Within Latin American coordinates, the neo-avant-garde movements of the 1970s transformed body and language into fields of experimentation, aiming to reshape everyday life and, consequently, the space in which it unfolded: the city. The appearance of the body through performance, experiments with language, and the disruptions and reconfigurations of public space codes became tactics that, in their aesthetic-political depth, gradually overflowed the boundaries between art and life. Diving into an archive with these questions in mind immerses us in the spectral aura that images carry within themselves. However, this essay does not seek to reveal ghosts. Instead, it will follow their trail, transforming their elusive nature into a method for tracing “the intimate and secret relations of things, the correspondences, the analogies” across various materials. 1  This journey leads us to an archive that, as we shall see, also possesses a slippery nature. (Though isn’t that true of every archive?)

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) recently restored a series of films produced by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) in Buenos Aires during the 1970s. These films reflect the center’s institutional goals through a series of editorial choices and discursive strategies. At the same time, amid a rather didactic and propagandistic framework, these materials also reveal certain moments of the artistic practices that used this institution as a platform for work and exhibition; certain traits in their poetics of the body and language, which emerge through the filmic materials; and certain gestures in their relationship with space, all captured by the very nature of moving images.

CAYC Enterprises 2 

The CAYC was founded by Jorge Glusberg in late 1968. In a very tight synthesis, we could say its foundation rested on three pillars: an interdisciplinary and experimental approach; an internationalist drive rooted in the premise of the existence of a distinct Latin American art, promoted through network-building and strategic outreach; and the proto-curatorial role of its director, reflected, among other actions, in the creation of the artistic collective Grupo de los Trece in 1971 and the coining of the concept of Systems art, among other initiatives. 3  This concept of Systems art had a strategic scope, encompassing various significant forms: technological art, Conceptual art, politically engaged art, and art focused on social issues. 4  The poetics of Systems art—beyond its successive shifts—were built around the importance attributed to language, social context (with a geopolitical focus on Latin America), theories of communication (influenced by the radical experiences of the previous decade), and the privileging of the creative process over artworks as mere objects. One of the videos in the collection hosted by ISLAA further develops the concept of Systems art. Accompanied by a narrator who explains its characteristics, production conditions, and main structure, the images present a sample of works intended to represent the concept. I use the word “sample” (as well as terms like “explanation” and “representation”) because the video piece alludes to Systems art as a corpus, showcasing works that would belong to its catalogue as “examples,” where materiality, specific media, and poetic singularities are largely diminished. In the same vein, the camera moves through photographs of the works and posters announcing the center’ activities, without making any distinctions between them.

The first thing to note is that, although the films produced by the CAYC are part of a technological art project aimed at utilizing new media, they do not constitute works of art nor do they engage in experimentation with the audiovisual medium. Instead, as Benjamin Murphy points out in an insightful essay, these videos serve as didactic materials for art criticism developed in video format. Murphy states: “This unique genre of the audiovisual essay occupies a large proportion of the film and video output generated by the CAYC, in many ways eclipsing the experiments that artists produced using the institution’s audiovisual equipment … In other words, if audiovisual technology had functioned at the CAYC as an impetus for artistic exploration, what the genre of the audiovisual essay demonstrates is that, from the very start, this technology had also figured as an institutional instrument for art’s mediation.” 5 

That being said, beneath or alongside the institutional character of this collection, within its materials lies a rich repertoire of shared singularities, related to the poetics of the body and language in their interplay with space, often subtly present or in the background. This is why I referred to “gestures” or “traits” above. Thus, in addition to embracing the spectral nature of images to develop a method for engaging with them, this collection reminds us that every archive is, in itself, a construction, requiring us to work with fragments, cuts, and edits. Moreover: to engage with archives, and to fairly acknowledge their nature (now more akin to a haunted house than merely a ghost), it is advisable to enter through the back door, the service entrance, or the fire escape.

Semiotic Magicians

Perhaps we could start with a detail: in the videos produced by CAYC, the artists linked to the center and its director are featured time and time again. We see Luis Benedit walking around Venice during his participation in the 1970 Biennale, showcasing the designs of the Biotrón, working on its construction, and discussing the project (figs. 1 and 2) (we imagine these discussions, as the recording lacks ambient sound and features a first-person voice-over we assume belongs to the artist.) In another film, Benedit appears to be in conversation with Glusberg—or maybe he is pretending to converse, as we hear only a voice-over paired with silent images—while they walk through the CAYC building, where the works Fitotrón (1972) and Laberinto para ratones blancos (Labyrinth for White Mice, 1970) are displayed (fig. 3). In the film The Group of the Thirteen at Work, produced by Ediciones Tercer Mundo 6 for the Berlin Experimental Art Workshop, 7  Mercedes Esteves walks through her installation Ojo de señuelo (Decoy Eye, 1973) (fig. 4), Alfredo Portillos lights the candles for one of his rituals, while Mirtha Dermisache flips through printed newspapers featuring her signature calligraphies (fig. 5). What we mean is that this archive—particularly in those materials resembling newsreels or documentaries—does not focus solely on “artworks.” It also dedicates time to the artists themselves, capturing their faces, movements, gestures, activities, and, to a lesser extent, their voices.

In any case, within these audiovisual essays, there are moments when the artists’ bodies become artistic materials—serving as both themes and supports for the artworks. We are referring to a series of video performances and photo documentation in which the performative nature of the bodies is accentuated by the presence of a video camera. Brazilian artist Angelo de Aquino covering his eyes with forks and pulling at the corners of his wide-open mouth (fig. 6); a group of people forming an arch and arrow for the camera, as part of Luis Pazos’s Transformaciones de masas en vivo (Live Mass Transformations, 1973); a man running without moving, always in the same place, in Margarita Paksa’s video performance Tiempo de descuento—cuenta regresiva—la hora cero (Extra Time-Countdown-Zero Hour, 1978) (fig. 7); 8  teenagers’ licking popsicles, from which toy soldiers emerge, while they recite (rhythmically, tirelessly) the Ave Maria, and the popsicles melt on their lips, as seen in Chilean artist Gloria Camiruaga’s video performance Popsicles (1982–84) (fig. 8). These bodily gestures puncture the objects’ functionality (Camiruaga), disrupt their conventional uses and the very relationship between object and body (Aquino), or between body and signs (Pazos), or between body, time, and movement (Paksa).

Toward the end of the 1980s, Glusberg published a book on performance. 9 . In this work, he explores the semiotic qualities of the body as a signifying material, considering it an “object of study within disciplines such as gesture theory, bodily kinetics, and proxemics.” By emphasizing its ability to engage in rhetorical operations on signs and meanings, Glusberg underscores the semiological value of ritual expressions enacted within the performative scene. The performer, he argues, is a semiotic magician—someone who “operates transitions between countless moving codes” that can be “altered, transformed, and recuperated”—exploring discourses on the body through various gestural programs: the magical, the mystical, the ludic, and the everyday. 10  But clearly, structuralism—a prominent trend of the time—influences the poetics of some of the artworks, not just the discourses surrounding them. This is evident in the aforementioned Ojo de señuelo (Esteves), which explores the relationship between mask and identity through dialectic dualities, reflecting a clear influence of Saussurean linguistics. The CAYC’s booklet for this installation reads: “To mask / to unmask, to veil / to unveil, hollow / convex: these are adjectives of the signifying matrix (mask), which is thought as a screen where the subject of representation lies outside, and the object, within the field of the visible, is the restructuring gaze for every symbolic possibility.” 11 

The structuralist perspective is also evident in how the performers’ bodies are used, in some pieces, as systems that can be codified and decoded. An example of this is Kidnappening (1973), the opera-cantata-happening that Marta Minujín presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The event’s structure, which culminates in the voluntary “kidnapping” of some participants, begins with over forty performers executing a choreography. This choreography is based on an alphabet of movements created by the artist, drawing from her studies of Greek theater and Picasso’s Cubist paintings. 12  The film Latin American Artists (a kind of “silent catalogue” of artists) opens with the footage of a television displaying images of Minujín’s face as she looks into the camera, along with what could be interpreted as fragments of that performance (still within the television). This impression is conveyed through the performers’ makeup, which follows Picasso’s Cubist lines, and their body postures, which recreate Minujín’s movement alphabet. 13  Amid the shadows and lights of the footage (a very blurry fragment, lasting only a few seconds, and like the rest of the film, completely silent), we see bodies forming systems of signs through movements that repeat and slow down. This choreographic mass glides through sequences that are unknown to us yet mesmerizing (fig. 9).

Todo es de color (Everything Is Colorful, 1984) is a video by Chilean artist Juan Forch, included in a compilation of works by Chilean and Argentine artists produced by CAYC on Betamax. (This compilation also features works by Paksa and Camiruaga previously mentioned). Amid a series of experiments with audiovisual language, set to the repeating refrain of the flamenco song “Todo es de color,” we see a man’s face as he articulates vowels in alphabetical order, with the corresponding letters appearing successively on the screen. It is the image of a body performing the code of language, though we cannot hear its sound. At one point, the song's lyrics say: “De lo que pasa en el mundo / por Dios que no entiendo na / El cardo siempre gritando y la flor siempre callá / Que grite la flor y que se calle el cardo.” 14  Over the song, we hear someone’s breathing growing progressively louder until it becomes a scream. Vowels, according to Gabriela Milone’s reading of Michel de Certeau, are the “index of a voice.” 15  In this image, which slips between the visual articulation of an inaudible letter (silent vowels), art pierces small stings into the instrumental skin of language (fig. 10).

Mirtha Dermisache is another artist associated with the CAYC who follows a similar path, considering that she has made language the central element of her work. Filmed stills of her “unreadable writings,” as Fernando Davis has called them, illustrate the concept of Systems art in the video dedicated to this theme by Glusberg, alongside works by other artists. I use the term “illustrate” because, as previously mentioned, that is the role of images in this video. However, there is also a kind of slippage between two registers in Dermisache’s works that suggests a key point. In the aforementioned video, the camera films photos of her writing experiments as if they were details of a painting—self-sufficient, autonomous. But in the film The Group of the Thirteen at Work, when we see the hands holding the pages and flipping through them before pausing at a certain point, the importance of the body in these works becomes evident. Davis states: “Her texts circulated among different media and editorial artifacts.… Dermisache’s writings were meant to be held in the hands; they want to be read. In this sense, the artist considered the book the privileged medium for their presentation and circulation.... She insisted, in contrast to the idea of a single artwork, that they be published. 16 

Often, we tend to understand corporeality—as Marie Bardet notes in the field of dance—as a way of “incorporating” meanings. But this creates a relationship of exteriority between the alleged “immateriality” of language and the “materiality” of the body, which is often assumed to be passive and pre-discursive. However, from a perspective more aligned with attention to gestures and with the relational nature of practices, the rigid dualities of structuralism begin to weaken. “It is about conceptualizing … corporeality in relational rather than substantial or merely organic terms; a corporeality that is simultaneously active and passive, or that transcends these categories; a corporeality that exists between gestures rather than being confined to the body. This perspective bridges the opposition between the material and immaterial, opening up the possibility of establishing a connection between artistic and social practices.” 17  Magic itself—if we take Glusberg’s thesis of the performer as a semiotic magician and give it a twist—is a bodily practice in which objects, signs, sensory perceptions, language, and sensorimotor movements intertwine in a continuous, nonhierarchical relationship. Just consider the friction between hands and cards, the colors and shapes that shimmer on them, the narrative skills of the conjurers—marked by pauses and crescendos—or the rhythm of the illusionists’ transitions, at times rapid and at other times almost static.

City and Action Art

According to Rodrigo Alonso, CAYC organized three events in the early 1970s that can be labeled as action art: “Argentina Inter-medios (Teatro Ópera, 1969), a show that, according to its organizer, aimed to create events highlighting the relationship between humans and the physical and social spaces that surround them; and two urban interventions: Escultura, follaje y ruidos (1970) in Plaza Rubén Darío, and CAYC al aire libre” (1972) in Plaza Roberto Arlt.” 18  This short list serves to illustrate the productive connections between action art and public space, as well as CAYC’s growing interest in fostering such endeavors, transitioning from intermedia investigations to explorations of street spaces. Ediciones Tercer Mundo produced a 16mm documentary about the last of these events, now legendary, which was ultimately shut down by the Municipality of Buenos Aires, leading to the dismantling and confiscation of the artworks. The film opens with a voice-over that says: “I conceived the idea of organizing this type of exhibition not as an entrepreneur putting together an event, but because I no longer believe in theory-based critics.” This is clearly Glusberg, whom we also see walking through Plaza Roberto Arlt with his iconic pipe. At this moment, the first-person testimony is overshadowed by another voice-over, this time in English, which will guide the narration for almost the entirety of the rest of the documentary. The camera captures the works, performances, and interventions in situ, albeit without direct references. We see Jorge Romero’s helium balloon being inflated, the installation process of Horacio Zabala’s 300 metros de cinta negra para enlutar una plaza pública (300 Meters of Black Ribbon to Mourn a Public Square), and the moment when the artists dig an existing hole for La realidad subterránea (The Underground Reality), created by Leonetti, Pazos, Roux, and Duarte Laferrière. The film also shows children playing, people walking, and Glusberg and some artists being interviewed. Notably, we only hear fragments of these dialogues—we hear words like “political consciousness,” “structures,” and “intention”—as they are continuously drowned out by the English voice-over. This voice-over attempts to contextualize the action within CAYC’s history, elaborating on its main ideas and intentions, political implications, and the subsequent closure of the event, along with the legal proceedings that Glusberg faced when he was accused of “incitement to crime.” The film ends with photographs of the police intervention in the park. 19  Herrera notes: “The tumultuous political situation in Argentina and Latin America, along with the potential for art to foster social change, was debated in dialogues held in the open-air public space” (figs. 11–15). 20 

If there is a foundational moment in the genealogy of Latin American action art, it is Alberto Greco’s Vivo dito, which took place in the streets of various cities around the world, with its manifesto dating back to 1963. When Greco declared people, cars, shoes, or floor tiles as artworks and signed them as his own, he did so in a continuum, without establishing hierarchical distinctions between them. It was simply the signal of writing his name with chalk (“merely gestures,” continuing with Bardet). When thinking with gestures, relationally, other ways of doing, inscribing, and inhabiting are revealed. So: body, language, and the city. Dislocamiento y reubicación de monumentos (Dislocation and Relocation of Monuments, 1972) is a project by Leandro Katz in which these vectors are intertwined. The film Latin American Artists includes documentation of this project, featuring sketches, maps, plans, and photographs of actions performed in urban spaces. The CAYC booklet announcing the project states: “I proposed the likelihood that, at twenty-one points on the planet, there will be accumulations of human language that take on a vertical architectural form … and which will be referred to as THE 21 COLUMNS OF LANGUAGE.” 21  Katz conceived these columns through typewritten lists of words 22  or through actions performed around monuments, such as the Buenos Aires Obelisk, where the artist stood holding a sign that read “For Sale.” He thus created a linguistic situation—an immaterial architecture, cartographically projected as mere chance or as a shift toward action. Wittgenstein once imagined language, precisely, as a city—a relational tangle of different things. Relationships of coexistence, connections, twists, cuts, and accumulations.

Several works from this period challenged the conventional uses of public space, transforming the city into a theater of operations that inverted utilitarian logics. This was achieved by deprogramming the productive uses of space, sometimes employing tactics reminiscent of situationist détournements. In the aforementioned film, we see documentation of another performative action: a series of photos of sketches and instructions for “blocking the entry to public buildings,” a project by Chilean artist, visual poet, and editor Guillermo Deisler (fig. 16). His instructions outlined how to disrupt the usual entrances to these spaces, replacing them with windows. This environmental gesture aimed to re-signify not only art but also everyday life. Yet Deisler’s instructions concluded with a cautionary note about the relationship between action and impact: “Do not forget: to provoke a disturbance is not to alter reality.”

A few minutes earlier in the film, posters by artist Lea Lublin appear, displaying the phrase “Art will be life,” suggestively flanked on one side by the shadow of a man smoking a pipe (fig. 17). The contours of the art institution—represented by Glusberg’s silhouette, as the shadow is unmistakably his—intertwine in the film with the echoes of Rrose Sélavy (Art will be life for Lublin/ Eros is life for Duchamp) that emanates from this work. In Duchamp’s invention, the linguistic inscription on the ghostly body implied by the pseudonym dissolved dichotomies—particularly those between the feminine and the masculine. For Lublin, the equation became “Life/Language = Art.” Between the traces of Duchamp and the Latin American imagination, it became increasingly clear that the challenge posed by these artistic practices was no longer about renewing specific aesthetic styles or genres. Rather, the focus shifted toward redefining the very conception of art, political praxis, and life itself—life as it is lived.