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 art and 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 (1966–70), 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 a variety of activities with intellectuals that contributed to the circulation of ideas from different disciplines (analytical philosophy, mathematical logic, epistemological problems, psychology, semiotics, and linguistics), which had been excluded from official circles. The center’s interest led to the creation of the Escuela de Altos Estudios (EAE) in early 1973 (GT-201; doc. no. 1478752, GT-201-A; doc. no. 1478753, GT-224; doc. no. 1478771, GT-219; doc. no. 1478755, GT-225; doc. no. 1478772).
Having delivered his first seminar at the CAYC toward the end of the previous year (GT-188; doc. no. 1478743), Néstor García Canclini (b. 1939), the writer, anthropologist, and cultural promoter, presented the seminar announced in this newsletter: “Vanguardias estéticas, estructura social y cultura popular.”. In this lecture he analyzed the relationships between society and art, providing a critical review of the historical circumstances surrounding the art in question. This approach allowed him to consider the role of Latin American artists within the relevant sociopolitical context. These same thoughts were expressed under the same title in a text published by the Centro Editor de América Latina some months earlier. In that text he proposed the necessary “[…] interaction between the possibilities of an artistic language and the demands for liberation of a class and a society.” Canclini referred to several works created by artists involved with the center as examples of the possible organization of a “popular art” that was related to current forms of artistic expression. This was a pioneering work concerning the sociology of Latin American culture, which introduced the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s “field theory.” In time, it became required reading for understanding aesthetic expressions of that period as well as local cultural problems. (M. Marchesi, “El CAYC y el arte de sistemas como estrategia institucional”, 2013.)
