Open Systems/THEORY ESSAY

Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970

Building upon the structures and systems of Fluxus, Neo-Concretism, Minimalism and Conceptualism, all of the artists included here are linked by their use of a generative or repetitive system as a way of redefining the work of art, the self and the nature of representation. This book traces some of the ways in which these artists drew parallels between their aesthetic systems and those of the real world.

At first glance, Hans Haacke's Condensation Cube 1963-5 may seem deceptively simple. First shown at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, it is a sealed Perspex box, 30 x 30 x 30 centimetres, containing a small amount of water. As light enters, the cube warms and the water within condenses on its interior walls, collecting at the bottom to perpetuate the process. Initially, Haacke was involved with an analysis of physical and biological systems, including living plants and animals, and the physical states of water and wind.

Condensation Cube is just one of a series of works the artist produced in the early 1960s combining technological with organic processes to make visible the physical forces of nature. Haacke's cube bears only a passing resemblance to the reductive Minimalist structures of the 1960s, but also reflects his involvement with the Zero group, established in Dusseldorf by Otto Piene (b. 1928) and Heinz Mack (b. 1931), and later Gunther Uecker (b. 1930). The group was interested, as Haacke has said, 'in light and phenomena and reflection, and motion, and also works that were taking place with a public outside of the gallery space'.17

Although a sealed structure, Condensation Cube is entirely dependent upon its ambient surroundings: light and temperature directly influence the process of condensation happening within, placing viewer and work in real time and space. As artist and critic Jack Burnham wrote: 'Traditionally, artworks exist in "mythical time", that is in an ideal historical timeframe separated from the day-to-day events of the real world. Some systems and conceptual artists, such as Haacke, attempt to integrate their works in the actual events of the "real world", that is the world of politics, money-making, ecology, industry, and other pursuits.'18 The phenomenologically-based practices of Minimalism, which required the viewer to navigate the spaces around and within works, also placed the viewer in real time and space. They became implicated in an interconnected system of objects in space, engaged in perceptual changes as they moved around the objects. The objects themselves, however, remained materially stable, whereas Haacke now added instability, allowing him to 'make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is nonstable'.


PS: If you want the whole essay taken from that book I could email it to you. Katia