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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tIt was Haacke\u2019s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 <\/em>(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\u2019ll see social systems like this one everywhere.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBut if systems art is so ubiquitous, then why did the term fall out of favor? Many recent shows have tackled specific systems\u2014\u201cEnergies\u201d (2024) at the Swiss Institute in New York, \u201cElectric Op\u201d (2024) at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, \u201cElectronic Superhighway\u201d (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\u2019s \u201cOpen Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970\u201d likened Minimalism\u2019s systematic approach to that of more politically engaged works. (This lineage looked oddly literal: The show featured almost entirely human figures and cubes.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tPart of the term\u2019s sidelining likely owes to Burnham\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThere is another reason for the sidelining. Haacke\u2019s Shapolsky et al.<\/em> wasn\u2019t shown as intended back in \u201971: Famously, it agitated the Guggenheim to such a degree that his planned retrospective was swiftly canceled. This \u201cexemplif[ied] the \u2018liquidation\u2019 of the artist in a way Burnham had never anticipated,\u201d Jones adds. \u201cThe Guggenheim cancellation demonstrated that systems art had merged with society\u2019s systems and was thereby subject to their political, legal, and economic forces,\u201d she continues. \u201cThe cancellation was thus both the apotheosis of systems art and the moment after which it would become difficult to say its name.\u201d Systems art challenged the very social system that defined what art is\u2014and in so doing, ceased to be easily legible as art at all. And that wasn\u2019t a failure but, in many ways, precisely the point.<\/p>\n \n\tDecades on, Haacke\u2019s proposition\u2014that systems could be the subject of art and not just the process behind it, and that systems are social\u2014has become foundational. Many of today\u2019s most prominent artists are focused on rendering vast, abstract, and often invisible systems perceptible\u2014often by scaling them down to something more sensible while still gesturing toward their magnitude. Indeed, infrastructure is a major theme of this year\u2019s Whitney Biennial. And artists of all stripes\u2014some more convincing than others\u2014are 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\u2019t see?\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tPerhaps the splashiest among the many 21st-century systems artworks are projects that function like expos\u00e9s. One is Trevor Paglen\u2019s \u201cLimit Telephotography\u201d (2005\u201325): 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\u2019t just images but acts of countersurveillance. The work points to a broader shift toward technocracy\u2014where data, rather than elected officials, exerts growing power\u2014and shows how we might fight back by making some data of our own.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tEdward Burtynsky\u2019s expos\u00e9-esque photographs of industrial sites make palpable the magnitude of global supply chains. In one image from \u201cManufactured Landscapes\u201d (2003\u201305), 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\u2019ll travel. Scale itself becomes the subject. Projects like these show you systems that are made invisible deliberately\u2014systems you might already know about but likely haven\u2019t quite seen or felt before.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAgainst 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\u2019s \u201cOpen Systems\u201d show, systems art often turns the artist into more of a producer of projects\u2014and indeed, plenty of systems artworks feel overproduced. You can, in fact, make the invisible too <\/em>visual. Take Olafur Eliasson or Refik Anadol: If Eliasson\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAnadol\u2019s Unsupervised <\/em>(2022) marked an early encounter with AI art for many museumgoers\u2014and 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\u2014as 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\u2019s collection, then simply blasted the results on a bright, gigantic screen in the museum\u2019s lobby. This glimpse into a system is both flattering and false.<\/p>\n \n\tIf Paglen and Burtynsky are more like mechanics\u2014lifting the hood and getting grease on their hands\u2014Eliasson and Anadol are in the car-wash business. The former show you how the machine works; the latter make it gleam.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAnadol\u2019s Unsupervised<\/em> finds its counterpoint in Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler\u2019s Anatomy of an AI <\/em>(2018), which maps the minerals, labor, data centers, and water involved in executing a single Amazon Echo command. It\u2019s diagrammed in a straightforward manner that hardly feels like art, but its affective power comes from its scale\u2014it\u2019s almost unreadably dense, covering the walls of an entire room. The sheer amount of information is discomfiting, and that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd yet, it\u2019s all too easy to mistake scale for substance. Anadol\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThis 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tPlenty 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\u2014and even be\u2014ordinary objects. Artists like Cameron Rowland and Jumana Manna place objects shaped by invisible systems of power in galleries, inviting viewers to consider their provenance\u2014to see the material traces that politicized systems leave on everyday life. Rowland\u2019s 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\u2019s doors and handrails, which were made of mahogany obtained through forced labor in the Caribbean. Manna\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n\tAyoung Kim\u2019s \u201cDelivery Dancer\u201d trilogy (2022\u201324) unfolds at the scale of one person\u2014a 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.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tConstantina Zavitsanos scales down even further, to the subatomic level. Their sculptures enlist quantum interferometers\u2014an apparatus of mirrors and lasers\u2014as well as holograms to show that our culture\u2019s insistence on independence is misguided and wrong on the most fundamental scale. Quantum physics posits that particles are not discrete but entangled\u2014that 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIn each project, shifting scale becomes a way to recover empathy from systems that abstract and dehumanize.<\/p>\n \n\tTwo 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\u2014who died last year at age 45, and is the subject of a survey at UCCA Beijing\u2014returned time and again to squares and cubes. But in his hands, these forms were never neutral, blank, or abstract. For We Buy White Albums <\/em>(2013\u201325), he set out to purchase every copy from the first pressing of the Beatles\u2019 1968\u201cWhite Album,\u201d whose cover was, famously, a sleek white square designed by Minimalist artist Richard Hamilton. At the time of Chang\u2019s death, he\u2019d gathered one percent of the initial three million copies. In the hands of consumers, the albums\u2019 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\u2014as 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\u2019s intervention turned it all into art.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe Beatles and the doodlers surely saw their contributions as art too; but certain kinds of art\u2014\u201chigh\u201d and \u201clow,\u201d visual and musical\u2014are valued differently in the commodity system. Now, it\u2019s all mixed together in a museum. But Chang\u2019s work speaks to yet another system of value: He was an artist with a job, a traveling businessman working for his family\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tFor 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\u2019s responding to the site; he will refashion moves from Dan Flavin\u2019s installation of linear lightbulbs, on view upstairs, into a white-picket-fence\u2013esque 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\u2014a wall-mounted silvery hemisphere\u2014that 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\u2019s because, as Ruiz explained to me, \u201csome things cannot be pictured.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWhere Dia was originally an institution devoted to Minimalism, it has since come to promote procedural art in a more social sense. The foundation\u2019s 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\u2014works that adhered to the logics of labor and bureaucracy so literally that they start to seem absurd.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tFor One Year Performance 1980\u20131981 <\/em>(Time Clock Piece), 1980\u201381, Hsieh punched a clock every hour for a year\u201424 hours a day, seven days a week\u2014then 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\u2014and quantifiable attributes more broadly\u2014has on our labor and lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBecause 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAgnieszka Kurant portrays the scary and absurd business of attempting to predict\u2014and control\u2014our world using data, logic, and algorithms. For her \u201cRisk Landscape\u201d (2024\u2014) 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\u2014because 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\u2019s jumbly data visualizations could be a crystal ball if it weren\u2019t for the logic and data behind it\u2014which is precisely her point.<\/p>\n \n\tWalid Raad also points to an obsession with the quantitative and the machine-measured in works like \u201cMy neck is thinner than a hair,\u201d which claims to comprise photographs of each and every instance of detritus left behind by a car bomb detonated in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War that lasted from 1975\u201391\u2014but 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\u2014and who can verify? Raad also authored the work as the fictional organization Atlas Group. His gotcha is funny and it isn\u2019t: Dwelling on the magnitude of and motivations behind all those car bombs, and on the child amid the wreckage, horror sets in.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWhat 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\u2019s subject\u2014war\u2014is likewise highly systematized, yet requires mental gymnastics to justify itself.<\/p>\n \n\tIn Akira Ikezoe\u2019s 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\u2014try to actually follow the logic\u2014and you\u2019ll find chaos. We know that systems are connected, but not always how. In work like Robot Stories Around Solar Panels<\/em>(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?\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWithin more humorous approaches like Ikezoe\u2019s lies a powerful if subtle proposition. In that foundational Artforum<\/em> essay, Burnham wrote that systems theory \u201cmay be another attempt by science to resist the emotional pain and ambiguity that remain an unavoidable aspect of life.\u201d But art is useful for precisely such ambiguities, as a \u201crehearsal\u201d\u2014here Burnham quotes literary scholar Morse Peckham\u2014\u201cfor those real situations in which it is vital for our survival to endure cognitive tension.\u201d Systems don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \n\tThe good news is that once you\u2019ve 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\u2019d like us to believe. David L. Johnson\u2019s \u201cRule\u201d (2024\u2013), 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<\/sub>. As I\u2019ve written in my review of the Biennial, 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWith a similar gesture, Michael Wang\u2019s site-specific exhibition \u201cExtinct in New York\u201d (2019) called attention to the many species of plants, algae, and lichen that are native to New York City but no longer grow there\u2014while also bringing them home. In a greenhouse on Governors Island, he showed bog goldenrod and beard lichen and rough horsetail\u2014species that are no longer able to thrive amid so much overdevelopment and pollution. Wang\u2019s 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\u2014using our tools and our outsize impact on the ecosystem for good instead of evil.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe interventions of Johnson and Wang find a parallel in Haacke\u2019s 1972 Rhine-Water Purification Plant (Rheinwasseraufbereitungsanlage)<\/em>,which drew attention to Germany\u2019s 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<\/em>, 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\u2014or 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.<\/p>\n \n\tAs systems art has proliferated, its stakes have shifted, and Haacke\u2019s Rhine-Water Purification Plant <\/em>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\u2019t just diagram or demystify the machine\u2014it cracks it open and hands you a wrench. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/features\/21st-century-biggest-trend-not-style-systems-art-hans-haacke-1234786483\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Copy-of-AKI_295.jpg?w=1024″] The term \u201csystems art\u201d wasn\u2019t the most popular moniker among the many new art-world labels that emerged in the 1960s and \u201970s. But it has grown much richer with age. Half a century ago, systems\u2014from mass communications to the Cold War military-industrial complex\u2014were expanding rapidly, as protocols began to organize geopolitics and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1952875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1952875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1952875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1952875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1952875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n\t\tSHOWING SYSTEMS\t<\/h2>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Artwork-Render-13.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\t\tSCALING DOWN\t<\/h2>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/To-Be-Like-Water-exhibition-TENT-2021-photographer-Aad-Hoogendoorn-63.jpg?w=400\")
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\nin \u201cTo Be Like Water,\u201d 2021, at TENT, Rotterdam.<\/span>Photo Aad Hoogendoorn\/Courtesy TENT, Rotterdam\/\u00a9Jumana Manna<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\t\tA LITTLE LINEAGE\t<\/h2>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\t\tON HUMOR AND HUMANITY\t<\/h2>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/WR-44-PH.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\t\tDOWN WITH THE SYSTEM\t<\/h2>\n
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