A legend in his own lifetime: that was the charismatic Italian maverick Alighieri Boetti (1940 to 1994). The story of his life sounds quite improbable. A roving autodidact, steeped in alchemy and esoteric philosophy, he emerges out of nowhere as a youthful star of the 1960s arte povera movement before rejecting its success and disappearing, just as suddenly, into the wilds of Afghanistan.
It was said that he had gone to classify the world’s longest rivers, to study maths or start a hotel in Kabul: all of which proved true in their way. But Boetti could not be pinned down. In his comparatively short life he sent back such a variety of work from so many different places — Ethiopia, Japan, Pakistan, Guatemala — that he was rumored to be not one man but two: Alighiero and Boetti, just as his (self-adapted) name implies.
Tate Modern conspires with the mystery in a sense with its retrospective, titled Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan, of the artist’s work. The catalog biography gives nothing but the details of his birth and death. The curators do not try to corroborate the existence of his supposed 18th-century ancestor Sheikh Mansur, aka Boetti, leader of a Chechen uprising. They do not get into his drug habits or the tall stories of the One Hotel, except as an early instance of relational aesthetics. Their approach to Boetti is fastidious, reverent, scholarly.
Photo: AFP
But what it doesn’t fully entertain is the sheer joy of his art, its wayward and gorgeous appeal.
The opening rooms, for instance, have a buoyancy that plucks them straight out of art history. Here is Boetti’s absurdist Manifesto, matching the names of his arte povera comrades with tantalizing combinations of coded symbols. All would be revealed by a notary for a price if only you could trace him (and art-worlders tried, to Boetti’s delight). Here are his sweet ping pong signs spelling out the game on either side of an open door and his lightbulb that only shines for 11 seconds each year.
Should optimists hang around in hope; have pessimists just missed it? To this day, people stop and stare as if waiting for enlightenment.
These foolish things were all part of Boetti’s first solo show in 1967, crammed with cardboard creations that now look practically classical in their elegance. Two years later, with Me Sunbathing in Turin on Jan. 19, 1969, he lays himself across the floor in handfuls of concrete reminiscent of vertebrae, as if frozen to the bone. There is no discernible face but a bright butterfly alights roughly where the buttonhole might be. The artist was famously dapper.
Boetti’s self-portraits are eccentric, witty, prolifically inventive. They sling mud at the whole idea of summing oneself up in a single work. He is both shaman and showman in a tarot-card print (teasing Joseph Beuys). A postcard shows two of him holding hands with himself so convincingly one might be looking at twins in identical suits. The id and the ego are lovingly united: but which is Alighiero and which Boetti?
The elusive self-portraitist begins to slip away. In the late 1960s there are still some exquisite works that show his hand: a chessboard woven out of tracing paper and steel (but how?); the exquisite pencil drawings in which the faintest fluctuations of line release all kinds of ghostly suggestions across humble sheets of graph paper.
But he loved to collaborate, and gradually employed schoolchildren, students, pensioners and cafe locals across the globe. He relished the liberties they took with his projects, particularly the Afghans who embroidered his maps of the world with unexpected adjustments.
Boetti is still best known for these maps, each country worked in the colors and symbols of its flag, each embroidery a year and more in the making, the passage of time apparent in the subtle mismatches of color as the silks run out. The Afghans worked messages in Farsi along the borders and sometimes did the oceans in dazzling pink or black. Their own values were woven into the geopolitical picture, along with his: Sinai remains Arab even after Israeli annexation.
A passion for the visual image is what distinguishes Boetti from the next conceptualist. While his contemporaries were shooting themselves in the arm or filling tin cans with their own excrement, he was producing objects of idiosyncratic beauty. You see that in the multicolored embroideries based on mathematical progressions, in the Manifesto symbols that resemble some graceful cuneiform alphabet, and most especially in the stunning blue ballpoint pen works.
These vast panels, each tiny grid minutely colored in by different hands, shimmer like oceans or glow like blue skies, punctuated (literally) by white commas. Once again, these commas are coded and no doubt their secret meaning might enhance the experience. But to see them rising so vibrantly at Tate Modern — like birds or balloons — is to be reminded of what they signify: forward motion, not a period.
Continuity is not what one might expect from this Zelig of an artist, always turning up somewhere else, a foreigner in every photograph. But it’s one of this show’s revelations. Tate Modern stresses his consistency of principle — order and disorder, logic and randomness, quasi-mystical number systems — and this is undeniable. But it is also as laborious as the display itself, where the floor weavings are laid out like a carpet department and there are far too many maps in one gallery for each to retain its special character.
But the connections are there: in that glorious plane-crowded sky that looks stitched in silk and not scripted in Biro, in those little grids on paper and across the mesh of embroidery canvas, in the chessboards and friezes of hexagonal faces. Everything multiplies and everything is interwoven, the warp and weft of life come together no matter where you are. It may sound a spacey creed, blossoming out of Afghan poppies, but it produced sharp ideas and remarkable visions. Look closely at what might be Boetti’s signature embroidery, a mass of radiant silks scintillating like static, and a celebratory pun gradually materializes before your eyes: “I vedenti” — the sighted.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50