Alighiero Boetti

From 1963 to 1965, Boetti began to create works out of then unusual materials such as plaster, masonite, plexiglass, light fixtures and other industrial materials. His first solo show was in 1967, at the Turin gallery of Christian Stein. Later that year participated in an exhibition at Galleria La Bertesca in the Italian city of Genoa, with a group of other Italian artists that referred to their works as Arte Povera, or poor art, a term subsequently widely propagated by Italian art critic Germano Celant.

Boetti continued to work with a wide array of materials, tools, and techniques, including ball pens (biro) and even the postal system. Some of Boetti's artistic strategies are considered typical for Arte Povera, namely the use of the most modest materials and techniques, to take art off its pedestal of attributed "dignity". Boetti also took a keen interest in the relationship between chance and order, in various systems of classification (grids, maps, etc.), and non-Western traditions and cultural practices, influenced by his Afghanistan and Pakistan travels.

An example of his Arte Povera work is Lampada annuale (Yearly Lamp) (1966), a single, outsized light bulb in a mirror-lined wooden box,[3] which randomly switches itself on for eleven seconds each year. This work focuses both on the transformative powers of energy, and on the possibilities and limitations of chance – the likelihood of a viewer being present at the moment of illumination is remote. In 1967, Boetti produced the piece Manifesto, a poster listing the names of artists that make up Boetti's creative background.[4]

Dossier Postale (1969–70) consists of a series of letters which were sent to 26 well-known recipients, primarily artists (Giulio Paolini, Bruce Nauman), art critics (Lucy Lippard, Arturo Schwarz), dealers (Konrad Fischer, Leo Castelli), and collectors (Giuseppe Panza, Corrado Levi) active at the time. Boetti sent the envelopes to imaginary addresses, thus each letter was returned to the artist undelivered, demonstrating Boetti's preoccupation with improbability and chance.[5][6]

Boetti disassociated himself from the Arte Povera movement in 1972 and moved to Rome, without, however, completely abandoning some of its democratic, anti-elitist, strategies. In 1973, he renamed himself as a dual persona Alighiero e Boetti (“Alighiero and Boetti”) reflecting the opposing factors presented in his work: the individual and society, error and perfection, order and disorder. Already in his double-portrait I Gemelli begun in 1968 and published as a postcard, Boetti had altered photographs so that he appeared to be holding the hand of his identical twin.[7][8][9]

He often collaborated with both artists and non-artists, giving them significant freedom in their contributions to his works. For instance, one of the better known types of his works consists of colored letters embroidered in grids ("arazzi", meaning wall hangings or tapestries) on canvases of varying sizes, the letters upon closer inspection reading as short phrases in Italian, for instance Ordine e Disordine ("Order and Disorder") or Fuso Ma Non Confuso ("Mixed but not mixed up"), or similar truisms and wordplays. To create these pictures, Boetti worked with artisan embroiderers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to whom he gave his designs but increasingly handed over the process of selecting and combining the colors and thus deciding the final aesthetic look of the work.

Similarly, in the lavori biro (ball pen paintings), he would invite friends and acquaintances, to fill large colored sections of the multi-part work by ball pen, typically alternating between a man and a woman from one sheet to another. Boetti made his first ballpoint ink drawings in 1972–73 and continued through the late 1980s.[10][11][6] The largest of all Boetti's Biro works are the four versions of Ononimo (1973), with their progressions of eleven separate panels, each hand-coloured in biro (two in blue biro and two in red).[12]

His most ambitious project is a large embroidered piece titled Classificazione dei mille fiumi piu lunghi del mondo (Classification of the thousand longest rivers in the world (1977).[13][14]

Following an invitation by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artist published six of his watercolour drawings in Austrian Airlines' in flight magazine ‘Sky Lines’. To accompany this publication, jigsaws of the images were produced, and were available to passengers on the flights at this time.

In 1986 he took part at the Lucio Amelio's exhibition "Terrae Motus". After the 1980 Irpinia earthquake the Neapolitan gallerist asked to the major contemporary artists of that time to realize a work of art about the earthquake; so Boetti realized for this occasion Di palo in frasca nell'estate dell'anno millenovecentottantasei, accanto al Pantheon, a reflection on the concepts of time and thinking: the monkey stands for the human thought's capacity to jump from a think to another.

Mappa (1978)

Perhaps best known is Boetti's series of large embroidered maps of the world, called simply Mappa. After the Six-Day War in June 1967 the artist began to collect newspaper covers featuring maps of war zones.[15] He then asked his wife to embroider the shapes from the June 1967 map.[16] He pondered the idea of the first large-scale Mappa during his second voyage to Afghanistan in 1971,[17] resulting in a series of woven world maps entitled Territori Occupati.[18] Between 1971 and 1979 he set up the One Hotel with his friend and business partner Gholam Dastaghir[19] in Kabul[20] as a kind of artistic commune[21] and created large colourful embroideries, the most famous of these were the Mappa, world maps in which each country features the design of its national flag. In 1971, Boetti commissioned women at an embroidery school in Kabul to embroider his first map. He initially intended to make only one but went on to commission roughly 150 of them in his lifetime, with no two possessing exactly the same dimensions.

Boetti's maps reflect a changing geopolitical world from 1971 to 1994, a period that included the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Embroidered by up to 500 artisans in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the maps were the result of a collaborative process leaving the design to the geopolitical realities of the time, and the choice of colours to the artisans responsible for the embroidery. The maps delineate the political boundaries of the countries.[22][16] In one map, the sea is unexpectedly coloured pink rather than blue, as landlocked Afghans had no tradition of mapping, certainly not of oceans.[3] The border texts contain dates or details relative to the work's production, Boetti's signature and sayings, as well as excerpts from Sufi poetry.

"For me the work of the embroidered Mappa is the maximum of beauty. For that work I did nothing, chose nothing, in the sense that: the world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them; in short I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges everything else requires no choosing." Alighiero e Boetti, 1974[23]

Today the Nineteenth Day of the Eighth Month of the Year OneThousandNine100Eighty-Eight (1988) at the National Gallery of Art in 2022

The brightly colored Arazzi works are embroidered pieces made in various sizes that depict sentences drawn from poetry, wisdoms from around the world, or sayings invented by Boetti himself. The Arazzi grandi, containing messages in both Italian and Persian, are each distinct, recording the date when they were created, and containing an elaborate internal code that prescribes the order of the sentences on display.[24] They contrast geometric European letters and flowing Persian calligraphy in checkerboard patterns, alternating bands, grids or cruciform shapes.[25] The dates, carefully noted on each Arazzi grandi, mark a point of captivation for Boetti, as he was deeply interested in the concept of time and its inevitable passing.[26]

The embroidery of each map normally took one to two years and, in some cases, much longer due to geopolitical events. Following the closure of the Afghan border, Boetti was forced to abandon this practice and work remotely from Italy. This work began in his studio in Rome, with the artist outlining the countries in felt-tip pen onto linen, before sending the cloth framework to Afghanistan.[27] The invasion of Afghanistan by Russian troops in 1979 shifted production completely from Kabul to Peshawar in Pakistan, where the group of Afghan women had taken refuge and where Boetti was only able to reconnect with them through middlemen. It also halted production completely until 1982, with only a few maps being made between 1982–1985[17] During the 1980s Boetti visited Pakistan to meet the men organizing the embroidery. As a European male, however, Boetti was not allowed to visit the camps. He therefore asked photographer Randi Malkin Steinberger, with whom he had collaborated on the book Accanto al Pantheon in Rome, to go to Peshawar in 1990 to photograph the craftswomen at work.

A chief example of this series, Mappa del Mondo, 1989 ("Map of the World, 1989"), is on view in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (see Key Works).

• Galleria Christian Stein, Turin, Italy, 1967
• Arte Povera, Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa, 1967 (group exhibition)
• Shaman Showman, Galleria De Nieubourg, Milan, Italy, 1969
• When Attitude Becomes Form, curated by Harald Szeemann, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, 1969 (group exhibition)
• Io che prendo il sole a Torino il 24 February 1969, Galleria Sperone, Turin, Italy, 1969.
• John Weber Gallery, New York, 1973
• Mettere al mondo il mondo, Sperone-Fischer Gallery, Rome, Italy, 1973
• Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Switzerland, 1975.
• Kunsthalle Basel, curated by Jean-Christophe Amman, Basel, Switzerland, 1978
• Art Agency Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, 1980.
• 44th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 1990.
• Synchronizitaet als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhaenge, Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany; Westfalischer Kunstverein, Munster, Germany; Kunstmuseum, Lucerne, Switzerland, 1992–1993
• Alternando da 1 a 100 e viceversa, Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Grenoble, France, 1993
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California, 1994
• P.S.1 Museum, Long Island City, New York, 1994.
• Alighiero e Boetti, part of the project, Origin and Destination, Societe des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, 1994
• Alighiero Boetti, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; Musee d'Art Moderne, Villeneuve d'Ascq, France; Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Austria, 1996–97
• Alighiero Boetti: Mettere al mondo il mondo ("Bringing the World into the World") – Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and Galerie Jahrhunderthalle Hoechst, Germany, 1998
• Boetti; the maverick spirit of Arte Povera, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1999
• Zero to Infinity, Arte Povera 1962–1972 – Tate Modern, London,' Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 2001–2002
• When 1 is 2: The Art of Alighiero e Boetti – Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX, 2002
• Quasi Tutto, Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy, 2004.
• 2012 Tate Modern retrospective.
• "Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan" MoMA, NY, 2012.