To say that the Whitechapel's recent Boetti retrospective was timely is a bad but useful pun. Boetti's work has never really been given the exposure it deserves in this country, and his systematic revealing of the mutable systems underpinning our measuring devices is wonderfully relevant to a time when a certain date is giving the world so much cause for excitement, apprehension, celebration and fear.
Boetti's instinct to get to the root of the matter can be found even in his name. In 1972 the artist began signing his works Alighiero 'e' (and) Boetti. As embodied in the 1968 photomontage Gemelli (Twins), 'Alighiero' was the person who 'those who know me name and call me', whilst 'Boetti' was his more abstract nomenclature, 'the surname as category, as classifying device'. Functioning in the same way as his name, his works draw the viewer in at a familiar level before diving into a examination of concepts and categories.
The show revealed Boetti to be a master of cross-media art practice, the very model of a proto-90s artist. He employed painting, sculpture, performance, mail art, embroidery, drawing, concrete poetry and mathematics, all with grace and humour. Opening with a few works from his early Arte Povera period, the exhibition quickly segued into more familiar Boetti territory - which is not to say that the earlier works are totally hermetic and self-referential. Legnetti Colorati (Small Coloured Sticks, 1968), is reminiscent of the bundled rods of the fascii, power symbol of both ancient and Fascist era Italy. Tavelle (Tiles, 1967), a floor piece that looks like a chunk of pavement, Itervallo (1969), a metal chequerboard, or a series of drawn grids 'Cimento dell'armonia e dell'invenzione', (Contrast between harmony and invention, 1969), all find playful affinity with Minimalists like Carl Andre or Sol LeWitt.
However, it is Boetti's later works that really resonate. Again and again, the artist succeeded in revealing the inherent absurdity of imposing abstract human concepts upon the natural world, as if our efforts might reveal some Platonic essence in the landscape or in the passage of time. Language, both written and visual, appeared to be almost synesthetic for Boetti. In his work, numbers function as words and letters possess human characteristics. Shaman Showman (1968), for example, reveals the artist as a student of cabbala and alchemy, discovering, inventing and imagining systems and relationships in language. In 1970, Boetti began a series of woven world maps entitled 'Territori Occupati'. Each work (Mappa) was made with the help of master weavers the artist befriended during numerous trips to Afghanistan. The land mass of each country is filled in with its flag. Every day, countries rise and fall, while alliances are built and broken. The time and group effort it took Boetti to create such beautiful objects is a reflection of the will power and harmony it takes to achieve a common goal, albeit a fragile one.
Boetti made explicit the imbalance between certain methodologies and the elusive ideas they try to capture in Classificazione dei mille fiumi piu lunghi del mondo (Classification of the thousand longest rivers in the world, 1977), a quasi-scientific investigation and cataloguing of the world's rivers. Aerei (Aeroplanes, 1967), is a large watercolour depicting one hundred or so different model aeroplanes, poised and frozen in mid-air. Suggestive of Futurist drawings of Utopian cities where everyone, it was hoped, would fly instead of walk, if these craft were to continue on their flight paths, a hideous accident would surely have ensued. The works embody an awareness of the fragility that is never mawkish and laced with a sweetly dark sense of humour.
The show ends with Tutto (Everything, c.1989), another huge woven work made by Boetti's exiled Afghan friends after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Thousands of shapes and drawings culled from encyclopedias and reference books are woven together in an attempt to create some visual sense of the incomprehensible profusion of objects, people and ideas in the world. Inevitably it fails, but therein lies its beauty. Boetti's fascination with patterns and his pataphysical approach to mathematics and seriality mark him out as a kind of satirical cabbalist trying to identify the one key system that will perhaps reveal some kind of universal answer. He never quite makes it but on the way shows us a form of truth perhaps more touching and disturbing than any rigid system can offer.
