Translating Arte de Sistemas: The Centro de Arte y Comunicación in Buenos Aires and Abroad, 1969-1977

Abstract

My dissertation studies the exhibitions, discourses, and institutional maneuvers of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación in Buenos Aires from its founding in late 1968 to 1977, which enabled it to pursue its ambitious and multi-faceted mission of fostering an atmosphere of experimental and vanguard art in Argentina through reciprocal exchanges and collaborations with international artists, curators, and critics. I characterize the CAYC’s methods as acts of translation, using the multiple senses of the term, in order to address the ways in which the institution physically and discursively navigated between Argentine and international art contexts and how it managed to facilitate communication and exchange between local artistic interests and traditions and international trends and discourses. The CAYC’s strategies of translation enabled it to fulfill its internationalist, developmentalist, and didactic missions while straddling the seemingly opposing forces of a homogenizing cosmopolitan art circuit, on the one hand, and increasing calls for national and regional liberation among Latin American artists and critics, on the other. This dissertation is primarily a compilation of exhibition histories that illuminate and analyze both the institutional strategies and motivations of the CAYC and the aesthetic developments that were supported and promoted by the institution’s founder and director, Jorge Glusberg. Most chapters focus on a single CAYC exhibition whose themes and execution illuminate distinct moments in its institutional history, its strategies for international exchange, and the evolution of experimental and vanguard art, which provide key insight into the systems aesthetics and conceptualist art of Argentina throughout the 1970s. I analyze CAYC exhibitions as rhetorical devices that enabled Glusberg to physically and discursively compare Argentine and foreign art. By applying structuralist ideas of signification onto artistic production, Glusberg developed the curatorial and critical concept of an arte de sistemas that reinforced the idea of art as a form of communication and as a collection of codes and signs in systems of meaning making. It also underscored the greater role of process, the significance of new media, and the active engagement with audiences within contemporary practices of conceptualism, performance, post-studio sculpture, and even experimental printmaking and painting. As such, the concept of an arte de sistemas provided Glusberg with a curatorial framework in which a wide range of international contemporary practices could be translated to Argentina and reconciled with the work of Argentine artists. My methods intervene in existing CAYC scholarship by addressing both the experimental artistic practices that were supported, and at times developed, by the CAYC and their subsequent dissemination and mediation by the institution to facilitate its mission of translating Argentine art within international art circuits. Chapters analyze the evolution of arte de sistemas across the exhibitions Arte y cibernética (1969), Arte de sistemas (1971), Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano (1972), Arte e ideología: CAYC al aire libre (1972), and Signos en ecosistemas artificiales (1977) to reveal shifts in institutional and aesthetic priorities and to chart the CAYC’s intertextual engagements with ideas of cybernetics, semiotics, conceptual art, and ecology. One chapter supplements the institutional and curatorial focus of the dissertation by analyzing the work and development of Nicolás García Uriburu, who was closely affiliated with Glusberg and the CAYC. As in my analyses of CAYC’s activities and Glusberg’s curatorial strategies, I closely examine García Uriburu’s work, his writings, and his critical reception to articulate the way in which he and his work translated between Argentina and international centers. I also employ an ecocritical methodology to analyze the forms of arte ecológico supported within the CAYC to reveal Argentine artists early instances of ecological sensitivity and critical reflection about the political ecology of Argentina and environmental justice in Latin America.