Exhibit of the week: Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Through Oct. 1

Alighiero Boetti “seems to have lived his life in a kind of fever delirium of ideas,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. Consider the “magical survey” MoMA has mounted using just a fraction of the art produced by the late Italian artist (1940–94). Beginning in the 1960s, when he was associated with the Arte Povera movement, he churned out visually unprepossessing work that was nevertheless “packed tight with conceptual content.” A few early pieces set the tone—drawings on graph paper, a postcard of adult male twins holding hands, a lightbulb in a box. Every line on the graph paper has been drawn over in freehand. The twins turn out to be dual images of Boetti, who for a time presented himself as two artists—Alighiero and Boetti. The lightbulb, surprisingly, “turns out to be the most charismatic object of all.” Because it turns on at random for 11 seconds every year, viewers can’t help but think they might get lucky.

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“There was an absurdist whimsy to everything Boetti did,” said Dan Bischoff in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. “His most memorable pieces” were the product of a 1971 trip to Afghanistan that he made ostensibly because he’d decided to head to an airport and board the next international flight, whatever its destination. In Kabul, he launched a striking series by hiring local craftswomen to create large rugs embroidered with maps of the world. The project marshaled Boetti’s passion for collaboration, while the maps’ ever-changing boundaries chronicled a steady disintegration of world order. Uncharacteristically, he made himself the focus of a final work, which stands in MoMA’s sculpture garden.

Like much of Boetti’s work, Autoritratto (Self-portrait) is “a big idea with a small visual payoff,” said Lance Esplund in Bloomberg Businessweek. A bronze statue of the artist, it depicts Boetti pouring water over his head as a heated coil inside turns the water into steam. A big thinker? More like a Marcel Duchamp wannabe. Boetti embraced self-effacement, but he also embraced laziness, choosing to let collaborators do the hard work. We learn that he harbored an ambition of wasting time thoughtfully. But works like 1970’s Viaggi Postali (Postal Voyages), which enlisted the postal service in a game of sending and resending letters to imaginary addresses, suggest that he was more interested in wasting others’ time than his own.