ierimonti gallery
“The conditions for a passionate life existed, but I had to destroy them in order to salvage them.�
Alighiero Boetti, 1969
“In 1948 I tore a large sheet of brown paper to get little rectangular pieces that I piled up, and with which I erected a rather unstable column. In 1954 I straightened out a piece of corrugated cardboard with a surface area of a square meter. Since 1957, without interruption, I have been smoothing out the silver paper from cigarette boxes. In 1962 I began to detach the filters from cigarettes, with which I created long strips; in the case of the Murattis, I was started to note an extremely interesting granular stratification. In 1958, under the guidance of Mr. Sergio Vercellino, a resident of Vagliumina (Biella) and an agriculturalist, I cut, with a scythe, about 3 m3 of grass. In 1950 about twenty small ice cream glasses, which I collected with some difficulty, were inserted one inside the other so as to form an arch. In the same year I filled a little plastic box with some twelve little matchboxes, and with a great deal of difficulty I bought a packet of Marlboro which I soon took apart, flattened and stretched out. In 1949 I had rolled up a meter of yellow fabric and put my little finger in it to form a kind of tower of Babel. In 1953 I took a red or blue rubber band and stretched it with the four fingers of my right hand to form a square. A pile of sand about 30 cm. high was made in 1949, in Alassio, where I also dug a big hole until I found water. The first pile of matches and the first bundle of pencils date back to 1947. There were also countless works either with salt water or aqueduct water, or with other liquids of various kinds. Using a pencil as a ruler I cut up a manifesto in 1948, and in the same year, if I remember correctly, I poured an inkpot into a glass full of sawdust. In April 1951 I melted tinfoil and other metals and poured them into some water. The first experiments with a sheepskin that I squashed against some glass, not to mention the experiment of pouring liquid sugar on the marble kitchen table, took place in 1952-53. Bending a piece of rubber be- tween two fingers, rolling a sphere on a plane inclined by myself to this end, rolling up a soft wire inside a pencil, mixing different colored powders, these are the works carried out between March and April 1949. From 1946 onwards, I have continuously poked fires with the help of various materials. In 1954 it took me three days to glue together a manuscript that I had torn into a thousand little pieces; two hours were enough to put in a vertical position, in a line, 342 matches; it took me a moment to put a weight on a spider’s web; I took advantage of the early hours of the afternoon to strip off the bark of a tree to see its smooth, moist surface.”
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1. CONTATORE
2. PREFISSI
3. PAVIMENTO
4. GIULIO PAOLINI E A E B
5. ROSSO GILERA
6. ROSSO GUZZI
7. AW : AB = L : MD
8. MANIFESTO
9. GEMELLI
10. GIOCARE
11. CITTA’ DI TORINO
12. GHISE
13. SHAMAN SHOWMAN
14. ITERVALLO
15. TERRITORI OCCUPATI
16. SAN BERNARDINO
17. PERCOMUNICAZIONI
18. CIMENTO DELL’ARMONIA E DELL’INVENZIONE
19. ORIGINALE
20. PAGINA DI MATEMATICA
21. 1970
22. PIETRO GALLINA RITRATTO DI A E B
23. ESTATE 1970
24. 32 X 32 - 24
25. 31 X 31 + 39
26. DUE DISEGNI DI SALVO
27. GRANBACINO
28. CIO’ CHE SEMPRE PARLA IN SILENZIO E’ IL CORPO
29. CIO’ CHE SEMPRE PARLA IN SILENZIO E’ IL CORPO
30. CIO’ CHE SEMPRE PARLA IN SILENZIO E’ IL CORPO
31. CIO’ CHE SEMPRE PARLA IN SILENZIO E’ IL CORPO
32. STRUMENTO
33. TERMINOLOGIA GEOGRAFICA
34. 11 LUGLIO 2023
35. 16 DICEMBRE 2040
36. CALLIGRAFIA
37. L’ESPERANTO A COLPO D’OCCHIO
38. PACK
39. BANGLA DESH
40. UNO A ZERO
41. MA COSA FAI MA COSA DICI
42. ONE HOTEL
43. METTERE AL MONDO IL MONDO
44. ONONIMO
45. SCRIVERE CON LA SINISTRA E’ DISEGNARE
46. TRE PER TRE
47. I VEDENTI
48. LA QUADRATURA DEL DIECI
49. KABUL TIME
50. LA STAMPA
51. SALE E ZUCCHERO
52. AUTONOMO
53. ORDINE E DISORDINE
54. PASSE PARTOUT
55. DISEGNO FELICE
56. DUE MODI DIVERSI DI FARE DUE COSE DIVERSE
57. COLPO DI STATO
58. ROCKING SNAKE
59. NATI A TORINO IL 16 DICEMBRE 1940
60. LE QUATTRO OPERAZIONI
61. PIER PIET
63. VERIFICANDO IL DUNQUE E IL POI SE NE ANDO’ PIAN PIANO VERSO IL CANTO DI UNA PINETA
62. VERIFICANDO IL DUNQUE E IL POI SE NE ANDO’ PIAN PIANO VERSO IL CANTO DI UNA PINETA
64. NOVELLA
65. I CINQUE CENTRI
66. RADDOPPIARE DIMEZZANDO
67. AUTODISPORSI
68. SOLITARIO
69. LA META’ E IL DOPPIO E L’UNITA’ MANCANTE
70. GUATEMALA
71. LA MOLE ANTONELLIANA M.168
72. PARI E DISPARI
73. I PRIMI MILLE FIUMI PIU’ LUNGHI DEL MONDO
74. BOMBE ORDIGNI ORIGINI E O ALTRO
75. RISO
76. VALIDO FINO AL
77. CODICE
78. AVIAZIONE OGGI
79. SAGITTARIO
80. SIMBOLO COME PRATICA
INSICURO NONCURANTE Portfolio of 80 mixed media prints Edition of 39/42 1965-1975 21 21/32 x 17 23/32 in
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“I am currently looking for a way to double the energy without doing anything, without efforts: diluted dispersing. I found a system whereby any reality is okay with me. That is to say, I do not make choices. This is also a great achievement, being able to not make choices. I delegate to others what I would like to do, like going to a country house with a needle and thread and work for months. I would say that it’s about dividing the work, as is done with the cinema. The director has the screenwriter, the photographer, the musician, the editor... Each of my works come from a different type of collaboration. I’m interested in the primary things, even for what they trigger between order and disorder. There is a specific order for everything, although it is transcribed in a disorderly manner. And I like this balance between structure and waste. The concept of waste drives me crazy, like the sun that gives itself for free.” “These days I cannot stand some of my bourgeois sides: we always have this sense of industry and realization, to make a straight line, instead all the adventures have traced a kind of a Greek line. I like to move sideways. I am like this: I like adventures. My little formula is that humanity is divided into those who think in short term and those who think in the long term. If I have to go to New York, I have to pass by Kabul first and open up a hotel, my One Hotel. If I have to go to Venice, I stop in Rome first. My art is a space where I can put everything, my things and other people’s things, postcards and information. It’s a diary but at the same time is a way to represent the fragmentation of the life we live in today. These days, everything seems to me simultaneously superficial. The square is a universe without corners.” “It’s like when you work with others: to collaborate with someone, you have to know to give your- self away, completely, without fear. But at the same time you have to have clear ideas. You have to go with the low, and never choose.”
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“I have just mounted an exhibition in Milan and this morning I gathered all my staff members around me. For me, it was further confirmation that the way I work resembles that of a movie director. There are different levels of a co-operation: there are tasks which simply involve carrying out instructions, and others which, by contrast, give the staff member handling them far greater liberties. The embroidered works, for example, are based on realizing a plan, or rather on the choice of colors which are more or less decisive for the quality of the embroidery. The embroidery is done by Afghan women who can look back on a long cultural tradition in this area. These women are extraordinarily tasteful in their choice of colors. I simply say to theme ‘use all your colors’ – there are one hundred in all. I would not have been able to supervise the choice of the colors.” “Then the degree of delegation varies depending on the work, from the minimum of the ball point pens (Biro), where there is nothing of creative, to the maximum of Tutto. I asked the assistants to draw everything, all the possible shapes, abstract and figurative and blend them to saturate the sheet. Then I brought the drawing in Afghanistan to make it embroidered with all 90 colored threads, as long as it had the same quantity. The different colors of every shape are chosen by the women. Not to create hierarchies between the colors, I use them all. My problem is in fact not to make choices according to my taste but to create systems that then choose me.”
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TUTTO 1988-89 Embroidery on fabric 51 3/16 x 86 39/64 in a. 1114
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“With Dodici Forme I started to consider the present in my work. The ‘forme’ were the borderlines of the areas occupied by Israel. The newspapers constantly retained the same graphic depiction of these areas: one color each for Gaza, Jerusalem, the Sinai and the Golan. It was 1967, the year of the war. I took the first page of the Stampa with the reproduction of this map, deleted everything except for the date and the map and engraved it on a copper plate. I had realized that whenever such a form appears on a newspaper title page something important must have happened ... In this way, I followed the ups and downs of politics through till 1971, the year when Bangladesh was founded. What interested me in these drawings was the fact that they were not spawned by my imagination, but prompted by artillery attacks, air raids and diplomatic negotiations...” “I have no idea whatsoever what the Afghans really think about my working together with them. They do not think much of it, I have no illusion in this regard. ...I have always only had to do with one person, whom I carefully explained exactly what I wanted; this person then explained it to two or three others, and they then distributed the work among the women. Only four years ago, five hundred women were working for me in Peshawar. That was on the ‘Mappa del mondo’, which was the reason for my first visit to Afghanistan. Back then I went there in order to see the work, which was produced at a certain school; the headmistress accompanied me. At a certain place on the carpet there were major errors. The headmistress noticed this, and, deadly embarrassed, took a pair of scissors and cut through the threads, one after the other. The woman responsible for this part of the carpet wept. I brought the finished carpet back with me to Rome. The first reactions were awful. The people were annoyed, I mean literally annoyed. It bears saying here that at the time only a few artists had their works produced for them by craftsmen and women. The public back then found the work embarrassing from a theoretical point of view and at the same time ‘sweet’...But all the collectors wanted it and I wanted to make only one. ... He (Enzo Sperone) visited me in my studio and said to me: ‘Now listen, Alighiero, why not make more than one Mappa? They are, after all, working for you. You could spend more time in Afghanistan. So why only one and not ten?’ That was the moment I changed my mind: from then on I desired a wealth of them and made the principle of series my own.” “To my mind, the work of the embroidered map represents the supreme beauty. For these works, I made nothing, select nothing in the sense that the world is made the way it is and I have not drawn it; the flags are those that exist anyway, I did not draw them; all in all I have made absolutely nothing. Once the basic idea is there, the concept, then everything else is already chosen.”
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MAPPA 1983 Eimbrodery on fabric 44 7/8 x 66 8/64 in a. 2673
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“I want to talk about the wind: the force which makes things light, which moves things and carries them away, and even makes the heavy light. Wind is a moment of mercy. The shapes it creates are always shapes of energy and movement. By dint of the wind, things become provisional again, it instills them with the dimension of time for it impresses on them the shape of a sequence of one moment after the other... A burst of wind blows clear a path into the past and to the tracks made in it. Wind constantly changes all shapes: you see this as regards snow, dust, or sand. It is a real living form, like the rays of the sun, but even lighter, although sometimes it becomes exceptionally violent energy. Yet its image remains that of lightness, that of the spirit: the light and airy words.” “Beauty is one result of the thought and will to realize it. Let us take the example of how color is spread across the wings of a butterfly – in two small circles. In other words, it forms an order. The butterfly uses the circles for its own purposes, which usually have to do with love. He attracts attention with his colors, and he then dies, together with his circles of color. The butterfly becomes one with the earth and thus once more assumes the color of the earth. And then the earth brings forth these colors anew, and new circles form, with new col- or hues... These thousands of form innate in the world... including those of music, so closely bound up with numbers, with mathematics...” “I’m sure that there are sequences of numbers which hold the key to the world if you simply utter them... But we do not know them. Incredible acceleration, or whatever... The Fibonacci series is one of the many wonders of the mathematical world, and it is also encountered in Nature.” “Numerals are the only entities which exist in the universe. Numerals are the only entities, which exist autonomously. It may correct to judge the fact that the letter B follows on from the letter A is a convention, which we humans established. However, this does not apply to the sequence of 1 and 2. For this is an awful reality.” “Every number has its own individuality, its own presence. This is how you learn to control them. Numbers are accomplices, 3 is Mr. 3, 2 refers to the concept of dualism, of the double, 1 is the unit, 4 is the ground, the four walls, 5 is the pentagon and the concept of war comes to mind, terrible; 6 is the hexagon and it makes me think of bees: it is sweet but it also makes you think about work. Numbers are like words: they are the custodians of the difference. There are words that kill, words that hurt tremendously, words like stones, light- weight words, words real as numbers.”
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OGGI SESTO GIORNO QUARTO MESE MILLE NOVE 100 OTTANTA NOVE Peshawar Pakistan Variante V c 1989 Embroidery on fabric 46 1/16 x 42 33/64 in
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“I would like to speak about my twenty years working as an artist. During this time I believe I have developed a certain research approach for myself. What I mean is that I have natured an attitude defined by attentiveness and curiosity which has allowed me to perceive the most different of things and to have fun with the world, which beneath the phenomenal surface is governed by incredible magic processes: the magic of words, the magic of numbers ... An example for this word magic, i.e. one small aspect of our universe, which is so rich in countless things which deserve our attention and which we should make certain we became familiar with, are those minute particles of words which, if placed before a verbs, completely change its meaning. Let us take the verb correre (to run) and derive from it the prefixes: scorrere, occorrere, accorrere, decorrere, incorrere, ascorrere, riscorrere, rincorrere, percorrere [...]” “We have to do here a series of small sounds which modify the image and the meaning of the root verb, in fact sometimes completely change it. Just as there are extraordinary magical things in the world of numbers and likewise in the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. These worlds were separated from one another and organized hierarchically. However, I believe that there is no definitive hierarchy: We always have to do with the same thing, always disclose in the same way the design in the things.” “The thing is to know the rules of the game: He or she does not know them will never recognize the order prevailing in things, just as someone who does not know the orders of the stars will always only see confusion, while an astronomer has a very clear view of things... Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an outlook, which reduces concepts to zero, spreads them out and unfolds them. Just as you can unfold a leaf of paper, so, too, you can order or mix up a pair or class of concepts, without ever privileging one of the two opposing notions.” “I have drawn some 1501 pairs of words that can be set as squares. If today I encounter a phrase such as ‘the core power” – a notion from Yoga – then I instinctively know that the number of letters it contains would enable it to be set in a square. I have produced 100 copies of each of these. But each is different – owing to the colors and the differences in the styles of the various embroideries. They belong in a new category, in a market, which is completely unlike that of my other works. Someone once said to me that I had created the first picture in folkloristic concept of art.”
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PER NUOVI DESIDERI 1977 Embroidery on fabric 11 13/16 x 11 1/32 in Amman II p. 280 n. 938 a. 5715
AMMAZZARE IL TEMPO 1979 Embroidery on fabric 6 11/16 x 7 31/64 in Amman II p. 381 n. 1188 a. 2801
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AMMAZZARE IL TEMPO 1979 Embroidery on fabric 9 29/64 x 9 29/64 in (each) Amman II p. 379 n. 1185 a. 536
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REGOLA E REGOLARSI 1979 Embroidery on fabric 8 21/32 x 9 29/64 in Amman II p. 375 n. 1177 a. 5375
REGOLA E REGOLARSI 1979 Embroidery on fabric 9 1/16 x 9 1/4 in Amman II p. 375 n. 1177 a. 6291
REGOLA E REGOLARSI 1979 Embroidery on fabric 9 1/16 x 9 29/64 in Amman II p. 375 n. 1177 a. 5754
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LE NUOVE AUTONOMIE 1979 Embroidery on fabric 9 1/16 x 9 29/64 in Amman II p. 373 n. 1175 a. 5354
LE NUOVE AUTONOMIE 1979 Embroidery on fabric 9 9/64 x 9 29/64 in a. 7221
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DIVINE ASTRAZIONI 1984 Embroidery on fabric 9 1/16x 9 27/32 in a. 5098
TAVOLA PITAGORICA 1988 Embroidery on fabric 19 11/16 x 19 11/16 in a. 4383
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AVERE FAME DI VENTO 1989 Embroidery on fabric 6 57/64 x 6 57/64 in a. 4363
A BRACCIA CONSERTE 1994 Embroidery on fabric 6 27/64 x 6 57/64 in a. 5305
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A LUCIO ALIGHIERO 1991 Calendar 7 7/8 x 11 13/16 in a. 6755
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This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition: “Alighiero e Boetti: Insicuro Noncurante” April 16 - June 5, 2015 Ierimonti Gallery, New York All rights reserved This catalogue may not be reproduced in whole or in part, or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic media or mechanical, or stored in a retrieval system without the written permission of Ierimonti Gallery. Catalogue Curator: Christian Piscitelli, Catalogue Coordinator: Francesca Cigola Catalog Assistant Coordinator: Alexandra Fanelli We would like to thank those individuals who aided in the process of making this exhibition and catalogue a reality. Sincere love and appreciation goes to Brigida Barraco, Adriana Calabrese, Luca De Luca, Filippo Fossati and esso project, Luigi Francese, Paolo Marinelli, Matteo Milani, Michele Morgillo, Famiglia Muzzin. Special thanks to the Archivio Alighiero Boetti - Rome IMAGE CREDITS ©2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Insicuro Noncurante, Tutto (a. 1114), Mappa (a. 2673), Oggi sesto giorno, Divine Astrazioni (a. 5098), Tavola Pitagorica (a. 4383), Per Nuovi Desideri(a. 5715), Avere Fame di Vento (a. 4363), Regola e Regolarsi (n.1177 a.6291): photos by Dario Lasagni - Ammazzare il Tempo (n.1185), Ammazzare il Tempo (n.1188 a.2801), Le Nuove Autonomie (a. 7221), Le Nuove Autonomie (n.1175 a. 5354), A Braccia Conserte (a. 5305), Regola e Regolarsi (n. 1177 a. 5754), Regola e Regolarsi (n. 1177 a. 5375), Calendar A Lucio Alighiero (a. 6755): photos by Stefano Cianfarini. TEXT CREDITS Page 5: Alighiero Boetti, text from Germano Celant in Eine kunstgeschichte in Turin 1965/1983, Kolnischer Kunstverein, Colonia, October 1983. Page 27-28: Alighiero Boetti, interview with Maurizio Cattelan; Alighiero Boetti, from Cat. Torino, pag. 207. Page 30: Alighiero Boetti, from Cat. Torino/Vienna, pag 213; Alighiero Boetti, Cat. Torino, pag 215 – 216 – 219 Page 32: Alighiero Boetti, dal Catalogo Torino, pag 206 – 213; Alighiero Boetti in discussion with Sergio Givone, “Che cosa sia la bellezza non so,” (Milan, 1991), quoted from Cat. Vienna, 1997, pag.214; From the interview with Bruno Corá, (1982), quoted from Cat. Vienna, 1997, pag.208; Alighiero Boetti, interview with Maurizio Cattelan. Page 34: Alighiero e Boetti, Dall’oggi al domani, curated by Sandro Lombardi, ed. L’Obliquo, Brescia, December 1988; Alighiero Boetti quoted from Cat. Vienna, pag 216.
ierimonti gallery 24 West 57th Street, Suite 501-503, 10019 New York, NY