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. As part of the interdisciplinary approach it had always encouraged, the CAYC promoted experimental practices, appropriating a variety of examples of Argentine art from the 1960s.
In 1969, with its first exhibition, Arte y Cibernética (Art and Cybernetics), the CAYC established its experimental credentials, which were in line with ideas that had already been presented on the international stage. The center hoped that this exhibition at the Galería Bonino in Buenos Aires would show what new technologies could do for creative activity.
The exhibition’s curatorial plan included electronic music composed by Dante Grela, Francisco Kröpfl, Carlos Rausch, Jorge Rotter, and Eduardo Tejeda. The center’s intention to combine disciplines was on display again in Argentina-Intermedios (Teatro Ópera, Buenos Aires, 1969), a show that included electronic music, performing arts, experimental films, and Kinetic sculptures.
This newsletter announces the Beckett ´74 series, which consisted of three plays and a video, to be presented by different groups in July 1974 at the CAYC. Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) was a seminal figure in the twentieth-century theatrical avant-garde. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. His Theater of the Absurd was particularly relevant in those days, especially in South America, which was rife with coups d’état and de facto governments. Beckett’s plays were known for their formal austerity that underscored the anxiety and the coarseness of the human condition. Three years after Waiting for Godot (1953) opened in Paris it was performed in Buenos Aires in a production directed by Jorge Petraglia. The play itself and its staging influenced the experimental theater scene at the time.
