Alighiero Boetti's Tribute to the Giants of the Skies
This piece was originally published in Sorbet magazine, issue no. 3, spring 2014
Although a large number of Boetti’s Aerei are privately owned (the
Fondation Carmignac owns a 1989 Aerei), the very first is part of the
Los Angeles Museum of Art’s collection, while Aerei, 1983 – a triptych
in black biro on paper, mounted on canvas is owned by the Museum of
Modern Art, New York. In 2012 five of the artist’s Aerei were exhibited
along with a set of six jigsaws, each produced in an edition of 4000 for
distribution to Austrian Airlines’ passengers, as part of Tate Modern’s
seminal retrospective, ‘Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan’, an exhibition which
subsequently travelled to the Museum of Modern Art, having opened at
the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in October 2011. Boetti is represented
by Sprüth Magers Gallery (Berlin/London) and has been honoured
posthumously with several significant exhibitions including at the Museum
für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (1998), the Whitechapel Gallery (1999),
Gagosian Gallery, New York (2001) and Houston’s Contemporary Art
Museum (2002). In 2001 the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was
dedicated entirely to Boetti’s work.
Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994), now considered one of the most
significant figures of Post-War European art, might variously be described
not only as a conceptual artist and one time member of the Italian Arte
Povera movement, but as a maverick, a magician, a musician and a
mathematician. Enigmatic, and with a range of eccentric and eclectic
interests, Boetti and his oeuvre continue to fascinate. This can be attributed
to the sheer diversity of his creative output, its often quixotic conceptual
ingenuity and global political sensibility. Indeed, the work of a number of
Contemporary artists, including Maurizio Cattelan, Francis Alÿs, Frances
Stark and Jonathan Monk, is heavily indebted to him.
Born in Turin, Boetti received no formal artistic training, abandoning
his studies at the University’s business school to move into his first studio
in 1966, and the following year had his first solo show at the Galleria
Christian Stein in Turin, where he exhibited a series of objects. The artist
never referred to his work as ‘sculpture’ at this time, insisting instead on
the term ‘object’. It was as a result of this exhibition that Boetti came
into contact with the Genoese art critic Germano Celant, responsible for
the descriptive label Arte Povera (literally, poor art) used in reference to
the work Boetti and his Italian/Turinese contemporaries were producing
at the time, using unconventional, industrial and often mass produced
materials in order to present “visual and plastic reality as they happen
and as they are”. However, by the following year, Boetti had begun to
distance himself from what he considered to be the relative insularity and
intransigence of the Arte Povera movement: In the spring of 1969 Boetti
left his studio, which he felt had become a sort of depot, full of asbestos
lumber and cement, starting “again from scratch, with a pencil and a
piece of paper.” (Gabriele Perretta, ‘L’arte, gli artisti e il ‘68’, Flash Art,
no. 147, Milan, Dec 1988-Jan 1989, p 69).
The year 1969 proved to be a definitive one for Boetti, marking as
it did a shift in perspective, resulting in the abandonment of object making
in favor of a far more conceptual aesthetic. He began to travel
widely, at a time when Arte Povera was gaining considerable recognition
elsewhere in Europe and offering a further means of distancing himself
from association with what was essentially a national movement. In 1970
Boetti holidayed in Morocco and in 1971 he made the first of many trips
to Afghanistan, continuing to visit at least twice a year until the Soviet
invasion of 1979. In 1974 he travelled to Guatemala followed by sojourns
in Sudan and Ethiopia in 1975, Japan in 1980, Zanzibar and Tanzania in
1985. Musing on what, to Italian curator Achille Bonito Oliva, seemed to
be such an innate and insatiable desire to travel, Boetti reflects: “Perhaps
it comes from this schizophrenic idea that one cannot stay always in the
same place” (Alighiero e Boetti in an interview with Achille Bonito Oliva,
1973, translated by Paola Morsani in Paola Morsani, When 2 is 1: The
Art of Alighiero e Boetti, Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 2002,
p.93). Subsequently, he has spoken too of his childhood love of Paul Klee’s
Moroccan watercolors and of an exhibition held at the Fondation Maeght in
Vence, France which brought together all of the beautiful things that Andre
Malraux, then the French minister for Cultural Affairs, had acquired on
his travels around the world. It was here that Boetti encountered “a global
vision of art” for the first time. He recalled that “it was a concentration
of completely unknown worlds, new images, new desires, new ideas, new
cultures…” (Alighiero e Boetti, ‘A Text for Frederic’, in Alighiero e Boetti,
Frederic Bruly Bouabre, World Envisioned, exh. cat., Dia Centre for the
Arts, New York, 6 Oct 1994-25 Jun 1995, p.96).
Boetti’s fascination with Afghanistan proved central to the articulation,
fabrication and mass production of his own “global vision”, resulting in
his iconic Mappe, a spectacular series of embroidered world maps and
arguably his most iconic work. Boetti was to commission well over 200
maps - large tapestries in which the landmass of each country is delineated
by its respective national flag. They are unique in their different and largely
unpredictable color combinations, chosen deliberately, without Boetti’s
consultation, by their Afghani fabricators. Boetti delighted in this “element
of surprise” likening it to that sense of “disorder invading the formal order
of the grid”. Indeed, order versus disorder is a familiar binary in Boetti’s
oeuvre, featuring too in the artist’s truculent series of Aerei [Airplanes].
The Aerei first appeared in 1977, and were to become a long-term
on-going series. Boetti had been collecting, tracing and re-tracing images
of airplanes printed in newspapers and magazines for some time up until
this point, reproducing them in 1975 as part of an 81 part print portfolio
Insicuro noncurante, which included past projects as well as works yet to
be completed. Produced in partnership with the architect, cartoonist and
illustrator Guida Fuga, the first Aerei is a beautiful blue watercolor teeming
with hand drawn planes of all shapes and sizes. Exhilarating to behold,
Aerei is an impossibly exciting combination of a scene at once visually
cacophonous and yet artfully orchestrated, in which the action might
even be described as balletic. Frenetic and energetic, one feels a barely
contained sense of the kinetic potential inherent in such a vision. There is
a sense too of unbridled joy, of liberation, of supreme weightlessness and
of a certain kind of authorial delight in the power of the imagination to
realise such fantastical happenings. Boetti and Fuga appear to make use
of a wide variety of airplanes in this triptych: fighter jets and passenger
planes, cargo craft and two-seater jets, everything from early propeller
engines to Concorde, and yet on closer inspection Tate Modern curator,
Mark Godfrey points out that almost all of these airplanes were made
either in Russia or in America. He sees Aerei as an arguably Cold War
work, whilst admitting that the majority of images of planes that the duo
would have had access to in contemporary publications would have been
from these countries.
Boetti liked the initial image and the contrast between the color of
the sky and the white of the planes so much that he photographed the
inaugural Aerei, 1977, thereby making it easily reproducible and the basis
of the majority of subsequent iterations. Throughout the late 1970s and
up until the mid to late 1980s Boetti produced a whole series of Aerei
as a result of his collaboration with Fuga, commissioning a variety of
burgeoning artists as well as unknown amateurs to fill in the sky, for each
of the photographic prints he provided them with, either in biro or using
ink and watercolours. As well as varying the background colors (red, green,
black and blue) and the medium used, Boetti also played around with the
overall size of his compositions, making several tiny reproductions as well
as a large number on the same scale as the original triptych. Idiosyncratic
and instantly recognisable, both the biro works and those executed in
watercolor are, to my mind, equally beautiful, the excess ink in the latter
forming limpid blue pools on the photographic paper to strikingly abstract
effect. Those executed in biro possess a kind of chromatic sensuality that is
utterly mesmeric, each completely unique, each differing subtly in terms
of color gradation and undulation of line. The rippling effect this creates
is brilliantly illustrated in the blue 1983 Aerei.
Boetti conceived his biro works as “concentrates of time” - time
being “the only magical thing that exists”. In a physical way they give
“the sensation of a huge, expanded time frame” (Alighiero e Boetti in an
interview with Bruno Cora, first published in A.E.I.O.U., no. 6, Dec 1982).
Indeed some of these works, such as the red Aerei executed between 1980
and 1985, like the Mappe, took years to complete. Boetti was fascinated
by the peculiarity of time, elaborating in 1978 on the impetus to make the
Aerei, he pondered, “today everything seems to me to be simultaneous”
(Alighiero e Boetti in an interview with Jean-Christophe Ammann, Alighiero
Boetti (trans. Olimpia Isidori and Teresa Kittler, Basel: Kunsthalle Basel,
1978). According to the artist’s daughter, the inspiration for the work came
one afternoon as they were lying side by side on the grass gazing up at the
sky. Agata Boetti remembers her father remarking on the nascent vision
of a plane flying high above them and asking, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful
if the sky was filled with them?” (Agata Boetti in conversation with Mark
Godfrey, Mark Godfrey, Alighiero e Boetti, Yale University Press, London,
2010, p.256). It is an image that indicates Boetti’s continuing pursuit of
profusion and seriality. A critic and close friend of the artist, Giovan Battista
Salerno writes: Boetti’s works “capture chaos without diminishing it”;
when thinking about them “one can always cross over from one work into
another, while maintaining the same degree of precision: In Alighiero e
Boetti’s work, if there is a route, it is one that leads where routes branch
out, bifurcate and multiply” (Giovan Battista Salerno, ‘Alighiero e Boetti’,
Parkett no. 24, 1999, p45).
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-director of Exhibitions and Director of
International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London has repeatedly
underscored the importance of Boetti’s work. Obrist visited Boetti’s
studio in 1986, remembering it to be “the most important epiphany of
my life” (Hans Ulrich Obrist in an interview with Mark Godfrey in Oct
2010, Mark Godfrey, Alighiero e Boetti, Yale University Press, London,
2010, p319). In the early 1990s, not long before Boetti’s death aged only
53, Obrist asked him if he could think of any unusual venues in which
he would like to show his work. Boetti spoke of having an exhibition on
an airplane. Obrist, along with curator Joseph Ortner, whose Museum
in Progress involved collaborations with unorthodox venues, contacted
Austrian Airlines, which subsequently published six of Boetti’s watercolor
Aerei in its in-flight magazine Sky Lines. To accompany the publication,
Boetti designed a set of jigsaw puzzles based on images of Cieli ad alta
(High skies), re-workings of the 1977 Aerei triptych. The jigsaws were
then given to passengers on Austrian Airlines’ flights. Returning to the
game-forms of Boetti’s earliest sculptural objects such as Dama (wooden
‘chequerboards’ composed of a square tray and a number of engraved,
patterned blocks) and Castata, both 1967, and recalling the puzzle structure
of works like Pack (a cylindrical container filled with cracked cement) and
the later Tutto series, the jigsaws were manifestations of his delight in the
creativity inherent in child’s play. This was also another instance of the
artist relinquishing the fabrication of the finished work as he had done
with the Aerei and with Mappe, as in this case the jigsaws would be made
by, taken apart and remade by children. The large expanse of blue sky
meant that fitting the pieces of the jigsaw together required patience, or
rather, to quote Boetti’s maxim: “giving time to time”, while the player
was moving at huge speed through the skies. Not only was this a work
that presented an image of air travel but it was also a work about a kind
of utopian awe synonymous with air travel, and the artist’s long lived
desire, to quote another of Boetti’s aphorisms and the title of an earlier
series of biro diptychs, “mettere al mondo il mondo” [to put the world
into the world, or to give birth to the world].
