ENNESIMA | TRIENNALE OF MILAN

Vettor Pisani, L'eroe da camera. Tutte le parole dal silenzio di Duchamp al Rumore di Beuys (The Hero chamber. All the words from the silence of Duchamp to the Noise of Beuys), 1972.*

Ennesima. An Exhibition of Seven Exhibitions on Italian Art November 26, 2015–March 6, 2016 Triennale of Milan Viale Alemagna, 6 20121 Milan Italy

Triennale di Milano presents Ennesima. An Exhibition of Seven Exhibitions on Italian Art, curated by Vincenzo de Bellis, with the artistic direction of Edoardo Bonaspetti, curator of Triennale Arte. Not “one” exhibition of Italian art but, literally, an "exhibition of exhibitions" that, via seven paths, tries to explore the last 50 years of contemporary art in Italy, collecting more than 120 works and over 70 artists, from the early sixties through to the present day, in a display extending over the whole first floor of the Milan Triennale.

The title is inspired by a work by Giulio Paolini, Ennesima (appunti per la descrizione di sette tele datate 1973), the first version of which, dated 1973, is divided into seven paintings. This gives the number of exhibition projects included in de Bellis's exhibition for La Triennale: seven independent exhibitions, in the form of notes or suggestions that explore different aspects, links, coincidences and discrepancies, as well as the exhibition grammar in the recent history of Italian art.

Seven working hypotheses through which we can read, reinterpret and tell Italian art also through the analysis of some of the possible exhibition formats: from the solo exhibition to the site-specific installation, through to the thematic group show and chronological group show, the group exhibition on artistic movement and the medium-based group exhibition and on to the archive exhibition.

The path of Ennesima starts therefore with the thematic group exhibition entitled To Write an image, focused on the analysis of the centrality of iconography in the Italian artistic production from the sixties through to the present day, to continue with the group exhibition on an artistic movement entitled The image of writing: Group 70, visual poetry and verbal-visual investigations and dedicated to Visual Poetry, and then with Alessandro Pessoli: Sandrinus, the whole before the parts, the artist’s first solo exhibition in an Italian public institution. Central hub of the path is the medium-based exhibition The Performance Where Time Stands Still: Tableau Vivant between Reality and Representation​, hinging on performance, with the objective of presenting an analysis of its development by focusing on the tableau vivant sub-genre, followed by A Choral Archive: The via Lazzaro Palazzi Space, the Experience of Self-Management and AVANBLOB, the exhibition of documents that, 25 years later, pays homage to the activities of the artists working in Milan proposing a first attempt at historization. 2015: present time, indefinite mood, a generation-based exhibition ends the path, revolving around a selection of artists born between the mid-seventies and eighties. The whole project is finally studded with site-specific interventions at crucial points of the exhibition path, gathered under the title of Here, Now and Elsewhere: Site-specific and Thereabouts, that fit transversely in respect of the other six exhibitions.


Artists:
Vincenzo Accame, Vincenzo Agnetti, Alessandro Agudio, Mario Airò, Yuri Ancarani, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Francesco Arena, Stefano Arienti, Massimo Bartolini, Gianfranco Baruchello, Vanessa Beecroft, Alighiero Boetti, Monica Bonvicini, Lupo Borgonovo, Ugo Carrega, Elisabetta Catalano, Maurizio Cattelan, Giuseppe Chiari, Francesco Clemente, Roberto Cuoghi, Danilo Correale, Gino De Dominicis, Patrizio Di Massimo, Luciano Fabro, Lara Favaretto, Vincenzo Ferrari, Linda Fregni Nagler, Giuseppe Gabellone, Alberto Garutti, Francesco Gennari, Paolo Gioli, Massimo Grimaldi, Adelita Husni-Bey, Emilio Isgrò, Jannis Kounellis, Ketty La Rocca, Via Lazzaro Palazzi Space (Mario Airò, Vincenzo Buonaguro, Matteo Donati, Stefano Dugnani, Giuseppina Mele, Chiyoko Miura, Liliana Moro, Andrea Rabbiosi, Bernhard Rüdiger, Antonello Ruggieri, Adriano Trovato, Massimo Uberti, Francesco Voltolina), Marcello Maloberti, Lucia Marcucci, Nicola Martini, Fabio Mauri, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Eugenio Miccini, Luca Monterastelli, Liliana Moro, Maurizio Nannucci, Alek O., Martino Oberto, Luigi Ontani, Luciano Ori, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Diego Perrone, Alessandro Pessoli, Lamberto Pignotti, Vettor Pisani, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Paola Pivi, Luigi Presicce, Carol Rama, Pietro Roccasalva, Andrea Romano, Gianni Emilio Simonetti, Rudolf Stingel, Santo Tolone, Franco Vaccari, Francesco Vezzoli, Luca Vitone

 

*Vettor Pisani, L'eroe da camera. Tutte le parole dal silenzio di Duchamp al Rumore di Beuys(The Hero chamber. All the words from the silence of Duchamp to the Noise of Beuys), 1972. Collection Mimma Pisani. Courtesy Elisabetta Catalano Archive. Photo: Elisabetta Catalano.





Art_prospect

ALIGHIERO BOETTI | MAPS

Alighiero Boetti – Map of the World, 1971-72, embroidery

In 1971 upon his departure from Italy and his arrival in Afghanistan, Alighiero Boetti began a continuous collaboration with local weavers to produce embroidered tapestries, using himself only as the referential artist but considering the works a creation of a combined effort. Mappa del Mundo is a colorful, beautiful crafted tapestry showing each country emblazoned with its own flag, examining borders, frontiers, nationalism, and patriotism. The borders are emblazoned with Italian and Persian texts, selected by Boetti and the craftswomen. Over the next two decades, more than 150 Mappe of different colors and sizes were created in this way. From this, geopolitical changes were tracked throughout the world, transforming a simple idea into a political vision by visualizing territory disputes and regime changes. Halfway through their endeavour, the embroiderers selected a pink thread to fill in the oceans, completely altering the look of the works. Boetti loved the intrusion of chance into the artistry of the craftsmen, and let them select the thread colors from then on. Because of this, he has little say in the appearance of the maps.

About Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero e Boetti was born in Turin, Italy in 1940. Although not formally trained in art, Boetti was preoccupied with the theory of creativity from an early age. Traveling to Afghanistan at the beginning of the 1970s, he was introduced to the traditional craft of embroidery, which marked a turning point in the artist’s career. His fundamental concern with the relationship between order and disorder is manifest in his grid structures, derived from the magical squares, that feature sayings and aphorisms that stem from cultural, philosophical, mathematical and linguistic contexts.

He had exhibitions throughout Italy and the United States until his premature death in 1994. Boetti has been honored post-humously with several large-scale exhibitions, most notably at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Vienna in 1997 and the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main in 1998.

Alighiero Boetti – Map of the World, 1971-72, embroidery on linen, 200 x 360cm

Alighiero Boetti – Map of the World, 1979, embroidery, 86 x 139cm

Alighiero Boetti – Map of the World, 1979, embroidery, 93 x 131cm

Alighiero Boetti – Map of the World, 1984, embroidery

Alighiero Boetti – Map of the World, 1979-85, embroidery, 103 x 155cm

Alighiero Boetti – Map of the World, 1988, embroidery

Alighiero Boetti – Map of the World, 1989, embroidery

Alighiero Boetti – Map of the World, 1989, embroidery on fabric, 118 x 229cm

Alighiero Boetti – Map of the World, 1989-94, embroidery

Alighiero Boetti – Map of the World, embroidery

Alighiero Boetti – Map of the World, embroidery

http://publicdelivery.org/tag/alighiero-boetti/

ALIGHIERO BOETTI | MOMA

Alighiero Boetti, installation view at the Museum of Modern Art, Aug, 2012.

Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan

July 1–October 1, 2012

Alighiero Boetti at the Museum of Modern Art.

This retrospective, organized in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London, will be the largest presentation outside of Italy of works by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994) to date. Working in his hometown of Turin in the early 1960s amidst a close community of artists that included Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, among others, Boetti established himself as one of the leading artists of the Arte Povera movement.

Organized chronologically, the exhibition will span Boetti’s entire career beginning with his sculptural works, or objects as he preferred to call them, comprised of everyday materials including wood, cardboard, and aluminum. Brought together (many for the first time since Boetti’s seminal exhibition at Galleria Christian Stein in Turin in 1967) and installed in a dense configuration inspired by the original clustered presentation, these early works convey the material experiments of the period as well as notions of measurement and chance that Boetti would play with and revise throughout his career. While Boetti is often chiefly affiliated with the Arte Povera moment, Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan will consider Boetti beyond these brief years. In 1969 Boetti began exploring notions of duality and multiplicity, order and disorder, travel and geography, and he initiated postal and map works imagining distant places. For the work Viaggi Postali, begun the summer of 1969, Boetti sent envelopes to friends, family, and fellow artists but used imaginary addresses, forwarding each returned envelope to yet another non-existent place. Boetti thus created imaginary journeys for the people he admired. In other conceptual, mail art-related works made throughout the 1970s, Boetti would use different stamps and arrange them in permutations on the envelopes to compose his art, and send postcards picturing a monument in his hometown from places around the world. The exhibition brings together these and other works related to travel, geography, and mapping, many of which relate to his extensive travels to Afghanistan, where he operated the One Hotel (archival material from which will be on view) from 1971 until the Soviet invasion in 1979. During this period, Boetti began working with local artisans to produce embroideries such as the Mappas (maps), Arazzi (word squares), and Tuttos (literally, “Everything”), important examples of which will be included in the galleries and the Marron Atrium.

An important aspect of Boetti’s oeuvre is drawing, which runs as a constant throughout his work. A monumental Biro (ball point pen) drawing from 1973, spelling out the title “Mettere a mondo il mondo (Bringing the world into the world)” points to some of Boetti’s ideas about art making that were fundamental to his practice: that the artist, rather than inventing, simply brings what already exists in the world into the work; and that everything in the world is potentially useful for the artist. This exhibition will celebrate the material diversity, conceptual complexity, and visual beauty of Boetti’s work, bringing together his ideas about order and disorder, non-invention, and the way in which the work addresses the whole world, travel, and time, proving him to be one of the most important and influential international artists of his generation.

The exhibition is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Tate Modern, London.

The exhibition is organized at The Museum of Modern Art by Christian Rattemeyer, The Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator of Drawings.

The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of two anonymous donors.

Additional funding is provided by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

Related publication

Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan

Edited by Lynne Cooke, Mark Godfrey and Christian Rattemeyer, 2012

Hardcover, 277 pages

$38.00 ($34.20 members)

Learn more at MoMAstore.org 

Art_prospect

ALIGHIERO BOETTI | WITHOUT WORDS

Without words

Ann Jones – Art and Writing

Alighiero Boetti, Mettere Al Mondo Il Mondo (Bringing the World into the World), 1975

There are three paying exhibitions at Tate Modern at the moment. The Damien Hirst exhibition is being widely advertised and has been the subject of a lot of media attention. Of the other two, the Yayoi Kusama seems to have generated the most discussion. Hirst is of course a household name and Kusama was already firmly in the consciousness of Londoners with an interest in contemporary art following Walking in my Mind at the Hayward Gallery in 2009 which was heavily centred on her work, indeed her polka dot wrapping of the trees along the South Bank ensured that her work also reached a signifcant non-art audience. The Hirst and Kusama exhibitions are also the ones making the most – visual – noise in the gallery, and while the Hirst was proved mercifully quieter than I had expected when I visited, they do seem to be attracting the bigger crowds.

There were things I liked about the Hirst – it was good to see those early works again and entertaining to stare in horror at the worst excesses of his more recent output – and I really liked the Kusama exhibition (at some stage I may well write about both) but it’s the other show – Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan – that I found by far the most inspiring.



Mettere Al Mondo Il Mondo (detail)

In the late 1960s, Boetti was part of the Arte Povera movement in Italy, making art from unexpectedly ordinary – poor – materials. Though Tate Modern staged a major exhibition of Arte Povera work from the 1960s and early 70s in 2001, and usually includes work by these artists in its collection displays, and though other Arte Povera artists have been the subject of notable exhibitions in London in the last few years (such as Michelangelo Pistoletto at the Serpentine and Pino Pascali at Camden Arts Centre, both in 2011), this is the first real survey of Boetti’s work here. And it’s quietly fascinating.

Boetti is can’t just be defined as an Arte Povera artist though – he rejected the definition in the early 1970s – so that although Game Plan opens with work that is seen as falling within that movement, the show also is primarily based around his later work which defies such categorisation. The work is interesting in many ways and for many reasons and as usual I’m not going to attempt to do more than write about a couple of works. There was a lot here to like though so there’s every reason to suspect I’ll come back to Boetti again; the maps in particular seem likely to work their way in here at some point and I reckon Boetti may creep into a post about artists using other people to make the work. For today though I’s all about Boetti and the biro. And commas, I especially liked the commas.



Boetti made a number of works using biro inclusing a series of large scale drawings – for want of a better description – based around text and called Mettere Al Mondo Il Mondo (or Bringing the World into the World) which include the alphabet at the top or side of the work with a mass of scrawl. The only legible symbols are the commas, white space cut into the sea of blue biro, which punctuate the space and, in conjunction with the letters at the side or top of the page, allow the work to be decoded and become the text of the title.

The scale of these pieces is part of what makes them work so well for me – I’m not sure I’ve come across other examples of biro drawings on this scale, but they’re to be encouraged in my book – but the real fascination is in Boetti’s use of pattern and code, something that recurs throughout the exhibition. There is something mesmerising about these works that comes in the main from the intensity and repetitious nature of the marks and the negative space of the commas that punctuate the space.

Aerei, 1989

Elsewhere in the exhibition there are other works that have much in common with the biro text pieces – there are key approaches that Boetti used repeatedly – including other large scale biro pieces such as Aerei (orAirplanes), and biro sky wildly overcrowded with planes of many types.

Boetti’s work uses systems, patterns and codes in a way that is absorbing and at times funny. The work is highly conceptual but though the hand of the artist is generally absent nonetheless the work has real warmth. This is a show that gave me a lot to think about. This is work that speaks quietly but it’s well worth listening to.

Thanks to:    http://imageobjecttext.com/2012/05/09/without-words/

ALIGHIERO BOETTI

MAPPING ALIGHIERO BOETTI'S CARRER:
NEW BOOK AND TETE EXHIBITION CELEBRATES THE ITALIAN CONCEPTUAL ARTIST

Boetti’s Me Sunbathing in Turin, 19 January 1969

This month sees the opening of a brand new exhibition at the Tate Modern looking at the career of Alighiero e Boetti, one of the most important and influential Italian artists of the twentieth century. The Italian artist’s prolific, varied career is also the subject of a new book by the exhibition’s curator Mark Godfrey. Today we take a look at the life and works of this enigmatic figure.

Alighiero e Boetti (1940-1994) is one of the most significant figures of postwar European art, and one whose practices are still having a huge impact on younger artists. His powerful influence can be attributed to the material diversity of his work, its conceptual ingenuity and his political sensibility (as typified by his involvement in the Arte Povera movement). Boetti also took a keen interest in the relationship between chance and order, in various systems of classification (grids, maps, etc.), and non-Western traditions and cultural practices.

Boetti’s extremely varied artistic output is the subject of a new exhibition at the Tate Modern, Alighiero e Boetti: Game Plan (28 February  –  27 May 2012). Highlights include works never seen in the UK such as the iconic Self-Portrait 1993, a life-size bronze cast of the artist hosing his head with a jet of water.

Boetti, Self-Portrait (1993)

Boetti’s Life and Work

Alighiero Boetti was born in Turin. As a young man he had profound and wide-ranging theoretical interests and studied works on such diverse topics as philosophy, alchemy, esoterics, mathematics and music. At seventeen, Boetti discovered the works of the German painter Wols and the cut canvases of Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana, which were to have a profound influence on his later projects.

Working in his hometown of Turin in the early 1960s, Boetti began to create works out of unusual materials such as plaster, masonite, plexiglass, light fixtures and other industrial materials. He worked amidst a close community of artists that included Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, eventually establishing himself as one of the leading artists of the Arte Povera (poor art) movement.

Lampada annuale (Yearly Lamp), 1966

Boetti continued to work with a wide array of materials, tools and techniques, including Biro ball-point pens and postage stamps. Boetti’s artistic strategies are considered typical for Arte Povera, namely the use the most modest of materials and techniques, with the aim of taking art off its pedestal.

A famous example of his Arte Povera work is Lampada annuale (Yearly Lamp, 1966), a single, outsized light bulb in a mirror-lined wooden box, which randomly switches itself on for eleven seconds each year. This work, which is on display at the Tate modern, focuses both on the transformative powers of energy, and on the possibilities and limitations of chance – the likelihood of a viewer being present at the moment of illumination is remote.

Boetti disassociated himself from the Arte Povera movement in 1972 and moved to Rome. Despite this disassociation, he did not fully abandon some of the movement’s democratic and anti-elitist strategies. In 1973, he renamed himself as a dual persona Alighiero e Boetti (“Alighiero and Boetti”) reflecting the opposing factors presented in his work (individual and society, error and perfection, order and disorder).

His work engaged with the changing geopolitical situation of his time, much of it made on his travels to places such as Ethiopia and Guatemala and Afghanistan. Between 1971 and 1979 he set up a hotel in Kabul as an art project and created large colourful embroideries, the most famous of these were the Mappa, world maps in which each country features the design of its national flag.

Embroidered by artisans, the maps were the result of a collaborative process leaving the design to the geopolitical realities of the time, and the choice of colours to the Afghan women responsible for the embroidery. The maps delineate the political boundaries of the countries; (some nations, such as Israel, are not represented because the Taliban regime of Afghanistan did not then recognize their existence). In one map, the sea is unexpectedly coloured pink rather than blue, as landlocked Afghans had no tradition of mapping, certainly not of oceans. The embroidery of each map normally took one to two years and, in some cases, much longer due to external events.

Boetti, Mapp (1983)

The Soviet invasion of 1979 made Boetti’s operations in Afghanistan impossible, but he continued to work on his maps, shifting from Kabul to Peshawar in Pakistan, where the group of Afghan artisans had taken refuge.

His most ambitious project was a large embroidered piece titled Classificazione dei mille fiumi piu lunghi del mondo (Classification of the thousand longest rivers in the world, 1977). In characteristically blocky letters, this work spells the names of the world’s 1,000 longest rivers in descending order of length. It is based on a list that required more than seven years of research by Boetti and his first wife, Anne Marie Sauzeau, an art critic, and that is known to many scientists as the ‘Boetti List’.

In his Aerei (1977), or Airplanes series, Alighiero e Boetti left as negative space line drawings of modern and historical airplanes. Originally culled from popular magazine sources, these often mural-size images construct an illusionary space of action and movement (similar works based on Aerei were then commissioned for an in-flight magazine). Indeed, Boetti pursued an interest in the media, which eventually brought him to collaborate with the daily Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, for which he produced a drawing every day for a year. He continued his interest in the media in 1983, when he created a series of pencil drawings traced from the covers of popular magazines.

He died of a brain tumour in Rome in 1994 at the age of 53.

Aerei, 1989

Alighiero E Boetti by Mark Godfrey

Alighiero E Boetti by Mark Godfrey

Alighiero e Boetti by Mark Godfrey (the curator of the exhibition at Tate Modern) is the first book covering the whole career of this crucial artist to be published in English. Rather than present a linear account of the artist’s creative practice, the book contains linked chapters that expound the key subjects of Boetti’s art, and position this work in relation to that of his European and American contemporaries.

…

Alighiero e Boetti is available now from Yale University Press.

THANKS TO http://yalebooksblog.co.uk

ALIGHIERO BOETTI | MUSEO REINA SOFIA

Until February 5th, the Museo Reina Sofía of Madrid, exhibits a great collection of works by Alighiero Boetti (1940 – 1994), an Italian conceptual artist, considered to be a member of the art movement Arte Povera. Many of his pieces are maps embroidered by artisans in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a result of a collaborative process leaving the design to the geopolitical realities of the time, and the choice of colours to the artisans responsible for the embroidery.

From wikipedia: “For me the work of the embroidered Mappa is the maximum 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 e Boetti, 1974

That’s why the sea is painted in red, pink or yellow; while they were doing their work, the artisans didn’t know what meant the area with no-assigned-colour. Although as it has been said by the expert in Boetti with whom I have visited the exhibition, they even didn’t know the meaning of the whole image.

Boetti was a conceptual artist, but his work is also visually rich and joyful. Being a coproduction, after Museo Reina Sofía, the exhibition will travel to the Tate Modern and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Highly recommended.

http://www.museoreinasofia.es/exposiciones/actuales/boetti_en.html

ALIGHIERO E BOETTI

Avere fame di vento
1988-1989


Una parola al vento, due parole al vento, tre parole al vento, 100 parole al vento
1989


Alighiero e Boetti
Writing with Both Hands 1970
Photo: Paulo Mussat Sartor