The 21st Century’s Biggest Art Trend is Not a Style.
The term “systems art” wasn’t the most popular moniker among the many new art-world labels that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s. But it has grown much richer with age. Half a century ago, systems—from mass communications to the Cold War military-industrial complex—were expanding rapidly, as protocols began to organize geopolitics and everyday life at several scales. Today, those protocols have only multiplied. We increasingly understand the world as an ecosystem—and frame racism, sexism, and ableism as systemic issues. Meanwhile, algorithms, global finance, and supply chains exert an ever more powerful—if often invisible—force on all of us. Systems thinking has become unavoidable, and art has become a crucial tool for making invisible systems legible—and for fighting back. Related Articles Jack Burnham coined the term “systems art” in Artforum in 1968, though many of the artists he wrote about then are better remembered as Minimalists. Kenneth Noland, Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin developed structured approaches to making art. They turned their studios into systems and found procedural ways of working through rules, seriality, and repetition: Morris, …
