Plast S.A. (a supplier of plastic materials) in the exhibition Escultura, follaje y ruidos in 1970 (GT 08, 17). Or the competition organized by the appliance manufacturer Aurora (GT 41, 42, 47) in 1971. Glusberg had connections to the industrial sector through his own company, Modulor S.A., which sold lighting fixtures.
