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. In addition to the exhibitions, a program of different activities exposed attendees to the latest in scientific thinking. According to Glusberg, the coordination between theoretical thinking and artistic practice was an essential part of social change.
During the military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía, the CAYC became a cultural home for the Fundación de Investigación Interdisciplinaria, a space that welcomed a group of dissident professors from the Facultad de Arquitectura y Ciencias Exactas de la Universidad de Buenos Aires after the military takeover of the university in what came to be known as “La Noche de los Bastones Largos” in June 1966.
In its early years the center organized activities that involved a group of intellectuals from a variety of disciplines that had been excluded from higher education following the military takeover of the universities. After presenting CAYC al Aire Libre o Arte e Ideología at the Plaza Roberto Arlt in Buenos Aires in September 1972, Glusberg suggested taking another look at Conceptual art and popular culture as seen from a sociological perspective.
This newsletter invites readers to attend “Para una sociología de las vanguardias artísticas,” a seminar to be presented by the Argentine professor and anthropologist Néstor García Canclini (b. 1939) in November 1972. Canclini introduced Argentina to the thinking of the French theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002).
In the 1970s Canclini thought that avant-garde practices should be applied in the field of social struggles; politicized artists were urged to step away from art and transform “their works into rehearsals or triggers for a political event.” (García Canclini, N. (1972). “El artista en la ciudad. Para un replanteo político de la función de las vanguardias artísticas.” In Revista de la Universidad, no. 24, 349–71). His article addressed the essential question: How to produce art that can be part of daily life and contribute to the process of liberation?
The key issue he focused on as he delivered the (paid) seminar was how to transform “occasional subversion” into artists’ organic participation in movements that sought to bring about changes in society. That activity, as well as an interview with Glusberg, were the source of the text Vanguardias artísticas y cultura popular (1973). The CAYC thus sought to communicate the possibilities suggested by new social theories to be applied to artistic activity, particularly those that supported the center’s program of activities and the creation of an institutional poetics of its own that would establish its identity in Latin America.
