Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Boetti. Game plan. From  October 5, 2011 to February 5, 2012

(Two days ago it was May 2, 1971 – Alighiero Boetti)

Robert Lumley, Professor of Italian Cultural History at University College London: Alighiero Boetti was an artist who didn’t train as an artist. He started doing artwork, of which not many of the earliest examples have survived, and these early works – drawings, they are almost like technical drawings in spirit, in which he is taking common objects like cameras, microphone. He is obviously somebody that had great interest in the visual arts but he starts, really, without any training. And this is where it is very important that he was somebody who lived for a period of time in France, and they lived together in Turin. And the context of Turin is one in which, in the middle of the second half of the 1960s, there is a bubbling up of artistic activity, and so Boetti is able to find people with whom he can talk, with whom he can think, with whom he can share ideas, and this is where his work as an artist starts to take shape. It’s a city of quite extraordinary cultural richness at this time. If you look at literature, writers who are active in the city include Italo Calvino, they include Primo Levi. There is a very rich cultural life with many institutions, actually, functioning very well, like the public art institutions. So there is money, there are ideas, and there is a kind of enterprising spirit.

I think the subject of the “game” and the “play” is something which is an aspect of the art of the time, in as far as I am describing; a lot of young men, who are in their early mid-twenties, were experimenting, and there is a sort of social environment in which, I think, “performance” and “play” have an important kind of role. It’s an interaction which is part rivalry.

I think a way in which one can think about the “play” aspect is in relation to the figure of Pino Pascali. Pino Pascali becomes a friend of Boetti’s, and there is a strong aspect of “play”. There is, I think, a way in which both are fascinated by the idea of rediscovering a sort of childish, or child-like, fascination with the world, and the idea of playing with, in Boetti’s case, very often with words and numbers, letters of the alphabet, things that you learn in school, which he in a sense is kind of putting, sort of relearning, or reinventing. The idea of “plan” in Boetti is very important, and this comes, I think, with conceptual art, and the ideas that Sol Lewitt puts into paragraphs in conceptual art, which Boetti reads. Boetti becomes a friend of Lewitt’s, and there is a strong sense that the important thing is the idea, and the concept, the “plan” in a sense, and then the work comes after that, if you like. You set up a machine, you set everything ready, and then, once it is in motion, once the thing is being produced, in a way the plan is then, if you like, being operationalized. Let me give you an example of this, which is rather wonderful and is in the exhibition, which are the telegraphic works; these are works which are first sent to Gian Enzo Sperone by Boetti. And the first telegram goes like this: (Two days ago it was May 2, 1971 – Alighiero Boetti); the next telegram: (Four days ago it was May 2, 1971 – Alighiero Boetti), (Eight days ago…) and so on, until the last telegram sent: (8,192 days ago it was May 2, 1971). After that, there is a blank. After that, Boetti dies, effectively.

So, the game that is being played is the game of doubling, so that every time he sends a telegram, a double of the number of days have to pass before the next one is sent, and then, double of the number of days before the subsequent one, so his whole life, in a sense, is being measured in advance of him, but also, the telegram is looking backwards into a life that has already been lived, and obviously, it has mortality built into it, so there is a “game plan” but the game, inevitably, is going to be interrupted.