Item #54982 [LATIN AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE – PERFORMANCE ART – POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES] Latin American week in London: November 28th-December 6th, 1974 at the I.C.A., Institute of Contemporary Arts. CAyC. Center of Art and Communication.

CAyC. Center of Art and Communication.

[LATIN AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE – PERFORMANCE ART – POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES] Latin American week in London: November 28th-December 6th, 1974 at the I.C.A., Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Buenos Aires: CAyC, June 28, 1974. Octavo (21.5 × 15.8 cm). Original staple-stitched wrappers with photomontage; [16] pp. with numerous reproductions of artworks and photographic pictures of performances, as well as theater and dance pieces. Very good. Item #54982

Catalog for the exhibition “Latin American week in London”, which gave an overview of the current projects from the region that emerged as a result of the CAyC and pursued the “Arte de sistemas” approach. CAyC addressed an extraordinarily broad spectrum of contemporary positions and genres of contemporary art at the time (different systems). These included artists from Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, Concrete Art and Poetry, Op Art, Land Art, Fluxus, Mail Art, Cybernetic Art, Installation Art, Process Art, etc. System aesthetics" endeavored to unite the widest possible spectrum. "Arte de Sistemas" was the attempt to realize and depict an understanding of interacting systems in a context. The systems theorist and artist Jack Burnham, whose texts in the magazine "Artforum" played a decisive role in shaping the concept of systems aesthetics, had a formative theoretical influence on this. One of his theories was that art functions as a kind of "information processing device" that mediates between natural phenomena and cultural phenomena. (Cf. entry for the CAyC Newsletter 1971 / GT-54 on the page "CAYC Files", htt ps://ic aa.mfah .o rg)

Thus, the catalog presents a different project on each double-page spread. One example is the Grupo de Teatro del Encuentro, a theater group that was part of the CAyC's activities in 1973-74. The Argentinean theater director and playwright Alejo Piovano was its leader. The performance artists were influenced by political and experimental theater. In contrast to classical, bourgeois theater, the actors were interested in a ritual quality. Accordingly, the catalog does not speak of a play, but of a “ceremony” as a “presentation of myth”. (Cf. Verónica Tejeiro entry for the CAyC Newsletter 1974 / GT-469 on the page “CAYC Files”, https://icaa.mfah.org) Furthermore, the catalog presents, for example, a “Round Table” on “Art and culture in the countries if the Third World”, “Phono-Visual Performance”, Film, experimental theater, and video art.