The 21st Century’s Biggest Art Trend is Not a Style. But Once You See It, You’ll Notice It Everywhere.

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.

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, for instance, used modular units that were standardized but could also be reconfigured. Their creativity, in other words, was the product of generative constraints, and this way of working both mirrored and revealed the growing presence of protocolsduring the Cold War. 

One notable non-Minimalist in Burnham’s early schema is Hans Haacke, who, alongside Adrian Piper, is our best bridge connecting systems art’s past and present. The same year Burnham introduced the term, Piper devised a schema of geometric permutations, Sixteen Permutations of a Planar Analysis of a Square (1968). A few years earlier, Haacke created Weathercube (1963), a work he later refigured and renamed as Condensation Cube that visualized an atmospheric system: In his Perspex box, light, air, and moisture interact to produce condensation, effectively miniaturizing cloud formation. Then, in the wake of 1968’s political upheavals, both artists redirected their attention toward social systems—producing the work they’re best known for today. 

Now, Piper is described as a Conceptual artist and Haacke as a practitioner of Institutional Critique. But both of these labels can still fall under the umbrella of “systems art” insofar as they involve a logical way of working that decenters expressiveness and subjectivity—qualities that systems often chalk up to mere human error. Instead of centering an individual—as Abstract Expressionism had done a generation earlier—systems art “liquefied” the artist (Burnham’s word) with work that accounted in some way for its context, evolving from the atmospheric to the social. Where Minimalists like Donald Judd played with the light reflecting off metallic sculptures produced according to a schema, as in 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982–86), Haacke drew attention to everything from the moisture in the gallery’s air to the dubious real estate dealings of a museum board member. Art itself, in other words, was increasingly understood not necessarily as a material object but, per Burnham, “in relations between people and components of their environment.”

It was Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971) that marked his shift to the social. With text and images culled from publicly available archives, he exposed the slumlord practices of a board member of the Guggenheim Museum whose dealings were obfuscated through shady shell corporations. Take a look at the art of this century and you’ll see social systems like this one everywhere. 

But if systems art is so ubiquitous, then why did the term fall out of favor? Many recent shows have tackled specific systems—“Energies” (2024) at the Swiss Institute in New York, “Electric Op” (2024) at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, “Electronic Superhighway” (2016) at Whitechapel Gallery in London, to scratch the surface. But the most recent major group show to attempt a broader view was in 2005, when Tate Modern’s “Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970” likened Minimalism’s systematic approach to that of more politically engaged works. (This lineage looked oddly literal: The show featured almost entirely human figures and cubes.) 

Part of the term’s sidelining likely owes to Burnham’s initial explication being mired in military metaphors, as the art historian Caroline A. Jones has argued. Burnham himself was a US Army engineer during the Cold War and, early on, advocated for technology’s redemptive potential, hyping up artificial intelligence as early as 1968. This pro-industry tenor was hardly appealing to his largely leftist audience, especially during the American War in Vietnam. Eventually, Burnham understood: Reflecting on his original text years later, he renounced his early techno-utopianism. 

There is another reason for the sidelining. Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. wasn’t shown as intended back in ’71: Famously, it agitated the Guggenheim to such a degree that his planned retrospective was swiftly canceled. This “exemplif[ied] the ‘liquidation’ of the artist in a way Burnham had never anticipated,” Jones adds. “The Guggenheim cancellation demonstrated that systems art had merged with society’s systems and was thereby subject to their political, legal, and economic forces,” she continues. “The cancellation was thus both the apotheosis of systems art and the moment after which it would become difficult to say its name.” Systems art challenged the very social system that defined what art is—and in so doing, ceased to be easily legible as art at all. And that wasn’t a failure but, in many ways, precisely the point.

SHOWING SYSTEMS

Decades on, Haacke’s proposition—that systems could be the subject of art and not just the process behind it, and that systems are social—has become foundational. Many of today’s most prominent artists are focused on rendering vast, abstract, and often invisible systems perceptible—often by scaling them down to something more sensible while still gesturing toward their magnitude. Indeed, infrastructure is a major theme of this year’s Whitney Biennial. And artists of all stripes—some more convincing than others—are revealing the inner workings of governments and technologies and the ways they manipulate us; how we are part of an ecosystem and thus have a responsibility to other species; and how the world works at imperceptible scales from the cosmic to the quantum, drawing out implications for human life. This major movement is less a style than a set of answers to a perennial question: How do you picture something you can’t see? 

Perhaps the splashiest among the many 21st-century systems artworks are projects that function like exposés. One is Trevor Paglen’s “Limit Telephotography” (2005–25): To make this series of photographs, he spent 20 years enlisting drones, cameras with long-distance telephoto lenses, and other, often military-grade, tools to surveil surveillance sites that the US government has attempted to hide. The resulting pictures show satellites and telescopes belonging to the CIA and the NSA in remote desert locales, where they are invisible to the unaided civilian eye. These aren’t just images but acts of countersurveillance. The work points to a broader shift toward technocracy—where data, rather than elected officials, exerts growing power—and shows how we might fight back by making some data of our own. 

Edward Burtynsky’s exposé-esque photographs of industrial sites make palpable the magnitude of global supply chains. In one image from “Manufactured Landscapes” (2003–05), a chicken-processing plant interior stretches beyond the frame, with workers in pink hazmat suits extending as far as the eye can see; in another, a stack of shipping containers rises so high as to dwarf the surrounding terrain. Mountains appear minuscule on the horizon. Seeing them piled up in an anonymous port, we think of the great distances they’ll travel. Scale itself becomes the subject. Projects like these show you systems that are made invisible deliberately—systems you might already know about but likely haven’t quite seen or felt before. 

Against the photographic realism of Paglen and Burtynsky, a sleeker subset of work risks rendering seductive that which ought to disturb us. As Boris Groys writes in the catalog for the Tate’s “Open Systems” show, systems art often turns the artist into more of a producer of projects—and indeed, plenty of systems artworks feel overproduced. You can, in fact, make the invisible too visual. Take Olafur Eliasson or Refik Anadol: If Eliasson’s simulated suns and publicly placed glacier chunks bring awareness to our crumbling ecosystem, they also make climate change look chic, all while sidestepping the energy systems required to make the works themselves possible. 

Anadol’s Unsupervised (2022) marked an early encounter with AI art for many museumgoers—and it had the effect of making the tool feel like a fun new toy, a peek inside the black box that politely avoids all its invisible ethical and environmental costs—as if the system at hand, the algorithm, existed in a vacuum, separate from all the other systems. It enlisted a generative AI trained to create semi-painterly amalgamations from images of works in MoMA’s collection, then simply blasted the results on a bright, gigantic screen in the museum’s lobby. This glimpse into a system is both flattering and false.

If Paglen and Burtynsky are more like mechanics—lifting the hood and getting grease on their hands—Eliasson and Anadol are in the car-wash business. The former show you how the machine works; the latter make it gleam. 

Anadol’s Unsupervised finds its counterpoint in Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Anatomy of an AI (2018), which maps the minerals, labor, data centers, and water involved in executing a single Amazon Echo command. It’s diagrammed in a straightforward manner that hardly feels like art, but its affective power comes from its scale—it’s almost unreadably dense, covering the walls of an entire room. The sheer amount of information is discomfiting, and that’s the point.

And yet, it’s all too easy to mistake scale for substance. Anadol’s gesture is also a perfect example of a gimmick as the critic Sianne Ngai defines it: something that appears to be working too hard, but also not hard enough. Spectacular amounts of energy kept his lobby art system generating, yet the result felt utterly hollow. 

This is the risk of systems art: In trying to visualize a system, an artist can end up reproducing its logic, prioritizing scale and efficiency over meaning, over anything human. 

SCALING DOWN

Plenty of the most powerful systems art counters the conundrum by making a point of scaling down. If systems art is about getting you to see invisibilized forces operating right under your nose, it makes sense that some strong examples could pass for—and even be—ordinary objects. Artists like Cameron Rowland and Jumana Manna place objects shaped by invisible systems of power in galleries, inviting viewers to consider their provenance—to see the material traces that politicized systems leave on everyday life. Rowland’s works often reveal the mechanisms by which institutions continue to profit from slave labor. Their 2020 show at the Institute of Contemporary Art London drew attention to the building’s doors and handrails, which were made of mahogany obtained through forced labor in the Caribbean.Manna’s bent ceramic pipes are based on agricultural and irrigation systems in Palestine, but are shown unconnected to anything. In isolation, they hint at water and sewage systems both ancient and modern, and evoke the sabotage or neglect infrastructure faces under occupation. Obliquely, they point to Israeli settler techniques that involve rendering urban environments undesirable, even unlivable. Both artists show systems through synecdoche, with parts standing in for wholes.

Ayoung Kim’s “Delivery Dancer”trilogy (2022–24) unfolds at the scale of one person—a gig economy delivery driver too often treated not as an individual, but as one of many, or as a means to an end. Some scenes show what happens when technological and economic systems collide: We watch as an app exerts power over the human operating it despite its inferior understanding of the world. The driver zips around Seoul, but the app treats the whole ordeal as if it were a video game replete with synthy sound effects. Since the app understands the world only in 2D, it penalizes the protagonist for failing to navigate a hilly terrain as speedily as if it were flat. What feels like sci-fi resolves into a Realist worker portrait as a technological fantasy of efficiency chafes against the fleshy, earthly physical world.     

Constantina Zavitsanos scales down even further, to the subatomic level. Their sculptures enlist quantum interferometers—an apparatus of mirrors and lasers—as well as holograms to show that our culture’s insistence on independence is misguided and wrong on the most fundamental scale. Quantum physics posits that particles are not discrete but entangled—that everything is connected. Extending the logic, Zavitsanos shows that some things double when they are divided: Holograms, for instance, produce two images when cut in half.Should this not affect how we treat one another? 

In each project, shifting scale becomes a way to recover empathy from systems that abstract and dehumanize.

A LITTLE LINEAGE

Two artists, Rutherford Chang and Alan Ruiz, self-consciously chart a lineage between systems art past and present by confronting social systems while borrowing strategies from their Minimalist predecessors. Chang—who died last year at age 45, and is the subject of a survey at UCCA Beijing—returned time and again to squares and cubes. But in his hands, these forms were never neutral, blank, or abstract. For We Buy White Albums (2013–25), he set out to purchase every copy from the first pressing of the Beatles’ 1968“White Album,” whose cover was, famously, a sleek white square designed by Minimalist artist Richard Hamilton. At the time of Chang’s death, he’d gathered one percent of the initial three million copies. In the hands of consumers, the albums’ surfaces become something like blank canvases: Shown together in boxes for viewers to rifle through, each copy Chang collected bears traces of its circulation. Not only do the records feature scuff marks and price tags, but poems and doodles—as if the blankness was begging to be filled in. A few plastic-wrapped copies notwithstanding, they traveled through various systems of value: Their graffiti and wear meant they were no longer in mint condition, but Chang’s intervention turned it all into art. 

The Beatles and the doodlers surely saw their contributions as art too; but certain kinds of art—“high” and “low,” visual and musical—are valued differently in the commodity system. Now, it’s all mixed together in a museum. But Chang’s work speaks to yet another system of value: He was an artist with a job, a traveling businessman working for his family’s technology company based in Taipei. While on the clock, he dealt with financial, technological, and global systems all the time. Through art, he found a way to foreground humanity and humor while evoking these systems of circulation, imbuing warmth into works that so often take the form of cubes and squares. 

For a solo show this summer at Dia Bridgehampton, Alan Ruiz similarly asks us to look for the social in systems of various kinds. In fact, he teaches a course on systems art at the New School. Trained as an architect, he’s responding to the site; he will refashion moves from Dan Flavin’s installation of linear lightbulbs, on view upstairs, into a white-picket-fence–esque work about Latinx labor on Long Island. For Flavin, fluorescents were pure light and line; Ruiz reminds us that they were designed to extend the workday and serve capital. The show will also feature a pool light—a wall-mounted silvery hemisphere—that might pass as a sleek Minimalist sculpture to those who know more about art history than they do cleaning pools. The Hamptons remain starkly divided between the haves and the have-nots, and Ruiz is addressing both. In drawings, he has also plotted ICE raids on Eastern Long Island as they correspond to the path of the sun, directing attention toward two nearby ICE detention centers, one currently being repurposed from an office building. If that seems like an oblique way to depict such violence, it’s because, as Ruiz explained to me, “some things cannot be pictured.”

ON HUMOR AND HUMANITY

Where Dia was originally an institution devoted to Minimalism, it has since come to promote procedural art in a more social sense. The foundation’s recent exhibitions have featured artists like Rowland and Tehching Hsieh. A long-term Hsieh survey that opened last year at Dia Beacon features photographs of his famous yearlong performances—works that adhered to the logics of labor and bureaucracy so literally that they start to seem absurd. 

For One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece), 1980–81, Hsieh punched a clock every hour for a year—24 hours a day, seven days a week—then took a picture to prove it. Installed in one long row, the photos look nearly identical, except that we watch his hair grow. The result is both an earnest enactment and a devastating parody of the hold the clock—and quantifiable attributes more broadly—has on our labor and lives. 

Because the thing with systems is that, try as they might to impose order on the world, there is still so much that remains beyond the reach of rationality. For all the artists engaging earnestly in systems thinking, there seem to be just as many who follow a line of logic so literally, so relentlessly, that it starts to collapse under its own weight. 

Agnieszka Kurant portrays the scary and absurd business of attempting to predict—and control—our world using data, logic, and algorithms. For her “Risk Landscape” (2024—) series, the artist worked with data scientists and catastrophe modeling specialists to create holograms representing the kinds of assessments made to mitigate risk and plan for business. Consultants and clients use data about the climate, finance, social instability, wars, and so on to plan their assets, and using AI, Kurant plotted parameters and visualized these data points. The result is an abstract jumble of colors whose holographic forms change depending on how you look at them—because the future, after all, is unstable, even as the rich try to turn it into speculative real estate. Many powerful people give outsize credence to the quantifiable: Whether or not measurable qualities are useful ones, they are easier to plug into a spreadsheet than qualitative measures. Kurant’s jumbly data visualizations could be a crystal ball if it weren’t for the logic and data behind it—which is precisely her point.

Walid Raad also points to an obsession with the quantitative and the machine-measured in works like “My neck is thinner than a hair,” which claims to comprise photographs of each and every one of the car bombs detonated in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War that lasted from 1975–91—but this would mean that the project, like the war, began when Raad was just a child. While he did in fact get his start carrying the family camera around war-torn Beirut, you might wonder: How could a young boy document such events so comprehensively? And for that matter, how could adults accurately account for such ordeals? With what data, with what tools—and who can verify? Raad also authored the work as the fictional organization Atlas Group. His gotcha is funny and it isn’t: Dwelling on the magnitude of and motivations behind all those car bombs, and on the child amid the wreckage, horror sets in. 

What Raad offers is a kind of surrealism for the information age: Something can be systematic and based in data, but also utterly senseless. A sentence, for example, can be grammatical without meaning anything at all (as AI is making painfully apparent). Raad’s subject—war—is likewise highly systematized, yet requires mental gymnastics to justify itself.

In Akira Ikezoe’s paintings, on view in the Whitney Biennial, artistic, social, ecological, and energy systems enmesh in circular loops that appear schematic, like a Fordist assembly line. But look closely—try to actually follow the logic—and you’ll find chaos. We know that systems are connected, but not always how. In work like Robot Stories Around Solar Panels(2025), Ikezoe shows us robots moving and making Botticelli-esque paintings starring a robo-Venus, and then manning a printing press and arranging solar panels. What does one have to do with the others? 

Within more humorous approaches like Ikezoe’s lies a powerful if subtle proposition. In that foundational Artforum essay, Burnham wrote that systems theory “may be another attempt by science to resist the emotional pain and ambiguity that remain an unavoidable aspect of life.” But art is useful for precisely such ambiguities, as a “rehearsal”—here Burnham quotes literary scholarMorse Peckham—“for those real situations in which it is vital for our survival to endure cognitive tension.” Systems don’t necessarily eliminate ambiguity; often, they simply conceal it. Charts can be costumes, as Raad and Ikezoe remind, enlisting systems in order to dress them down.

DOWN WITH THE SYSTEM

The good news is that once you’ve seen a system break down, you can start playing with its parts. Some systems are designed to make us feel like cogs in a machine, but plenty are less all-consuming than they’d like us to believe. David L. Johnson’s “Rule” (2024–), also on view in the Whitney Biennial, features signs the artist removed from privately owned public spaces that lay out rules like NO SKATEBOARDING, NO SMOKING, NO PANHANDLING, NO CAMPING, NO SLEEPING. As I’ve written in my review of the Biennial (see page 106), while his work points to the creeping privatization of New York, it also intervenes in it: Once those signs disappear, their rules are no longer legally enforceable. 

With a similar gesture, Michael Wang’s site-specific exhibition “Extinct in New York” (2019) called attention to the many species of plants, algae, and lichen that are native to New York City but no longer grow there—while also bringing them home. In a greenhouse on Governors Island, he showed bog goldenrod and beard lichen and rough horsetail—species that are no longer able to thrive amid so much overdevelopment and pollution. Wang’s greenhouse came to resemble a life-support system tent in a warzone, suggesting that though our species killed off such life forms, we can also keep them alive—using our tools and our outsize impact on the ecosystem for good instead of evil. 

The interventions of Johnson and Wang find a parallel in Haacke’s 1972 Rhine-Water Purification Plant (Rheinwasseraufbereitungsanlage),which drew attention to Germany’s Rhine River and the ways postwar industrialization was turning it opaque with heavy metals and noxious chemicals. The artist made the Rhine flow into Kunstmuseen Krefeld through a filtration system, ultimately dripping clean water into a basin filled with fish whose thriving proved its healthfulness. He was showing us the Anthropocene avant la lettre, arguing that natural and human-made environments can no longer be seen as separate (we are animals, and our mess is all over everything). And he was showing us how we might fix the problem—or at least intervene. But more than that, Haacke was proposing how politics and art might be intertwined, too, by dissolving the institutional wall separating art from the world outside it. That wall separates symbolic gestures from material ones just as it divides institutions and ecosystems. But no systems exist in isolation; everything is connected.

As systems art has proliferated, its stakes have shifted, and Haacke’s Rhine-Water Purification Plant set the terms. By now, the issue is no longer that we are unaware that invisible systems are powerful and pervasive. The question has become: How do we resist the sense of resignation they try to condition in us? The most galvanizing systems art doesn’t just diagram or demystify the machine—it cracks it open and hands you a wrench.