Systems Group

"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.

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.

[12] 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.'

In the short period of its existence the Systems Group accepted the label of Constructivist, but this term was identified with Russia and hence associated 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.

At the time, 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?".