The elephant in the room at Espacio de Arte-Fundación OSDE this past summer was diminutive, almost invisible: a photocopy of a telegram, nestled in a vitrine filled with ephemera from the 1977 São Paulo Bienal. The Buenos Aires–based Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC), directed by founder Jorge Glusberg, won the Bienal’s top honor, the Gran Premio Itamaraty, that year with its “Group of Thirteen” Conceptual artists, who first organized in 1971 and repeatedly showed together during the first half of that decade. The telegram offers “most hearty congratulations” on the prize, which “reiterates once more Argentine art’s high level and the rich variety of its diverse aesthetic proposals.” The telegram bears the name of Jorge Rafael Videla, then president of Argentina and an architect of the military dictatorship that killed some thirty thousand people and imprisoned and tortured thousands more between 1976 and 1983. One suspects Videla never actually saw the work on display in the prize winning exhibition, “Signos en ecosistemas artificiales” (Signs in Artificial Ecosystems), almost all of which makes thinly veiled reference to the ongoing state terror: hundreds of potatoes hooked up to electrodes in Víctor Grippo’s Analogía I, 2a versión, 1977, for instance, or two-dimensional blackbirds in real cages in Jorge González Mir’s Factor interespecífico, 1977.

Perhaps because of the discomfiting fact that it remained open throughout the seven-year dictatorship, CAYC is only now receiving full art-historical consideration—a welcome development, given that, as a venue and promoter of critical developments in Argentinean art, the institution also existed for six years before the coup and remained in operation until the early 1990s. In “Arte de Sistemas: El CAYC y el proyecto de un nuevo arte regional, 1969–1977” (Systems Art: CAYC and the Project of a New Regional Art), curators María José Herrera and Mariana Marchesi framed their overview of the center’s first decade through “systems art,” an umbrella term that Glusberg employed in a series of exhibitions involving both local figures and international ones (Mel Bochner, Lucy Lippard, Sol LeWitt, and many others). Drawing on Jasia Reichardt’s and Jack Burnham’s exhibitions and writings on art and cybernetics, Glusberg endorsed treating heterogeneous natural, social, and political phenomena as “systems” to be analyzed. On view at Fundación OSDE, works by artists both within and tangential to the center attest to this shared tendency: among many others, Luis Benedit’s Mini-Biotrón, 1970, one of a series of Plexiglas habitats that sustained living ecosystems; Osvaldo Romberg’s El paisaje como idea (Landscape as Idea) lithographs, 1970, one of his first “typologies” for classifying different pictorial genres and elements; and Diario (Newspaper), 1972, by Mirtha Dermisache (one of CAYC’s few women artists), an illegible “newspaper” that retains a broadsheet’s visual form without any actual content. Yet this emphasis on systems did not preclude Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s Contempla y vota, 1971, a locked ballot box wryly commenting upon political, and perhaps art-institutional, corruption, or Horacio Zabala’s paper architectures ca. 1972, which feature lone figures in protective yet imprisoning underground structures—here one might think of CAYC itself, which had two floors of futuristic galleries below street level.

Ironically, by the time of its great success in São Paulo, the Group of Thirteen had already fractured, and a number of CAYC’s more openly political artists, Zabala and Juan Carlos Romero among them, had already fled the country. As suggested by the curators’ placement of “Signos en ecosistemas artificiales” with works from the 1972 exhibition “Arte e ideología. CAYC al aire libre” (Art and Ideology. CAYC Outdoors) in contiguous galleries, there are many different versions and visions of this institution. “CAYC al aire libre” was the open-air component of a massive exhibition that ostensibly analyzed political ideology through the “systems” frame; it was bulldozed by the government shortly after its opening. This rare appearance of local artists in public space yielded outraged protest works, such as Luis Pazos’s Monumento al prisionero político desaparecido (Monument to the Disappeared Political Prisoner), 1972, and inklings of communitarian art—Grippo, Jorge Gamarra, and A. Rossi’s functioning traditional bread oven now looks, in the extant photographs, positively utopian.

—Daniel Quiles