Life Is Beautiful
Alighiero e Boetti made art with
a sense of humor -- from age six until the year he died
BY KELLY KLAASMEYER
In 1948 the artist Alighiero e Boetti tore a large piece
of brown paper into small squares that he then
"stacked into a rather unstable column." He
smoothed out and saved the silver paper linings of
cigarette packs from 1957 on, "without missing a
single one." In 1949 he tightly wound a yellow
tailor's tape measure and pushed it up to form a
"Tower of Babel." And since 1946 he has
"incessantly used various materials to start
fires." These accomplishments are chronicled in a
1967 artist's statement. Boetti signs it at the end,
adding his birth date: December 16, 1940. Some
rudimentary math reveals that he was six years old at the
time of his earliest artistic endeavors. It's a
wonderfully amusing, direct and unpretentious essay that
gives an incredible sense of Boetti's progression from a
kid investigating the world around him to an artist
investigating the world around him.
"When 1 is 2: The Art of Alighiero e Boetti," a
retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum curated by
Paola Morsiani, takes us through 29 years of the artist's
work. Boetti, who added the e ("and") to his
name in the 1970s to denote the duality of the self, was
associated early on with the Italian
Arte Povera movement. Povera can mean "poor,"
"plain" or "raw," and artists with an
Arte Povera sensibility created art in a process of
open-ended experimentation. The work rejected traditional
artistic hierarchies in materials as well as in
exhibition spaces and the marketplace. The communal
aspects of art-viewing and art-making were emphasized
over art as a consumer object. This '60s spirit of
eclectic openness and collaboration remained with Boetti
throughout his career.
Boetti's epic "Untitled" -- Victoria Boogie
Woogie (1972) is an example of a passing thought taken to
its extreme. Italian stamps in the early '70s were
produced in seven different colors, indicating
denominations between five and 70 lira. Boetti wondered
how many different variations you could have of the
seven-stamp combination. It sounds like an idle musing or
a high school algebra word problem, but Boetti put his
musing into action with 35,280 stamps arranged in
different combinations on 5,040 envelopes.
Neatly presented in grids on 42 five- by three-foot
panels, the perfectly pasted rows of colored stamps looks
like a sea of pale pixels, or the nod to Mondrian implied
by the work's title. It isn't just a dry conceptual
exercise; all of the envelopes were mailed by Boetti to
himself. Sent from various cities in Italy to the stamped
address at his home in Turin, the neatly aligned, tidy
grids of color are interrupted by the imprecise, human
randomness of cancellation stamps, which are scattered
across the exacting rows like errant coffee cup rings.
The Italian postal service became a collaborator in
Boetti's system.
Meter (1967) is one of many works that reveal the
artist's wit. In the strongly graphic black-and-teal
rectangular image, there is a series of seven white
rounded rectangles containing familiar forms. It looks
like your car's odometer. Each of the seven windows is
caught at the perfect moment when half of one number and
half of another are in the middle of rotating. 5999999 is
changing to 6000000, and you feel the same ridiculous
sense of anticipation that you have when your car is
about to roll through its 100,000th mile.
For Airplanes (1981), Boetti asked a comic strip artist
to draw a series of planes: Single engines, passenger
jets and military bombers of various sizes are scattered
across an orange-red sky like a flock of disparate birds.
The technology of flight put to the service of war,
travel and crop dusting. The background of the
small-scale image is filled in with obsessively scribbled
waves of red ballpoint pen that carefully stop at the
edges of the images.
In The Six Senses (1973), an expanse of paper is
compulsively covered with blue ballpoint pen, the surface
painstakingly inked in neat grids of linear strokes.
Several people ultimately worked on the piece; Boetti's
only requirement was that it be executed by a man and a
woman. The surface is softly grained by the marks of the
pen. Ballpoint has to be the most labor-intensive thing
to use to pigment a surface, with the exception of maybe
silverpoint. Some areas are dark and rich, almost solid,
made with a fresh pen held by a strong and rested hand.
In other, paler areas, the pen and the strength and
patience of the mark-maker wear out or a new person takes
over with a less emphatic approach. The densely marked
surface looks woven, like Boetti's projects with Afghan
embroidery.
Boetti first visited Afghanistan in 1971. Before the
Soviets, the Taliban and the United States blew the
country to hell, it was an exotic destination for
intrepid hippie wanderers fascinated with the exoticism
and spirituality of the local culture as well as cheap
travel and drugs. While there, Boetti studied with a Sufi
master and even opened a tiny hotel -- One Hotel -- in
Kabul. The artist repeatedly contracted with wonderfully
skilled Afghan women to embroider his works. After the
Soviets invaded in 1979, he continued his collaboration
with the women, now refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan. 
Executed in vibrant colors determined by the weavers
whose only instruction was that the colors be used in
equal measure, the embroidered pieces are the most
visually striking of Boetti's works.
Everything (1988-89), a dynamic 42- by 92-inch rectangle
of fabric, is densely embroidered with silhouettes of,
basically, everything. A guitar, dog, sunglasses, wine
bottle, car, rhino, ladder, heart, bikini top.Like the
ballpoint pen marks, the laboriously stitched, slender
threads mass together to cover the surface in riotously
colored, overlapping shapes. It's a fantastic record of
the women's intense engagement with the surface.
Many of Boetti's works have the artist himself as the
conceptual grounding point. For Calligraphy (1971),
Boetti had the names and addresses of everyone in Italy
who shared his phone number elegantly engraved on a brass
plaque. Oddly, the stock exchange in Milan made the list.
The piece has a mocking gravitas and looks as if it
should be commemorating something terribly important.
Boetti also immortalized two dates, both in engraved
brass and in the fanciful embroidery of the Afghan women.
One date, the 16th of December 2040, was exactly 100
years after the artist's birth. The other was his
hoped-for date of death, July 11, 2023. He would have
been 82 years old. Unfortunately Boetti missed the mark
by 29 years; he died in 1994 at the age of 53. The brass
plaques seem important and momentous; how could his body
have the audacity to give out and defy the pronouncement
of such an authoritative-looking object? It's unknown
whether Boetti revealed the significance of the dates to
the embroiderers, but the 2023 date has a hopeful
ascendancy to its floral pattern.
The latest work in the show presents Boetti in the form
of a seven-foot bronze statue. His face looks aged, and he wears a
slightly rumpled and conservative suit. The image is a
far cry from catalog photographs of the young, hip,
sunglassed Boetti, resplendent in au courant velvet. The
statue holds a hose in his hand, dousing his fully
clothed self with water. As the fine spray of water runs
down his face, steam rises from the heated bronze head.
It's a self-portrait that negates the egomania of bronze
statuary with a wry, self-aware wit.
Houstonpress.com KELLY KLAASMEYER ŠSept.2002
BOETTI MAP: Mappa del mondo, 1989
embroidery on cloth
55 1/8 x 86 5/8 inches
140 x 220 cm
SW 94243
Private Collection
DUBLIN. STATEMENTS ON ART, A FORUM
THAT IS NEVER ACTIVATED ???
In the Hugh Lane Gallery until Dec 8th a guy called
Sean Shanahan who is 42 yrs old has some
panels described as paintings that he has made for a
suite of rooms in Charlemount House in the vicinity of
Dublin. As these panels are unframed, and when asked to
explain himself, he said "The room the painting is
in is the frame."
As for the art buff who stands infront of one of these
panels he observes: "What is important is that the
viewer is aware of the fact that they are standing
infront of the painting...it places you there...Good art
has something about it that brings out our own
mortality" Two of these panels are entitled You're
Dead.Associating them with past art forms Shanahan
has chosen to associate them with Joseph Conrad's book,The
Shadow Line. You will observe that the photographer
Dara Mac Donall, the only artist present in the gallery
has taken account of.the shadow line.............
Degrade first the arts if
you'd mankind degrade
Hire idiots to paint with
cold light and hot shade,
Give high price for the
worst, leave the best in disgrace,
And with labours of
ignorance fill every place. - William Blake
The Public
versus the Abstract Artist
Doesn't anybody out there realize these people
don't bother lining up against someone unless that person
is the real thing. Unless he or she has something
important to say. That's when they start doing everything
in their considerable power to drown them out. I watched
it happen - watched them start pulling out all the stops,
as they kept raising the bar higher and higher - using
that age old tactic that works every time. It's the
tactic of demanding impossible proofs, always one more,
and then another and another (meanwhile ignoring every
effort that is made, and damning everything that has
already been presented as inadequate) until finally there
is no more proof available.........(Anonymous)
The
Agreement
For Shane Cullen the signing
of the Belfast Agreement was the beginning of a most
remarkable period of collaboration with the Arts Councils
of Northern Ireland and England.
"I really
think the Agreement represents a huge cultural shift,
politically and historically, in terms of Ireland's
relationship with Britain, as much as between the
nationalists and the unionists in Northern Ireland."
11,500 words
have been mechanically carved in a classic typeface, on
these limestone tablets, marking and celebrating the
event.
Let us hope that
these Irish tablets, as those of Moses,will not be now
thrown down by Shane Cullen, but receive respect down the
ages, not only from the communities in Northern Ireland,
but also by the English Government, who to date have
unfortunately remained equivocal about the true meaning
of these historical words. For recently, by dismembering
the Northern government, and failing to set up elections
immediately, they have indicated, as ever, that they
enjoy the status quo of their power, and not the proof
that Nationalists, under the terms of this Agreement,
have Rights, or that they certainly out-performed their
Unionist partners in ability to act in their ministries,
applauded by the public
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