Alighiero Boetti

First of all Iprefer thought

 

Alighiero Boetti was an artist who believed in duality and in the power of thought, and as such is both artist and conceptualist. His main preoccupation was finding new ways of reflecting both the world we live in and how we fit into that world. This duality is addressed to those who see without understanding and those who think they understand but don’t see. His informal art education with the Arte Povera movement reveals the questioning of art made from inexpensive materials. Above all, he derives his art from relationships with men and women, from journeys, as well as from his continual search for his place in the world

 

Born in Turin to Corado Boetti, a lawyer, and Adelina Marchisio, a violinist, the young Boetti began business studies at the University of Turin but left mid-way to dedicate himself to art. His fascination with mathematics and philosophy, as well as alchemy and the esoteric led him to Paul Klee and the writings of Herman Hesse, both early inspirations; later he became drawn to the works of German painter Wols and the cut canvases of Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899-1968).  Boetti’s career as an artist however was born during a journey to Paris in 1962 where he discovered the work of Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), and without doubt, that of Jean Fautrier, with whom he was close. There he discovered raw materials: earth, straw, strong colours – natural and primary – and linear repetition, which would later lead him to his biro drawings.

 

At the beginning of the 60s in Turin, Boetti became involved with the Arte Povera movement, whose members included among others, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis and Guilo Paolini. Well-known for their use of everyday materials including wood, cardboard and aluminum their aim was to create contrast with the industrial sensibility of American Minimalism. At the same time, they employed subversive avant-garde tactics, such as performance and installations considered very unconventional at the time. Boetti’s relationship with the movement was, although short lived, certainly not anodyne.

 

In 1968, Boetti produced one of his most famous works Gemelli (twins); a black and white photo montage where he represents himself as a double portrait in which he appears to be holding the hand of his twin but is in fact announcing future combinatory approaches, namely compositional games. In the same year, he produced Shaman-Showman (1968) another photo montage in which the artist appears as a ‘split figure’ half-shown, half hidden and Viaggi postal (1969). These works can be seen as a turning point in which he explores many of his enduring themes: duality, multiplicity, relationships, travel, the passage of time, and most notably, chance. Changing his name to Alighiero è Boetti (Alighiero and Boetti) in 1972 was both a statement of this aforementioned duality and a way of differentiating his relationship to the world from his relationship with the world. This decision left him free to engage in ideas uncluttered by previous work, driving him to explore the world: the Middle East, South America, Japan the United States, before choosing Afghanistan and its people as a traveling and artistic base. Afghanistan was a world away from the Italian ‘years of lead, it was an unspoiled place of great natural beauty: “I considered traveling from a purely personal, hedonistic point of view.” And on another occasion: “I was fascinated by the desert… the bareness, the civilization of the desert.”

By the 1970s, he had turned his back on his preoccupation with surfaces and opposites. Whether it was as a direct result of his new life in Afghanistan or other stimuli, he became more of a dreamer, interested in complex, visual systems. The overly cryptic nature of some of his later work became impenetrable to almost anyone other than the artist: Autoritratto (alfabetomuto)(1972), Untitled, (1973), 24 letters / 24 drawings, which follows the series I Vedenti (1967), also coded.

 

Having sought ‘a distant thing’, Boetti arrived in Afghanistan in spring ’71, staying first in a cheap hostel where he was inspired to create 720 Letters from Afghanistan (1972). In this piece he ‘plays’ with 6 stamps of different values and colors, combining them into a progressivemathematical permutation by completing all possible combinations and alternations. He sent the finished work of 720 letters to the Sperone Gallery in Turin. In need of stamps, he elicited the help of a hostel waiter who showed Boetti such gracious service that a friendship blossomed between them. One day Boetti asked his new friend about his dreams for the future. “I would love to have my own hotel,” said the young man. “And if I did, I would run it in such a way that you would fall in love.” Those words cast the dye for a new life for Boetti, who returned to Kabul in the autumn followed by his wife (art critic, Annemarie Suzeau) and young son. They found the waiter Gholam Dastaghir and together they set up the ‘One Hotel’ financed by Boetti as an art project, where he had both his studio and home. It was here that he found his true artistic identity through what would later become his seminal work: ‘Mappa’.

 

He commissioned Afghan women at a nearby embroidery school to create a map of the world using the flags of those countries as content. The advantage to this approach was that he constantly worked with or collaborated with both artists and non-artists, although he never dictated their role, thereby allowing the work to grow and form as a consciousness of many, instead of one. This can be seen in his tapestries, including Ordine e Disordine ("Order and Disorder" or: "Order is Disorder" 1973) or later Fuso Ma Non Confuso ("Mixed but not mixed up"1987) where he worked with embroiderers in Pakistan and Afghanistan and let them decide the colours and finished style, whilst keeping his words.

From these concepts he went on to create and commission nearly 150 Mappa in total, whose irreverent take on national self-definition, chart political progression, borders and influence: Sinai retained its Arab colors despite its post-1967 annexation by Israel, and the land area of Mozambique was colored with the Soviet-style flag of FRELIMO before the anti-colonial guerilla movement took power. Time, too, dictated differences from one Mappa to the next, near the end of the series: the singular Yugoslav bloc disintegrated into warring Balkan states, while the very last Mappa is the only one to depict the Russian flag.

 

Talking about his Mappadel Mondo in 1974, Boetti says: ‘For me the work of the embroidered Mappa is the height 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 Boetti died of a brain tumour on the 24th February, 1994 in Rome at the age of 53. He is arguably one of the most important conceptual artists the western art world has witnessed. His expression of art as a comprehensive vehicle through which his ideas are channeled goes well beyond his diverse use of materials or choice of technique. With his opus of maps he invites art into the world and reversely the world into art; linking cultures, countries and making cardinal points disappear in one single fusion. The inner language of the Mappa speaks for itself. ‘Given the fluctuations within politics and nations, Boetti’s Mappa constitute an ironic, irreverent take on national self-definition.’

 

Do you know why dates are so important? Because if you write, say, ‘1970’ on a wall, it seems like absolutely nothing, but in thirty years’ time…Dates have this beauty: the more time passes, the more beautiful they become.

 

Co-signed: Ann Kiev, Elvin Conrad