The CAyC network revisited: Archives, methodologies, and critical perspectives on Argentina’s Centre for Art and Communication
In 1968, the art critic and businessman Jorge Glusberg founded the Centre for Art and Communication (CAyC) in Buenos Aires. Over the following decades this interdisciplinary network of artists, thinkers and art professionals, rife with contradictions, shaped the production and circulation of art from Latin America. CAyC fostered artistic exchanges within and beyond the region, from Argentina and Brazil to Japan and the UK; organised ten International Open Encounters on Video Art; and hosted numerous events featuring natural scientists, philosophers, and literary figures. From the militarised repression of the 1970s into the post-1983 transition to democracy, CAyC also navigated multiple forms of political entanglement. Recent initiatives have begun to historicise CAyC, but its broader significance for global histories of contemporary art has yet to be examined in detail. Due to its scope of activities, CAyC provides a productive methodological lens through which to examine the intersection of key issues driving current art historical scholarship, including transnational connections and collaboration, interdisciplinarity, technological experiments, ecological approaches, and experiences of migration and exile.
This session will take place in two parts. The first panel examines how the specific socio-political and historical dimensions of various localities shaped and were shaped by CAyC’s exhibitions and events. The second panel focuses on the media systems and technologies, from computing to video, that were used by artists affiliated with or who exhibited at CAyC.
Session Convenors:
Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, Birkbeck
Catherine Spencer, University of St Andrews
Christopher Williams-Wynn, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut / Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Speakers:
Claudia Calirman, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, New York
Sculpture, Foliage, and Noises: CAyC’s First Outdoor Exhibition
This paper explores the pioneering outdoor exhibition—Escultura, follaje y ruidos (Sculpture, Foliage, and Noises), which took place in November 7–30, 1970) two years after the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC) founding, at Plaza Rubén Dario in the northern part of Buenos Aires. More than just a visual arts exhibition, the exhibition was meant to be an interdisciplinary event encompassing sculpture, installations, concerts, and dance that was to be on view for a month. Though not necessarily political per se, the exhibition addressed the artistic community’s urge to leave the walls of museums and galleries behind and occupy the streets. Showing art in public spaces had the potential to be an act of resistance that broke down the aseptic structures of art institutions and embraced the energy of the streets.
The exhibition promised to deliver “sculptures, foliage, and noises.” Indeed, it did provide some of it, as the public joyfully interacted with some of the artworks in the park and its verdant surroundings. Not everything, though, followed the script. While some of the passerby mingled with the artworks, others responded in a disturbing way damaging some of the pieces in display. How did this exhibition reflect the socio-political context of the 1970s, marked by social upheaval and cultural transformations? In which ways did it help to inform and shape contemporary public art? These are some of the questions this paper intends to explore.
Ine Engels, Department of Art History, Musicology, and Theatre Studies, Ghent University, Belgium
Exporting art across borders: CAyC in Belgium
When in 1973, Jorge Glusberg, director of the Argentine Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC) in Buenos Aires, made a telephone call from London to Florent Bex, director of the Belgian International Cultural Center (ICC), the start of a close collaboration between the two men took form. During the 1970s, they co-organized numerous exhibitions such as Art Systems in Latin America (1974-75), Aspects of Contemporary Art in Belgium (1976), and the International Open Encounters on Video for which its fifth edition (1976) took place in the ICC in Antwerp. For the exhibitions’ organization, Glusberg and Bex could count on the support of the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of National Education and Dutch culture, which was made possible by the cultural agreement between Argentina and Belgium. Whereas the involvement of government ministries proved to be financially beneficial, it also allowed the exhibitions to be subjugated to state control and censorship – the very processes Glusberg sought to escape in Argentina. Through an examination of the CAyC – ICC case, this paper discusses how Glusberg and Bex built a curatorial framework that relied on government interference, intended to facilitate cultural exchange but in practice also restricting it. On a broader scale, this paper reflects on the complex ways in which state repression travelled across borders and impacted artistic production from a distance. Moreover, by focusing on Glusberg’s understudied relations with Florent Bex in particular, and Belgium in general, this paper aims to contribute to the diversification of CAyC’s history.
Katarzyna Cytlak, University Nicolaus Copernicus, Toruń
In search of an alternative: South-East relations at the CAyC
The paper proposes to examine artistic contact with East European artists as crucial for Jorge Glusberg, a curator, entrepreneur-owner of the lighting factory Modulor SA, and the founder of the CAyC in Buenos Aires. Although Glusberg was mainly concerned with the promotion of national, regional and Latin American artistic production, he had ambitions to generate, through CAyC’s activity, an international platform for contemporary art which would include prominent artists from the West and from marginal regions of the post-war world system, such as Eastern Europe.
East European artists were shown at emblematic exhibitions organised by CAyC, including Arte de Sistemas (Art Systems), which took place at the Museo de Arte Moderno (Museum of Modern Art) in Buenos Aires in 1971 (Ladislav Novak, Jiri Valoch, Jarosław Kozłowski). Ties with Eastern Europe had a major influence on CAyC’s national and international positioning strategy, both symbolically and actually. Glusberg’s statements, part of CAYC’s discursive strategy, were motivated by a desire to redefine habitual relations with a colonising Europe. His references to the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, for example, functioned as a gesture toward de-westernisation, a recognition of art created beyond Western hegemonic centres, and an attempt to abandon Western-centric narratives on art. Symbolic or real cultural exchanges with Eastern Europe, which having been incorporated into the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War period, provided an alternative in the search in Latin America for more equal and horizontal relations with Europe.
Mariana Marchesi and Sebastián Vidal Valenzuela
Restaging CAYC: Two Trans-Andean Projects
Our proposal addresses the curatorial research of two historic exhibitions by the CAYC that explore the processes of dialog and cultural exchange during periods of dictatorship and transition in Argentina and Chile. It also provides new perspectives of CAYC’s regional impact during the ‘70s and ‘80s, the dimension of the meanings that were activated at each moment and the way in which some same problems are reactivated today.
This research has aimed to highlight these lesser-known cases overlooked by local historiographies, and through their reenactment, to shed light on the critical reconstruction of the political role of works and exhibitions that were pioneering at the time. The cases presented—Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano (1972) and Cuatro artistas chilenos en el CAYC (1985)—were exhibited at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Chile (2020) and in Argentina (2022) under the title La exposición olvidada y una lectura a Cuatro artistas chilenos en el CAYC 1972/1985/2020-22. These restagings allows to observe the displacement of certain themes related to Latin America that are sustained over time and that acquires different connotations at different times.
We consider that our proposal is relevant because it analyzes the global and binational aspect of these CAYC exhibitions in their time, as well as the way restaging them has enabled a critical approach to the intersection of art history research, curatorial practice, and the political perspective of the context in which they are circumscribed.
José-Carlos Mariátegui, Alta Tecnología Andina – ATA, Lima, Perú, Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, LUISS, Rome and Department of Media and Communications, LSE, London
Locating CAYC’s Network through Two Pioneering Latin American New Media Exhibitions: ‘Arte y Cibernética’ (1969) and ‘Arteônica’ (1971)
This paper examines two seminal Latin American art exhibitions that played a pivotal role in the early history of media arts and cybernetics: Arte y Cibernética (Buenos Aires, 1969), organised by Jorge Glusberg and, Arteônica (São Paulo, 1971), organised by Waldermar Cordeiro. Despite their importance, these exhibitions have not been extensively studied, especially in terms of their networks and exchanges, as well as their interdisciplinary collaborations. The paper focuses on the artistic and technological ecosystems that catalysed unprecedented interdisciplinary collaborations between artists, engineers, and institutions, establishing vital technological and artistic ecosystems across the region. Arte y Cibernética was organised by the Centre of Studies on Art and Communication of the Foundation for Interdisciplinary Research, a precursor of what would become the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación). The paper highlights the participation of key CAYC artists—including Luis Fernando Benedit, Antonio Berni, and Eduardo Mac Entyre—in both exhibitions, as well as other CAYC artists who participated in “Arteônica”. The study situates these exhibitions within the broader international context of computer art, particularly in relation to concurrent and influential computer art exhibitions like Cybernetic Serendipity (London, 1968), and the networks established in Latin America at the time. We will also situate the relationship between art, cybernetics and emerging computer technologies, and the potential for electronic art in Latin America as envisioned by Cordeiro and Glusberg during those early years. The research aims at contributing to media art historiography by understanding the CAYC’s network significance during this transformative period.
Katerina Valdivia Bruch, independent researcher, Berlin
The Peruvian Connection: CAyC, Early Cybernetics, and the Experimental Art Scene in Lima of the 1970s
During the 1970s, CAyC was involved in three exhibitions in Lima: Arte y cibernética in 1971, Arte de sistemas in 1972, both presented at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo (IAC); and 20 artistas argentinos in 1977, held at the gallery of the Banco Continental.
The 1970s was also marked by the government of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975), a leftist military administration with original economic, social, and educational reforms. Among its innovations were the creation of the Centro de Desarrollo para la Participación (CENTRO), directed by Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro. The centre was “possibly Peru’s first public think tank,” intended “to create a global computational model of Peruvian society and economy”(Mariátegui 2024).
While the collaborations in the field of video between CAyC’s director Jorge Glusberg and Peruvian artist Rafael Hastings have been documented (Mariátegui 2020), the exhibitions of CAyC in Lima and the connections that CAyC established with other Peruvian experimental artists – for instance César Bolaños, a pioneer of electronic music in Peru, or Swiss-Peruvian artist Francesco Mariotti – deserve more attention.
In this paper, I examine CAyC’s exhibitions taking place in Lima in 1971 and 1972, their impact on the local art scene, and CAyC’s networks with Peruvian artists. Contrary to the argument that the experimental art scene was interrupted by the military (López and Tarazona 2022), this paper highlights the government’s interest in cybernetics in the example of CENTRO. At the same time, CAyC’s exhibitions and that of other experimental artists in Lima evidence that experimentalism continued throughout this government and beyond it.
Benjamin O. Murphy, Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Video on Paper: The Televisual Image and the Problem of Politics at the Centro de Arte y Comunicación
This paper explores the role of video art at the Centro de Arte y Comunicación. Still a novel technology in the 1970s, video became a central pillar of the CAYC’s programming during the institution’s first decade. Beyond serving as a medium for art and communication, video served the CAYC above all as a rhetorical device, a metaphor through which the institution disseminated a geopolitical discourse within a dense and largely paper-based promotional apparatus. Represented on countless press releases, pamphlets, and flyers the CAYC circulated globally, video figured as the sign for a canny abstraction that posed Latin American art as a politicized, “revolutionary” alternative to practices from the Global North. Focused on these paper pictures of video, I present original, granular research on their sources and composition to show how they often dissimulated, and at times even fabricated, the works of video art they purported to document. Pressing upon this archival equivocation, I focus on a single, recurring video image. The material ambivalences surrounding this image, I argue, crystalize the political ambivalence at the heart of the CAYC’s institutional discourse, in which strident declarations of geopolitical critique obfuscated a constitutive prevarication about the CAYC’s own situatedness under the looming shadow of authoritarianism. To conclude, I briefly consider a group of rare CAYC video works from the late 70s. Far from felicitous survivals undistorted by the CAYC’s equivocal paper archive, I propose, these works stage uncanny reiterations of the archive’s own material dissimulations, and of the profound political ambivalences they disclose.
Julia Detchon, Museum of Modern Art, New York
El orden establecido: Mirtha Dermisache and Marie Orensanz at CAYC
“People are conditioned by environment,” Marie Orensanz wrote and rewrote in her text-based drawings of the 1970s. A frequent participant in CAYC exhibitions, Orensanz developed a sustained analysis of systems of representation that, during that decade, aligned with both Jorge Glusberg’s protean framework of “arte de sistemas” and with the more diffuse experimental writing practices of artists, such as Mirtha Dermisache, sometimes affiliated with CAYC. This paper will look comparatively at the work of Dermisache and Orensanz, taking as a point of intersection their participation in the traveling exhibition Art Systems in Latin America, which circulated in Europe in 1974-1975. It will track their engagement with CAYC’s transnational network as well as their exploration of the space of the page, looking at language as a system that, through strategies of appropriation and displacement, might restructure the relations between artist-author and viewer-reader.