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Systems Art

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Systems art is art influenced by cybernetics, and systems theory, that

reflects on natural systems, social systems and social signs of the art

world itself.

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Systems art emerged as part of the first wave of the conceptual art

movement extended in the 1960s and 1970s. Closely related and

overlapping terms are Anti-form movement, Cybernetic art,

Generative Systems, Process art, Systems aesthetic, Systemic art,

Systemic painting and Systems sculptures.

By the early 1960s Minimalism had emerged as an abstract movement

in art (with roots in geometric abstraction via Malevich, the Bauhaus

and Mondrian) which rejected the idea of relational, and subjective

painting, the complexity of Abstract expressionist surfaces, and the

emotional zeitgeist and polemics present in the arena of Action

painting. Minimalism argued that extreme simplicity could capture all

of the sublime representation needed in art. The term Systematic art

was coined by Lawrence Alloway in 1966 as a description of the

method artists, such as Kenneth Noland, Al Held and Frank Stella,

were using for composing abstract paintings.

Associated with painters such as Frank Stella, minimalism in painting,

as opposed to other areas, is a modernist movement. Depending on

the context, minimalism might be construed as a precursor to the

postmodern movement. Seen from the perspective of writers who

sometimes classify it as a postmodern movement, early minimalism

began and succeeded as a modernist movement to yield advanced

works, but which partially abandoned this project when a few artists

changed direction in favor of the anti-form movement.

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In the late 1960s the term Postminimalism was coined by Robert

Pincus-Witten to describe minimalist derived art which had content

and contextual overtones which minimalism rejected, and was applied

to the work of Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra and new work

by former minimalists Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Bruce

Nauman, Sol LeWitt, and Barry Le Va, and others. Minimalists like

Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, John

McCracken and others continued to produce their late modernist

paintings and sculpture for the remainder of their careers.

Cybernetic art

Audio feedback and the use of tape loops, sound synthesis and

computer generated compositions reflected a cybernetic awareness of

information, systems and cycles. Such techniques became widespread

in the 1960s in the music industry. The visual effects of electronic

feedback became a focus of artistic research in the late 1960s, when

video equipment first reached the consumer market. Steina and

Woody Vasulka, for example, used "all manner and combination of

audio and video signals to generate electronic feedback in their

respective of corresponding media."