Open Systems examines how international artists rethought the object of art in the late 1960s and 1970s as they sought to connect with the increasingly urgent political developments of the decade and make their work more responsive to the world around them. Building on the structures of Minimalism and Conceptualism, the mid-Sixties saw a radical departure from art's traditional focus on the object, to wide-ranging experiments with media that included dance, performance and, most notably, film and video. One characteristic of all the artists featured is their adoption of experimental aesthetic 'systems' to generate their work, a development that was to have tremendous influence on artists for decades to come.

Open Systems features the works of prominent international artists who emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, working in Britain, Europe, South America, Japan and the United States, and includes sculpture, sculptural installations, painting, film, video, photography and printed matter. It also includes essays by leading critics and art historians as well as a selection of seminal texts of the period. 60 colour and 50 black-and-white illustrations.