Alighiero Boetti: Game
Plan at the Museum of Modern Art
Alighiero Boetti, the Italian conceptual artist whose work
is currently showing in a retrospective, Alighiero
Boetti: Game Plan, at the Museum of Modern Art at 53rd Street
and 5th Avenue (and running through October 1st), once
said he considered manual skill to be secondary. It was Boetti’s belief that the artist’s job
is to take things from reality, to illuminate that which already exists. Said Boetti, “Everything, however small and
humble, always has a beginning and stems from reality.” However little manual skill is necessary in
the creation of Boetti’s work, it could be said that he is certainly in excess
of skill in areas within and beyond experimental art.
Boetti
created art based on systems—intensely complex systems of numbers, geometry,
coded words, and movable type. He was
interested in what he called “Order and Disorder,” what might at first seem to
be the chaos of the human mind metamorphosing through art into something
carefully planned and undertaken.
Whether hand-shaped concrete balls in a sunbathing self-portrait or a
boxy light that illuminates for 11 seconds once every year (not even the artist
knows exactly when), order and disorder, along with systemic pre- and
post-planning, give Game Plan much of
its mystery and flair.
Not all of Boetti’s work is
about the nature of the human mind.
Most, if not all, could be said to be about the artist himself. Not many of the works labeled as “portraits”
really resemble Boetti, but his soul-searching goes beyond outward appearance. For one, in an interesting if grisly
experiment, he sent two dates to two separate embroideries to be sewn onto two
cloths each. The two dates? December 16, 2040 and July 11, 2023, the
first being the day the artist would turn 100, the second being the date he
predicted for his death. (Boetti
actually died in 1994.) The difference
between the two sets of embroidered squares is huge, especially since he gave
no instructions other than the dates. This
is a common theme with Boetti, leaving much of his work up to chance to
punctuate his belief that the artist’s calling, as he says, is “bringing the
world into the world.”
Another interest of the artist is
duality, and the belief that his two personalities, Alighiero and Boetti,
represented order and disorder respectively.
(He would often sign his pieces Alighiero e Boetti, or Alighiero and
Boetti.) He fabricated a picture, which
he called Gemelli (Twins), of the
personalities holding hands with each other (in fact just a clever duplication
in which the artist holds hands with himself).
It is interesting to survey the artist’s communications, so to speak,
with himself about the nature of his two personalities. He even went so far as to draw with his right
hand as Alighiero and his left as Boetti.
Beyond the introspection of his
earlier years, some of Boetti’s greatest work is embroidered, including a
series of his most famous creations, the Mappe
(Maps), on display in both the museum’s atrium and the exhibit’s continuation
on the sixth floor. For each Mappa (one is seen above), Boetti obtained a traced world
map and filled each of the countries with its flag, creating a beautiful image
of the world as divided into borders and nationalities. He made 150 of these Mappe, each one slightly different from the last, always improving,
tweaking, and changing small bits of the work from one to the other. One thing he always did, though, was leave
the color of the oceans up to the seamstresses who produced the Mappe.
It is the one piece of this work he left up to chance, but, like
much of the things Boetti leaves up to chance, the pink and black and blue
oceans are beautiful. What one comes
away with is that Boetti, though he does venture occasionally into the mundane
and uninteresting, is just as great an artist whether he controls his final
product or not. It takes a talented man
to achieve that distinction.
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