Alighiero e Boetti
A constant factor in these three exhibitions of work by Alighiero e Boetti is the investigation of order within apparently disordered spaces. In Mille Fiumi più lunghi (entitled in English Classifying the Thousand Longest Rivers of the World), 1977–82, Boetti imposes the Western rationality of the encyclopedia on the rivers’ chance geographic locations. A tapestry, sewn by artisans in Afghanistan, shows a listing of the rivers’ names in order of their lengths, which are also embroidered in. This transformation of natural data—the varying extents of the rivers’ courses—into objective, serial data shows a need for control that is not seen in the work’s manual execution, for Boetti delegated this task to others, the anonymous artisans who sewed the project. Rather, his control lies in his need to eliminate all emotionality from the perception of reality. To enumerate, codify, serialize—these are automatic operations that do not require personal involvement. Similarly, the series of names and numbers, embroidered in small dotted strokes, are like computer characters. The enormous tabulation is in long regular lines, a huge encyclopedia page from which all description, all adjectives have been removed, leaving only the data of classification.
But there is a veiled sense of risk beneath this apparent neutrality. This is not a computer piece, and although the writing is serial, one can trace in the letters and the individual dots that compose them certain unevennesses, greater or lesser weights, the fluidity in the passage of a thread through the weave—elements that expose the project to countless impediments of fate. It is relevant that after the project was turned over to the Afghani embroiderers in 1977, the subsequent invasion of that country by the Soviets threw the work into uncertainty. But against all predictions (including Boetti’s), five years later it appeared. Thus one cannot avoid a double reading of the piece—as a work that is both planned and open-ended, that contains within itself the contradictory elements of order and chance.
Molo-la jetée-pier shows the closed form of a pier, left white and surrounded by a blue, red, green, and black field. Once again Boetti has had this work executed by others, furnishing an outline to be filled in using various colored ballpoint pens. Thus one part of the piece is geometrical, delimited by fixed laws, while another is automatic writing, scribble. The series of colors implies the possibility of indefinite continuity, but here the open-ended character of the work is denied.
In Senza titolo (Untitled), 1982, Boetti himself intervenes. The work consists of an empty white space on a wall enclosed by four pieces of paper that mark off the four sides of a rectangle. Using his left hand, Boetti has written phrases on the scraps of paper. The open/closed space of the wall, the casual tearing of the paper, and the labored rhythm of the left-handed writing all contribute to a unity derived from negatives, from opposites, from absence. The vertiginous fall of Boetti’s language, its missing words, give a troubled feeling, and the impossibility of naming things here except through negation is the opposite of the tranquil listing of rivers in Mille Fiumi più lunghi.
It is as if Boetti wants to try out every possible linguistic strategy, multiplying them by the use of randomness and the clumsy left hand, and searching for language’s essence. The concept of the opposite, the mirror image, is pivotal in the artist’s work; his left-handed writing here introduces the unlimited but hidden potential of that sphere. The work suggests a crisis of the concept of identity in its exposure of Boetti’s other self, the “sinister” (in the word’s sense of “leftward” as well as its usual meaning), unknown side of his life.
—Ida Panicelli
Translated from the Italian by Meg Shore.
