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Lot Essay
Oggi ventesimo giorno dell’ottavo mese dell’anno millenovecento ottantotto (1988) is an elaborate, large-scale and beautiful example of Alighiero Boetti’s Arazzi, or tapestries. The work consists of a chequered, scintillating grid of colourful letters, each of which has its own distinct colour scheme. Read vertically, different phrases emerge within their seemingly random arrangement. Boetti’s Arazzi began during his first visit to in Afghanistan in 1971. While he devised each work’s layout, they were woven by skilled craftswomen based in Kabul, and later—after the Soviet invasion of 1979—Afghan weavers who had fled to Pakistan. Through these collaborative, network-based projects, Boetti happily relinquished total control over the end product. The structure of the present work is disrupted by gentle irregularities, shifts of colour where spools of thread are finished and replaced, and the tactile presence of the artisans’ process. It is a sumptuous example of Boetti’s concept of ordine e disordine: the idea that all things in the world reach an overall state of balance through the constant flux between ‘order and disorder’.
Careful study of the work’s grid of 25 x 25 letters reveals multiple smaller 5 x 5 vertical phrase units. They spell out its date of creation, and playful phrases such as quando le parole sono stanche (‘when the words are tired’), seguire il filo di discorso (‘follow the thread of the conversation’), and tra l’incudine e il martello (‘between the devil and the deep sea’). Decoding those sections only gets the reader so far, however. At the centre, a long phrase is hidden in a less obvious cross-shaped arrangement, beginning with a 5 x 5 section at the left and following a vertical 5 x 20 column down the composition’s midpoint—which is itself interrupted by the phrase venticinque per venticinque (‘twenty-five by twenty-five’). Revealing the work’s title, the cross reads: seicento venticinque lettere da i cento colori i colori del mondo Alighiero Boetti Peshawar oggi ventesimo giorno dell’ottavo mese dell’anno millenovecento ottantotto all’amato Pantheon (‘six hundred twenty-five letters from the hundred colours the colours of the world Alighiero Boetti Peshawar today twentieth day of the eighth month of the year 1988 at the beloved Pantheon’).
If the ‘disorder’ in Boetti’s text-based tapestries was created by the conditions of their manufacture, the element of ‘order’ was set out by his numerical and alphabetical designs. Uncovering the present work’s long, self-reflexive central phrase reaffirms the facts of its conception: the date, the number of letters involved, its fabrication in Peshawar, and Boetti’s location in Rome. ‘We see colours and patterns before we read,’ Mark Godfrey observes, ‘so that when we do read the phrases in these works, our understanding, delayed, is sharpened’ (M. Godfrey, ‘Divided Interests: The Art of Alighiero Boetti’, Artforum, May 2009, p. 209). Boetti, who was fascinated as much by the rational structure of sign systems as their imaginative potential, drew on Sufi mysticism and other sources for his semiotic games. One antecedent is the ‘magic square’, a number-grid in which the sum of the rows, columns, and diagonals remains constant. The Shams al-Ma’arif (The Book of the Sun of Gnosis), an esoteric Sufi text dating from the 13th century, tells of magic squares that function as spells, allowing communication with the angels and Djinn who rule the planets. Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Melencolia I (1514) features a four-by-four magic square, containing 86 different four-number combinations that add up to the magic number 34. The square’s bottom row—4, 15, 14, 1—further encrypts Dürer’s initials and the date of the work’s creation: a Boettian gesture avant la lettre.
‘I designed some 150 words that could be arranged in a square’, said Boetti in 1992. ‘Today when I come across expressions like la forza del centro (‘the force of the centre’), a yoga concept, I know intuitively that the number of its letters allows it to form a square’ (A. Boetti, quoted in N. Bourriaud, ibid.). While he made squares in many different configurations, grids of five and twenty-five retained a special importance for the artist. ‘Twenty-five is the square of the holy number five’, he explained, ‘and is therefore also the centre of magical squares. It consists of the sum of the numbers 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9, and thus contains all the holy numbers which can be used in magic’ (A. Boetti, quoted in Alighiero Boetti: Mettere al mondo il mondo, exh. cat. Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt 1998, p. 117). In the present work, with its dizzying, nested semiotic systems coming apart and together in a modular symphony of order and disorder, the magical multiplicity of Boetti’s vision comes to life.
Careful study of the work’s grid of 25 x 25 letters reveals multiple smaller 5 x 5 vertical phrase units. They spell out its date of creation, and playful phrases such as quando le parole sono stanche (‘when the words are tired’), seguire il filo di discorso (‘follow the thread of the conversation’), and tra l’incudine e il martello (‘between the devil and the deep sea’). Decoding those sections only gets the reader so far, however. At the centre, a long phrase is hidden in a less obvious cross-shaped arrangement, beginning with a 5 x 5 section at the left and following a vertical 5 x 20 column down the composition’s midpoint—which is itself interrupted by the phrase venticinque per venticinque (‘twenty-five by twenty-five’). Revealing the work’s title, the cross reads: seicento venticinque lettere da i cento colori i colori del mondo Alighiero Boetti Peshawar oggi ventesimo giorno dell’ottavo mese dell’anno millenovecento ottantotto all’amato Pantheon (‘six hundred twenty-five letters from the hundred colours the colours of the world Alighiero Boetti Peshawar today twentieth day of the eighth month of the year 1988 at the beloved Pantheon’).
If the ‘disorder’ in Boetti’s text-based tapestries was created by the conditions of their manufacture, the element of ‘order’ was set out by his numerical and alphabetical designs. Uncovering the present work’s long, self-reflexive central phrase reaffirms the facts of its conception: the date, the number of letters involved, its fabrication in Peshawar, and Boetti’s location in Rome. ‘We see colours and patterns before we read,’ Mark Godfrey observes, ‘so that when we do read the phrases in these works, our understanding, delayed, is sharpened’ (M. Godfrey, ‘Divided Interests: The Art of Alighiero Boetti’, Artforum, May 2009, p. 209). Boetti, who was fascinated as much by the rational structure of sign systems as their imaginative potential, drew on Sufi mysticism and other sources for his semiotic games. One antecedent is the ‘magic square’, a number-grid in which the sum of the rows, columns, and diagonals remains constant. The Shams al-Ma’arif (The Book of the Sun of Gnosis), an esoteric Sufi text dating from the 13th century, tells of magic squares that function as spells, allowing communication with the angels and Djinn who rule the planets. Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Melencolia I (1514) features a four-by-four magic square, containing 86 different four-number combinations that add up to the magic number 34. The square’s bottom row—4, 15, 14, 1—further encrypts Dürer’s initials and the date of the work’s creation: a Boettian gesture avant la lettre.
‘I designed some 150 words that could be arranged in a square’, said Boetti in 1992. ‘Today when I come across expressions like la forza del centro (‘the force of the centre’), a yoga concept, I know intuitively that the number of its letters allows it to form a square’ (A. Boetti, quoted in N. Bourriaud, ibid.). While he made squares in many different configurations, grids of five and twenty-five retained a special importance for the artist. ‘Twenty-five is the square of the holy number five’, he explained, ‘and is therefore also the centre of magical squares. It consists of the sum of the numbers 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9, and thus contains all the holy numbers which can be used in magic’ (A. Boetti, quoted in Alighiero Boetti: Mettere al mondo il mondo, exh. cat. Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt 1998, p. 117). In the present work, with its dizzying, nested semiotic systems coming apart and together in a modular symphony of order and disorder, the magical multiplicity of Boetti’s vision comes to life.