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'The greatest joy on earth consists in inventing the world the way it is without inventing anything in the process' (Alighiero Boetti) The art of Alighiero Boetti is a holistic one. Although its roots lie in the experimental and collaborative climate of the late 1960s and in the aesthetics of Arte Povera- it has, in retrospect, clearly transcended its origins to become a completely unique and wholly autonomous body of work. Indeed, it is one that now seems to stand alone amongst much of the art of the last thirty years, as a simple and lovingly built platform of hope that points to the future as the arena of the possibility of a better world. Like many of the artists from his generation Boetti's approach to his work was one that attempted to show the world, without artifice, craft or deception, the way that it actually is. This aesthetic did not take the rather puritanical reductive form of his Minimalist and Conceptualist contemporaries in America however, but followed the more mimetic and tautological approach that had developed in Italy from precedents established by such artists as Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni. Boetti's working practice, which he called mettere al mondo il mondo (to bring/put the world into the world), was essentially a more holistic and complete version of the kind of mimesis current in the work of many of his Arte Povera colleagues. From Pascali's weapons and Pistoletto's mirror-paintings to Paolini's canvases, Kounellis's horses, cacti or numbers, and Penone's revealed trees, this was a generation of artists who responded to the call for an 'open' and 'authorless' work, of art (proposed by Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes respectively) by using tautology and mimesis as a visual way of turning the world back in on itself in order to reflect itself more clearly. In Italy, this mimesis was less the kind of investigatory questioning that characterised conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth's One and three hammers in which a real hammer, a photocopy of it and a dictionary definition of a hammer are thrown into conjunction with one another. It was more a revelatory process. Steeped in Mediterranean history and culture, the notion of time and of timelessness permeates even the most severe and analytical approach of the Italians' work. In contrast to many American artists' probing investigation of reality - an aesthetic which conjured the notion of reality as being a kind of 'final frontier' - the Arte Povera artists' approach seemed to be one of attempting to remove the scales, or layers of scales, from the viewer's eyes in order to reveal the complex multiplicity, not of a new world, but of the world we already know, a world already in situ. Their use of ordinary mundane objects and materials was certainly a part of this. It was also the reason that Boetti came to produce 'ordinary' objects such as kilims and tapestries that are by nature domestic items that play a daily role in the life of ordinary people as well as being, through his intervention, artworks on display in the world's greatest museums and galleries. This aim of using his art as a bridge between the daily lives of ordinary people was but another part of his central aesthetic of combining opposites, the philosophical principle of the harmony of united opposites that he called ordine e disordine. Beginning in 1970 this principle of ordine e disordine (order and disorder) dictated the course of both Boetti's art and his life. Based on the mystic principle that the world - like all totalities - is in a constant state of flux between the forces of order and disorder, each permeating one another, interacting and together generating a harmonious unity, Boetti sought to reveal this process at work as a way of healing the traumatic rifts that divide our modern world. Building on the simple yet complex game-like systems of his Dame (Checkers), where a seemingly disordered patterning is achieved from the set ordering of a group of signs and symbols, Boetti developed the ordine/disordine principle in a variety of highly inventive and ever more expansive ways. The most expansive being his collaboration with the women embroiderers and weavers in Afghanistan who made all his tapestries for him, from the Arazzi, and the Mappe to his Mille fiumi and the Tutti. Like his Mappe, this collaboration with the craftswomen of Afghanistan was a clear political statement. It was also yet another example of the principle of ordine e disordine in action. Through his involving of the ancient hand-made craft tradition of one of the poorest 'third world' countries in the manufacturing of a contemporary artwork, Boetti once again brought together two opposites and united them through the medium of his work. Boetti's tapestries with their representations of order and disorder combining are therefore, more than a mere symbol of this principle, they are material proof of its active participation in the world. By uniting the demands of the contemporary art market with a craft-based tradition that is dying out because of the Western world's manufacturing industry, Boetti was geographically transcending all the cultural, commercial and ideological barriers that exist between the East and the West. In doing so, he was also uniting them through the shared collaboration in his work, demonstrating the unity of ordine e disordine and its power to heal rifts and unite the world. His Mappe - tapestries demonstrating the unity as well as the political division of the world - are clearly one of the artist's most ideological works in this respect. They are also among the most poignant in that being centred on and made in Afghanistan (later Pakistan) they catalogue the trauma of the Soviet invasion of the country and its continuing upheaval at the very same time as they postulate the notion of a united world undivided by political difference. Outliving the Soviet invasion and indeed, the Soviet Union as a whole, the history of the Mappe, starting in 1979 and ending in 1994 - the year of Boetti's death - dramatically catalogues the shifting impermanence of political boundaries, the temporality of all empires, the suffering of the Afghan people and, in spite of everything, their triumphant and continuing survival. Increasingly, throughout his life, Boetti became more and more drawn to Afghanistan. The country's emptiness, its harsh, desert landscape and the simple, focused and disciplined lifestyle of its people in spite of and to some extent because of the material hardships they have been forced to endure, appealed to Boetti's innate nature as did the incisive mysticism of the Sufis. Francesco Clemente, who travelled to Afghanistan with Boetti in the '70s has described the country as a place 'devoid of the cacophony of capitalism' where Boetti's 'thoughts could expand without being interfered with by contemporary taste'. The extreme opposites represented by the modern Western way of life and the ancient way of living in Afghanistan undoubtedly fuelled Boetti's notion of the division of the world and the need to heal these rifts. After a visit to Frédéric Bruly Bouabré on the Ivory Coast in the late 1980s Boetti had been struck by a comment that Bouabré had made; 'when people are different, they can only communicate through art or war.' Boetti sought to counter the need to resort to war through the language of art and through the establishment of secret languages. Such secret languages form the basis of many of his coded systems and his biro works, but they are also often embedded within his art works. These secret languages are ones that are perhaps known only to the 'family' of individuals who came together and united in the creation of the art work. This unifying process, necessary to the creation of his art, was also an example of a way to heal unnecessary and artificial divisions. At the time of his premature death in 1994, Boetti was working on perhaps the most ambitious and radical of all his works - a work he had been told would be impossible to produce. He proposed to fund historians from all over the world to come together to write a single book on world history that could subsequently be used in all the world's schools. Imagine! Roberto Marrone PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994)

Cubo

Details

Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994)
Cubo
wood, polystyrene, steel rods, aluminium, fibreglass, cardboard, plastic, glass, rubber, wire wool and glue in Plexiglas box
35 3/8 x 35 3/8 x 35 7/8in. (90 x 90 x 91cm.)
Executed in 1968

Provenance

Sperone Westwater, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1996.

Exhibited

Turin, Galerie Depostio d'Arte, Deposito d'Arte Presente, 1968.
Rome, Galleria Sperone & Fischer, Alighiero e Boetti. Mettere al mondo il mondo, May 1973.
Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Alighiero Boetti. 1965-1994, May-September 1996. This exhibition later travelled to Villeneuve d'Ascq, Musée d'Art Moderne, September 1996-January 1997 and Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, January-March 1997.
Bremen, Neues Museum Weserburg, Arte Povera. Arbeiten und Dokumente aus der Sammlung Goetz. 1958 bis heute, June-September 1997. This exhibition later travelled to Nuremberg, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, October-December 1997; Cologne, Kölnischer Kunstverein, February-April 1998; Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, June-August 1998 and Gothenburg, Konsthallen Göteborg, September-October 1998.

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Archivio Alighiero Boetti, Rome, dated 11 April 2005 and numbered 152.
Executed in 1968, Cubo is an intriguing sculpture that reveals the extent of Boetti's participation in the Arte Povera movement, as well as an exciting insight into his early and formative years. That same year, Milan's De Neuberg Gallery played host to Boetti's famous Shaman/Showman exhibition. The dichotomy held in the title was to recur throughout Boetti's work for the rest of his career, and clearly manifested itself in the intriguing assembly of artworks and objects that made up this, his fourth one-man show, one of his most influential and one that truly placed him on the map of the Italian art scene.

At this point in 1968, a key watershed year of revolution and radicalism in Europe, the term Arte Povera was brand new, having been coined only months earlier for a group exhibition in which Boetti partook. The exhibition at the De Neuberg Gallery perfectly encapsulates the common ground that led to Boetti's brief involvement with Arte Povera. There, stones littered the floor, asbestos stacks were piled at the rear, and also featuring was at least one plexi-glass box filled with industrial materials. At the same time, this exhibition perfectly introduced the Shaman/Showman dichotomy, with Boetti's consummate skills as a showman being revealed in the almost theatrical presentation of these objects, many of them readymades, while their transformation from industrial scrap to art objects hinted at his shamanism.

Created as part of the abovementioned group of cubes in 1968, Cubo is a regular plexiglass container that has been painstakingly filled with pipes, chipboard, glass and wires amongst other objects. These have been arrayed with precision and regularity into a strikingly aesthetic abstract form, best exemplified from the top view, which unveils the incredible, dense texture of the combined materials. This unique object, pre-dating the artist's interest in multiples, has been crafted with an eye towards the end result as well as a bounding enthusiasm for the constituent objects themselves. Referring to the creation of one of the other pieces exhibited in his 1968 show, Boetti recalled his intense glee on discovering the beauty of industrial and pre-fabricated objects:

'When I produced Catasta ('Stack') using molded pipes, I had to go to the yard of a construction company. And when I saw all the great things there I could have gone crazy. They had everything you could dream of: fireclay bricks that are wonderfully beautiful, glass wool, polyester, everything... You see, I felt such amazing enthusiasm on seeing all these materials' (Alighiero Boetti, quoted in exh. cat., Alighiero Boetti: Mettere al mondo il mondo, Frankfurt, 1998, p. 33).

It is this enthusiasm that is concentrated in Cubo. There, each material becomes part of an artwork that has in its own right an imposing and concrete physical presence.

The overlap between Boetti and the Arte Povera movement at this time was largely related to their attitudes to the material world. Like many of his fellow artists who had been grouped under the same banner, Boetti was intrigued by the possibilities afforded by the humblest and, crucially, the most modern materials. Cubo is a celebration of the modern world, and of the wonders of technology. There is an intense and beguiling freedom at play in the dense yet glittering packing of wires, pipes and board into this plexiglass container. As Boetti himself remarked, '1968 marked a new period, a 'happy age': Columni, Legnetti, and plexi-glass filled in various ways' (Alighiero Boetti, quoted in Ibid., p. 35).

At the same time, as was only fitting in an age of simmering revolt and rebellion such as the early months of 1968, Cubo has an anarchic twist. On the one hand its rigid geometry and the rich patterning resulting from the elaborate and intricate arrangement of the various materials imply containment and therefore some level of control; on the other, the materials of the corporate, industrial world have been neutered, removed from the context of employment and construction and re-deployed as art. Cubo celebrates these materials, but only after removing them from the capitalist food-chain, allowing them to flourish outwith the control of factory-owning plutocrats.

In Boetti's work, and especially during this early conceptual period of his career, the transformation of these modern stuffs was as shamanic as it was political. Wielding the almost magical power of the artist, Boetti took these industrial odds and ends, essentially the scrap of the modern era, and transmuted them, as though miraculously, into Art with a capital A. A change of context and presentation had wrought this magical conversion.

There is a hint of Duchamp in this Arte Povera transformation, but also evident now is Boetti's interest in the various ways in which to chart, catalogue, number and divide the world. As well as Boetti the showman with his finger on the pulse, it is Boetti the shaman who has created Cubo, a fascinating repository of the materials of the day, preserved in the form of artefact, arranged neatly and slowly by the artist according to an interior logic. This logic has the hint of an obsolete alphabet: the placing of the materials in the Cubo appears to follow a pattern with some significance that eludes us. There is magic in the Cubo: the hidden codes in the placement of materials are as codified as a pentagram or a stone circle. As Boetti stated, 'I have worked much with the concept of order/disorder: by transforming order into disorder or certain disorder into order or by presenting apparent disorder which was, in fact, the depiction of intellectual order. The thing is to know the rules of the game: He or she who does not know them will never recognise 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' (Alighiero Boetti, quoted in Ibid., p. 133). Cubo's sculptural solidity, its megalithic insistence as a physical object and monument, demands that the viewer recognise and respect this interior order just as much as the more mundane order that would see these materials hidden away in the bowels of the faceless, wan buildings and machines of our age.

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