The Dream of Broadcast: Video and the Problem of Latin American Interconnectedness, 1974-78

This presentation addresses a group of video art exhibitions staged during the 1970s by the Buenos Aires-based Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidad de São Paulo (MAC-USP). By looking to an array of materials related to these events – press ephemera, archival documents and, when possible, videos themselves – I track how both institutions, often in collaborations between the two, sought to use video as a tool and a metaphor for constructing a Latin American network of artistic production and reception. For both Jorge Glusberg and Walter Zanini, the respective directors of the CAYC and the MAC-USP, such a Latin American network was sorely lacking within a contemporary art circuit dominated by the metropolitan centers of Europe and the US. With its capacity for immediate screening and mass broadcast, video technology enabled new configurations between viewers and makers of screen images, and it thus seemed an ideal medium through which to construct precisely that network. The resulting programming the two institutions organized offered a unique model of Latin American art as a type of televisual counter-public, one staked on an ultimately unsustainable technological optimism regarding the scale, availability and durability of broadcast images. Many of the videos that emerged within this programming survive today only through the secondary traces of photographs and texts. By considering such lost, partial, and impure objects, my presentation advances an understand of video as a shifting, inter-medial apparatus that configures Latin America as a shifting, contingent public.