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 first version of Arte en cambio was an exhibition presented by the Grupo de los Trece at the CAYC in May 1973 (GT-233; doc. no. 1476435, GT-239; doc. no. 1476434). At that time, it was announced that Horacio Zabala had officially joined the group, and that he had proposed the title of the exhibition as a broad statement that sought to capture a sense of the members’ various styles (María José Herrera, interview with the artist, unpublished, 2022). Zabala was referring to the fact that every artist is free to change his approach rather than having to repeat himself or do what has already been done.
This second version, in 1976, added the question ¿Hay vanguardia en Latinoamérica? as a subtitle and was expanded beyond the ranks of the Grupo de los Trece to include a larger number of artists (GT-619-620; doc. no. 1477267), several of whom had been collaborating with the CAYC on a regular basis for some time. Keeping in mind the censorship and repression that had been imposed by the recently installed military dictatorship (which took power on March 24 that year), Glusberg traces a connection between the experimentalism of the late 1960s and the different approaches that had emerged since then, such as those embraced by the CAYC. He discusses the inequality to which Latin American art is subjected, noting its lack of access to the market, which includes prestigious exhibitions that establish reputations, and to galleries all over the world. In his opinion, what has been achieved by his project (the Centro de Arte y Comunicación) is important because it has created an avant-garde in Latin America whose identity is based on its focus on social issues from a semiotic interpretation oriented toward mechanisms related to the significance of communication.
Meanwhile, in international art circles, Conceptualism was falling out of favor and yielding to the nt (new trends). Glusberg advocates reflection on the power of art that, from now on, relies on a discourse that is more politically tempered than the version that was expressed in exhibitions such as Hacia un perfil…but that the reduced impetus and the idea of art production as a model for social change should endure.
