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 year 1972 was pivotal in the establishment of “systems art” as an international promotional strategy for the CAYC. The exhibition’s opening at the III Bienal de Arte Coltejer in Medellín, Colombia, in May launched it on a journey that took it to several cities in Latin America and Europe.
The exhibition Arte de Sistemas II (Buenos Aires, September 1972) was presented at three different venues: Arte de Sistemas Internacional (Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires), Arte de Sistemas Argentina (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), and CAYC al Aire Libre. Arte e Ideología (Plaza Roberto Arlt). There was also a performance of experimental music. The three exhibitions included a greater variety of local trends and movements, which were mainly reflected in gestural, participatory, and ephemeral art, and contemporary works of a political nature.
The idea that art could be shown outside of traditional exhibition venues had already been explored with events such as CAYC al aire libre. Escultura, follaje y ruidos 1970, which was installed at the Plaza Rubén Darío in Buenos Aires in November 1970 (GT- 8; doc. no. pending, GT-17; doc. no. pending).
Adalberto Marzano, a little-known Argentinean artist, took part in this second version of CAYC al aire libre. Arte e Ideología. He used a survey to invite people to support his plan to paint the Obelisco. This iconic monument, on Avenida 9 de Julio and Corrientes Street in Buenos Aires, was built in 1936 by the modernist architect Alberto Prebisch. Ever since then, it has been a rallying point for meetings, celebrations, and popular demonstrations.
The works shown at the exhibition all had a social message of some kind; many were influenced by the Marxist ideas of the French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–1990), dependency theory, and the discourse around oppression in Latin America. The turbulent situation in Argentina and the rest of the Americas in the early 1970s and the possibility of creating “art that promoted social change” were the subject of lively public debate at the time. The works featured at the exhibition, which opened on September 23, 1972, echoed those sociopolitical conditions. The exhibition was shut down by the police two days later and the works were confiscated. The concept of art in the street was seen by the authorities as a challenge to the repressive limits laid down by the dictatorship imposed by General Juan Carlos Onganía in 1966.
