The Systems Group was a group of British artists working in a Systems or Constructed art tradition. The Group formed in 1970, following their 1969 Systeemi•System exhibition in Helsinki. Soon afterwards, the organiser Jeffrey Steele and Malcolm Hughes, invited the remaining artists to form the group. It had no constitution or formal membership.[1]
Some group members were influenced by Swiss Concrete artists, including Richard Paul Lohse; some by the Op art of the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel. Others were influenced by the British Constructionists: Victor Pasmore, Mary Martin, Kenneth Martin and Anthony Hill. "Above all, they shared a commitment to a non-figurative art that was not abstracted from the appearance of nature but constructed from within and built up of balanced relations of clear, geometric forms."[2]
The group disbanded in 1976 following political differences among its members.
The core members of the Systems Group were:
The following artists exhibited with the group:
In November 1969, nine artists participated in Systeemi•System: An exhibition of syntactic art from Britain held at the Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki, initiated by Jeffrey Steele and organised by his Finnish wife Arja Nenonen (1936-2011). The exhibiting artists were: Michael Kidner, Malcolm Hughes, Jean Spencer, Peter Lowe, David Saunders, Peter Sedgley, Michael Tyzack and Gillian Wise as well as Steele himself; Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin and Anthony Hill were invited but declined (Mary Martin died in October 1969). Although each artist selected a different choice of elements, each used some kind of rational principle to construct their work.[5]
Syntactic Art emphasises syntactic (structural) relationships between artwork elements over any semantic (referential) or pragmatic (expressive) relationships. In other words, in Systems art the structure and form of an artwork takes precedence over its figurative interpretation.
According to semiotician Charles Morris "language is a social system of signs mediating the response of members of the community to one another and to their environment." Additionally "to understand a language or to use it correctly is to follow the rules of usage (syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical) current in the given social community."[6]
Semiotics is the science of semiosis - a process involving the relationships between a sign, what it designates and how it is interpreted by an agent. Semantics is the relationship between a sign and what it designates; pragmatics is the relationship between a sign and how it is interpreted; and syntactics is the relationship between a sign and other signs.[7]
Anthony Hill appropriated Morris's syntactic-semantic-pragmatic framework into his own work, which in turn influenced some members of the Systems Group. 'By syntactic, Hill meant "the relations in the constituent structure, the internal plastic logic", or, put more simply, what happens within the paintings.' [8]
An example of Syntactic Art is found in Peter Lowe's "Spiral of 8 integers", where a sequence of numbers is summed in a mathematical series until the square root of the sum is a whole number. Lowe represents the syntactic relationships visually as a spiral pattern of smaller squares, culminating in a larger square. Although it's possible to interpret his work mathematically, Lowe emphasises that he discovered this relationship empirically. [9] [10]
The Cold War lasted from 1945 to 1991. In the short period of its existence the Systems Group accepted the label of Constructivist, but this term was identified with Russia and hence identified with "The Evil Empire". Quoting Peter Lowe: "In the art world, the CIA was covertly ensuring the supremacy of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism over Russian Constructivism and Formalism as an element of US Cold War propaganda. Local abstract expressionists proliferated in the UK and abstract expressionism was promoted in art school. Journalists and directors of our national institutions favoured US art and linked their careers to it. There was also a good deal of tabloid comment with syntactic work being invariably labelled 'cold and clinical'. The term 'system' had acquired negative connotations and it was an act of defiance on our part to use it in relation to our group."[11]
Several members of the Systems Group expounded the view that all acts were political and that art was therefore a vehicle for ideology. Lowe could not agree, feeling his visual research was apolitical having been influenced by the writings of Theo van Doesburg's in his essay "An Answer to the Question: Should the New Art Serve the Proletariat?". Things came to a head at a meeting in 1976, after which Lowe resigned from the group. The remaining members found no resolution to their political differences and disbanded shortly afterwards. Despite this, individual members kept in touch and exhibited together for over four decades.[12]