CAIA - Exhibition Trajectories: the Grupo de los Trece at the...

♯11 second semester 2017 : 129-134

Exhibition Trajectories: the Grupo de los Trece at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo / Luiza Mader Paladino

Luiza Mader Paladino (GEACC - MAC/USP, Brazil)

Exhibition Trajectories: the Grupo de los Trece at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo

ISSN 2313-9242

♯11 second semester 2017

Exhibition Trajectories: the Grupo de los Trece at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo / Luiza Mader Paladino 129

Exhibition Trajectories: the Grupo de los Trece at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo Luiza Mader Paladino (GEACC - MAC/USP, Brazil) Introduction In this article, I will examine the presence of artists associated with the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), based in Buenos Aires, at the MAC USP (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de la Universidad de São Paulo) thanks to the exchange between the two institutions and their respective directors, Jorge Glusberg (1932-2012) and Walter Zanini (1925-2013), throughout the seventies. Central to the Argentine center’s presence at the São Paulo museum was the Grupo de los Trece;1 its members participated in emblematic shows held at the MAC USP—Prospectiva 74 (1974), Poéticas Visuales (1977), Papel y Lápiz (1976), and Década de 70 (1976)—that dealt with experimental practices and with the new media.2 This essay will focus on Década de 70. Organized by Jorge Glusberg, that show represented the consolidation of an intensive dialogue between the MAC USP and the CAYC. I will, in this discussion, bear in mind the strategies for internationalization deployed by the CAYC’s exhibition method (heliographic paper) and by the category “systems art”, which Glusberg invented to describe a series of methods tied to a conceptualism adjusted to fit a certain understanding of the conditions of production in Latin America. An analysis of these exchanges focused on the arrival of the exhibition Década de 70 to the MAC USP will shed light on a complex set of interrelated artistic and institutional transformations. As

such, I hope to formulate another perspective of a period when a new visuality took hold. The Beginning of the Interchange The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de la Universidad de São Paulo (MAC USP) and the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) were fundamental to the expansion of experimental practices over the course of the seventies. During Walter Zanini’s tenure as director of the MAC USP (1963-1978), the museum would become a dialectical territory where the project of organizing a modern art collection and a series of retrospective exhibitions existed alongside the impetus to support contemporary production. With broad programming and scarce funding, Zanini turned the museum into an interdisciplinary and multimedia platform3 that encouraged conceptual practices and new technologies, and strengthened an alternative network of artistic exchange by means of mail art. Unlike the public and university-run MAC USP, the CAYC was a private institution that its director, Jorge Glusberg, had created in 1969. The CAYC opened up a new panorama in the Buenos Aires art scene. Initially, the center fomented the tie between art and technology. Later, though, its operation was twofold as it focused on the Latin American context within the larger poetics of conceptualism while also pursuing the internationalization of local art. The intensive dialogue between Walter Zanini and Jorge Glusberg revolved around sharing exhibitions, organizing visits from international artists and intellectuals, developing proposals for seminars and conferences and facilitating invitations to them. Mostly, though, they faced the same challenge: directing institutions in “temps difficiles”, as Zanini put it in one of his letters to Glusberg.4 The documentation5 in the MAC USP archive indicates that the exchange between the two men began in 1972. In one of his first letters, Glusberg tells Zanini about the Joseph Kosuth and Dennis Oppenheim exhibitions held at the CAYC, and invites Zanini to house some of the exhibitions organized by the CAYC at the São Paulo museum (Poesía Concreta, Arte de Sistemas en la Argentina, Grabados



Checoeslovacos, and Fotografía Tridimensional Polaca).6 In response, Zanini writes to Glusberg about the exhibitions he had recommended: “I think that might be a springboard for an exchange between the institutions. [...] In the hope that you will be open to the problem of Latin American culture, I support your idea and eagerly await your reply”.7 In later communications,8 Glusberg sent Zanini a copy of the catalogue to Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano and negotiated its exhibition at the museum. That show—the first of the Grupo de los trece—was important insofar as it set the political and ideological tone that would be the group artistic modus operandi. Heliographic paper became a privileged support for the exhibition and circulation of works. On heliography, Glusberg wrote, “this affordable and easy-to-reproduce system is not the product of chance, but the result of our inability to compete with technological methods that require economic means not yet at our disposal”.9 Regarding that new communications channel, artists aware of their national contexts expressed an understanding of art as ideological form, an understanding voiced in the statement “there is no art specific to Latin American countries, but rather a unique problematic due to [the region’s] revolutionary situation”.10 On the options for sending Hacia un perfil... to the MAC USP, Glusberg wrote in one of his letters:

Dear Zanini, Aracy Amaral has visited Buenos Aires and I had the opportunity to speak with her. I understand the problems you might have with “some of the works in the Perfil latino-americano show” [...] We would very much like to hear your view on holding a show in your museum that would leave out the works that might compromise you. I believe—as does Aracy—that the only place we could hold an important show of Argentine artists at this time is in your museum.11

In his reply, Zanini stated, “Things are by no means easy here, as you know. We have not, in any case, been museu tumulus. [...] Regarding the show Perfil, as long as it is not reduced to nothing at all, you can send it over”.12

This passage attests to some of the institutional obstacles that arose in negotiating exhibitions, particularly those that attempted to connect art and politics. The political situation, which was marked by repression and censorship on a daily level, sought to deactivate any and all artistic experience that might be radical. Luis Pazos’s (1940) Proyecto de monumento al prisionero político desaparecido [Project for a Monument to the Disappeared Political Prisoner] —one of the heliographic works in Hacia un perfil...—attests to the confrontational nature of the artists’ proposals. Similarly, his five propositions for a Latin American art, a text published in the exhibition catalogue, included “turning art into consciousness raising”. Both works indicate the political radicalization of art. Significantly, the first of those two works by Pazos was a tragic foretelling of the fate of thousands of civilians disappeared during the dictatorships that would ensue in Latin America. While Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano was never exhibited at the MAC USP, it did usher in a series of agreements geared to bringing a CAYC show to that institution. That effort can be seen as part of Glusberg’s broader attempt to internationalize Argentine art through, among other things, touring shows. The “yellow press releases” that the CAYC used to communicate its activities indicate that the center exported a number of shows to the United States and Europe.13 Glusberg’s correspondence with Zanini evidences that he was interested in including Brazil in the fold of his internationalization project.

The CAYC at the MAC USP In 1974, Horacio Zabala (1943), Juan Carlos Romero (1931-2017), and Luis Pazos—members of the Grupo de los trece—participated in the international show Prospectiva 74 held at the MAC USP.14 Organized by Spanish artist Julio Plaza and Walter Zanini, the exhibition formed part of a broad international communication network motored by mail art. According to Zanini, mail art, which “emerged of the international need for alternative structures”,15 became, starting in the seventies, a crucial poetics for artists from many different parts of the world.



There was a hunger among artists to go beyond the unique work of art by means of connections between groups of artists, cooperatives, and other media that operated outside the logic of the market. Much of this production was not geared to circulation in museums or galleries—institutionalized spaces—which makes the role of the MAC USP as place of resistance and support for practices of this sort particularly significant. The museum acted as a receptacle, taking in proposals conceived collectively in order to decentralize channels of distribution and circulation. Thanks to its far-reaching exhibition program, the museum was able to capture and connect practices not sanctioned by institutional spaces. The poems, maps, publications, xeroxes, drawings, 16mm and Super 8 films by almost one hundred and fifty artists were sent to the show from a number of countries. The large number of participants was made possible by the idea, formulated by the organizers, that each artist invite another person to participate in the event. Prospectiva 74 also encompassed screenings of films, including one produced by Jorge Glusberg and his Ediciones del Tercer Mundo cooperative,16 and slides. The works sent to the show by the three Argentine artists represented, in all cases, changes in the course of production previously exhibited at the CAYC. Notwithstanding, their proposals for the MAC USP show provided an apt summary of the center’s critical discourse which was based on the category of “systems art”, that is, “art as idea, political art, ecological art, project-driven art, or cybernetic art”.17 That concept is fundamental to understanding the practices developed in the context of the CAYC. It was at the core of a more general problematic operative in art produced in Latin American countries during the period. María José Herrera (2013) asserts that in the early seventies the CAYC not only organized exhibitions and gatherings of intellectuals, but also formed the collective El Grupo de los trece, which proposed works of “systems art”, works that addressed “[physical] space and social space”.18 The systems art category was in keeping with other conceptual categories on the rise during the period, categories with which artists interrogated the nature of the art object,

focusing less on the object itself than on the process or the idea. The cornerstone of European and North American conceptual art was research into the nature of the object on the basis of the “affirmation that art consists simply of the artist’s conception of it and that art has no meaning beyond itself”.19 Conceptualism in Latin America, on the other hand, operated according to a different politics of visuality, one more in keeping with the region’s status on the periphery and with its lived social dynamic. Called “ideological conceptualism”20 by some, this regional version gave the tautological and self-referential proposals exported from hegemonic centers a new logic. A conceptual inversion, it can be argued, activated the role of the artist in political and ideological structures. In the catalogue to Arte de Sistemas II, Glusberg wrote:

What matters is how the ideological conceptualism proposed by Argentine artists opens up a new form, one that emerges as a consequence of a regional problematic while making use of a methodology common to different contexts. That is the value of this new advance in Argentine art.21

Argentine “systems art” was informed by Marxist theories of ideology and politics—indeed, that was its distinctive trait. The CAYC outlined a conceptual agenda and inserted it in the institution’s international outreach policy, which revolved around supporting the artists in the Grupo de los trece and their exhibitions which, in turn, were organized around the idea of “systems art”. (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1. Detail of the exhibition catalogue Década de 70, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, 1976. Collection Biblioteca Lourival Gomes Machado, São Paulo.



Década de 70 opened in early 1976 in the MAC USP’s building. The show, conceived by Jorge Glusberg, was an exhibition of works on heliographic paper by over one hundred artists from Latin America, Europe, and the United States. The event was an extension of the conceptual agenda advocated by CAYC’s director; its theoretical orientation was in keeping with earlier shows. In the catalogue, Zanini wrote:

[The exhibition] is mostly geared to a critical vision of society [...] It is a display of a range of ideas and work methods that specify the participant’s behavior without the burden of traditional aesthetics. Década de 70 evidences the conviction of a language that counters alienation.22

The aim of the selection of works was not, according to Glusberg, in keeping with the interests of “official art”; it was by no means an attempt to please or to satisfy the demands of the “commercial terrain.” What it attempted to do, rather, was propose new aesthetic experiences. One of the ways to question privileged sectors was to democratize access to culture by means of new channels to circulate and distribute works. (Fig. 2)

In a world where objects of common interest are privatized, the institutionalized artwork is also merchandise. [...] It is for that reason –an economic reason– [...] that heliographic paper is used to produce the works that make up Década del 70.23

The exhibition’s discourse attempted to take distance from the notion that the visual arts are autonomous and from the idea of individual creation, focusing instead on what conditions an artist’s subjective creation. By engaging ideology as factor constituent of any artistic or cultural expression, the artist would be able to identify with a tendency, determining his or her production on the basis of a social repertoire. That was the premise of the Grupo de los Trece at exhibitions, as well as an example of contemporary artistic practices. All of the members of the Grupo de los trece participated in the show at the MAC USP, as did some one hundred other artists from Brazil and abroad. While the individual poetics of each member of the group varied, they did coincide, Glusberg argues, to form a coherent whole with “a single constructive rhetoric, that is, a common

problematic”, based on constituent systems activated by the political and social conditions of their production.24 In all cases, the artist is the one who emits local codes that, in turn, condition him or her. And that cycle is what generates a political artistic discourse. “As a group formed in the cosmopolitan ambivalence of conceptual art, what holds it together is something that is extrapolated from the visual or formalist field”.25

Fig. 2. Partial view of the exhibition Década de 70, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, 1976. Photo: Gerson Zanini, 1976. Collection Arquivo do MAC USP, São Paulo. In Diagrama por analogía [Diagram by Analogy], Víctor Grippo (1939-2002) represented his design for a scientific experiment based on the construction of an electrical system that would extract energy from dozens of potatoes. An essential element in Grippo’s work and a foodstuff native to the Americas, the potato symbolized, in the experiment, a storehouse of energy. By means of appropriation and technical disarray, Horacio Zabala created new territories and critical associations—the tactic underlying his cartographies and prison designs. In Las deformaciones son proporcionales a las tensiones [Deformations are Proportional to Tensions], Zabala created disturbances in standard geographic representations, suggesting a cartographic field in a constant state of political dispute. Luis Pazos’s Ascensión de las masas [Rise of the Masses], meanwhile, is based on the shift from action art to attitude-art, terms he coined to name a series of proposals that attempted to activate viewer participation, to produce a concrete tie between art and life, and to privilege collective work over individual production. Juan Carlos Romero



exhibited Destrucción y exaltación del cuerpo humano [Destruction and Exaltation of the Human Body], an extension of his Violencia series. Years before, Romero had done extensive research into the term violence, studying it in a range of contexts, from news stories to scientific articles. (Fig. 3)

Fig. 3. Juan Carlos Romero, Destruição e exaltação do corpo humano, Heliography on Paper, 1972/74, reproduced in the exhibition catalogue Década del 70, Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte, México, 1977. These conceptual proposals looked to art as an instrument to incite change in the political and cultural system in a context increasingly riddled with conflict. They were a strategy; they demanded that art provide something more than immediate sensory gratification and pleasure, that it spur reflection on the art circuit and its sociopolitical context.26 In that, the works in the show were in keeping with the ideas central to the CAYC. Conclusion While the two institutions analyzed here are widely recognized in their respective countries, little is known about the exchanges between them. I have briefly attempted to study some of the results of those exchanges, specifically around the exhibition of Década de 70 at the MAC USP. I have addressed the exhibition methodology (the use of heliographic paper) and tactics to internationalize Argentine art under the category “systems art” Some artists close to the CAYC had participated in earlier events at the MAC, such as the exhibition Prospectiva 74. For that network of exchanges to be completed, though, a show conceived by Glusberg held in Brazil was necessary. In closing, it is important to point out that Década

de 70 was significant in the Brazilian context because the culmination of an exchange that had begun years earlier and—mostly—because it filled a gap in the CAYC’s Latin American agenda. Translation: Jane Brodie N0tes

1 Created by Jorge Glusberg in 1971, the members of the group were artists Jacques Bedel, Horacio Zabala, Juan Carlos Romero, Luis Pazos, Luis Fernando Benedit, Carlos Ginzburg, Gregorio Dujovny, Alfredo Portillos, Victor Grippo, Jorge González Mir, Vicente Marotta, Julio Teich, and Glusberg himself. 2 Term used by Walter Zanini in the catalogue to Prospectiva 74 in reference to new experimental languages as opposed to the traditional categories of painting and sculpture. At the end of his text, Zanini explains that the works produced by means of multimedia processes in the show had been sent to the museum by post. The concept of new media would be the cornerstone of the exhibitions mentioned, including Década de 70. ZANINI, Walter. Prospectiva 74. (exhibition catalogue) São Paulo: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de la Universidad de São Paulo MAC USP, 1974. 3 Cristina Freire, Walter Zanini: escrituras críticas, São Paulo, Annablume - Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, 2013, p. 28. 4 FMACUSP 0046-003. 09-25-1973. 5 The documents in the archive analyzed consist of correspondence between Zanini and Glusberg (1972 to 1978): “Gacetillas amarillas”, or bulletins published by both institutions; and photographs of exhibitions at the MAC USP during the period covered by this essay. 6 FMACUSP 0046-003. 03-16-1972. 7 FMACUSP 0046-003. 03-28-1972. 8 FMACUSP 0046-003. 11-21-1972. 9 Idem. 10 Idem. 11 FMACUSP 0046-003. 12-12-1973. 12 FMACUSP 0046-003. 02-04-1974. 13 From Figuration to Systems Art (Camden Arts Centre, London, 1971); Hacia un perfil del arte latino-americano (II Bienal de Coltejer, Medellín; Encuentros de Pamplona, Spain, 1972); Art and Cybernetics (University of Minnesota, 1973); Art Systems in Latinamerica (Internationaal Cultureel Centrum, Antwerp; Palais de Beaux Arts, Brussels; Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 1974. And at Espace Cardim, Paris, 1975). Mariana Marchesi, Teresa Riccardi, MNBA-CAYC, 1969-1983: dos alternativas institucionales en la promoción del arte argentino, in María Isabel Baldasarre, Silvia Dolinko (org.), Travesías de la Imagen. Historias de las artes



visuales en la Argentina, Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero, 2012, pp. 596-598. 14 Integração de linguagens poéticas experimentais com investigações sociais e econômicas, a set of ten cartographies on which Horacio Zabala had intervened; photographic register of Luis Pazos’s performance A cidade possuída pelos demônios; and Juan Carlos Romero’s Situações de Violência - Poema da negação sent for Prospectiva 74. All three works were brought into the MAC USP collection in 1975. 15 Original version of the article “El arte postal em busca de una nueva comunicación internacional”, published in O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper in 1977, in Cristina Freire, op. cit. 16 Starting in 1973, the CAYC explored the field of experimental film by means of the Cooperativa Ediciones del Tercer Mundo, whose members were Danilo Galasse, Pedro Roth, and Glusberg himself. Their project encompassed the production of films and videos and the formation of a video library of works by artists from a number of countries in Latin America. 17 Indeed, Arte de Sistemas I was the name of the emblematic exhibition organized by Glusberg in 1971. The show featured hundreds of artists from Argentina and abroad. Like many international tendencies in art such as conceptualism, arte povera, and land art, the term –in the words of the CAYC’s director–referred to “processes rather than to the final product of ‘good art’”, Jorge Glusberg, Arte de Sistemas [cat. exp.], Museu de Arte Moderna, 1971. 18 María José Herrera, Arte de Sistemas: el CAYC y el proyecto de un nuevo arte regional. 1969 – 1977 [cat. exp.], Buenos Aires, Fundación OSDE, 2013, p. 13. 19 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Circuito de heliografias: arte conceitual e política na América Latina”, in Revista do Programa de Pós-graduação em Artes Visuais, EBA, UFRJ, a. 7, n° 8, p. 155. 20 In a footnote, Spanish writer Simón Marchán Fiz associates the term ideological conceptualism with Latin American conceptualism, specifically with the CAYC’s Grupo de los Trece. Simón Marchán Fiz, Del arte objetual al arte de concepto (1960-1974). Epílogo sobre la sensibilidade “postmoderna”. Antología de escritos y manifestos, Madrid, Ediciones Aka, p. 269, 1986. 21 Jorge Glusberg, Arte de Sistemas II - CAYC al aire libre. Arte e Ideologia [cat. exp], Buenos Aires, CAYC, 1972. 22 Walter Zanini, Década de 70, op. cit. 23 Jorge Glusberg, Década del 70 [cat. exp], Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes, 1977. 24 Idem. 25 Frederico Morais, Artes plásticas na América Latina: do transe ao transitório, Rio de Janeiro, Editora Civilização Brasileira, 1979, p. 57. 26 Ligia Canongia, O legado dos anos 60 e 70, Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Zahar Ed., 2005, p. 56.

How to correctly cite this article Mader Paladino, Luiza; “Exhibition Trajectories: the Grupo de los Trece at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo”. In caiana. Revista de Historia del Arte y Cultura Visual del Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte (CAIA). No 11 | 2nd semester 2017. Pp 129-134 URL: http://caiana.caia.org.ar/template/caiana.php?pag=articles/article_2.php&obj=292&vol=11 Reception: November 22, 2017 Acceptance: November 27, 2017

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