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Lot Essay
Consisting of two works – Asta di misurazione (Measurement pole) and Triplo metro (Triple metre) – the present lot is an important example of Alighiero Boetti’s early conceptual practice. Presenting two measuring devices leaning up against a wall, it demonstrates the whimsical engagement with quotidian objects that paved the way for his exploration of everyday materials, universal concepts and the relationship between art and life. Executed in 1966, the year before Boetti’s first solo exhibition at Christian Stein’s avant-garde gallery in Turin, the works take their place alongside other significant early creations including Lampada annuale and Ping Pong. Like these works, which dealt with notions of chance, order and chaos, Asta di misurazione and Triplo metro broached themes that would become central to Boetti’s oeuvre. Together, they invoke concepts of measurement, demarcation and the seemingly arbitrary systems through which humankind seeks to categorise the world – ideas that would later feed into his Arrazi, Mappe and other major series.
1966 was an important time in Boetti’s career. During this period, he established himself as a central figure on the Turin art scene, building relationships with fellow artists including Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto and others. The following year, the critic Germano Celant would coin the term ‘Arte Povera’ – meaning ‘poor art’ – uniting many of these artists through their allegiance to humble, non-traditional materials. Boetti, for his part, explored industrial media including plaster, masonite, plexiglass and light fixtures – the present works consist of painted iron and a bamboo stick respectively. Operating in the legacy of Dada and the ‘readymades’ of Marcel Duchamp, they chime with the currents of Minimal and Conceptual art that swept the world during this period – their positioning against the wall, in particular, poses a direct challenge to the nature of the art object. Artists such as Carl Andre, John McCracken, Donald Judd, Richard Long and Dan Flavin all played with these ideas: art, for them, was no longer an illusory window onto the world, but a statement of reality in and of itself.
Within this context, many other artists began to explore themes of counting, measurement and the passage of time. Numeric systems were interrogated in both visual and semantic terms – from Jasper Johns’ Numbers, to On Kawara’s Date Paintings and Roman Opałka’s bid to write every number from one to infinity. Boetti himself was fascinated by the codes and structures that organise human knowledge and experience – maps, graphs, dates, postage stamps, letters and language – and would spend his life devoted to exploring our propensity to seek order and meaning from life’s chaos. ‘The greatest joy on earth consists in inventing the world the way it is without inventing anything in the process’, he explained (A. Boetti, quoted in Alighiero Boetti, exh. cat., Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt Am Main, 1998, p. 297). In this, the present two works are prophetic: at once familiar and eerily divorced from all context, they shed light on fundamental meaninglessness of the regulations that govern our existence.
1966 was an important time in Boetti’s career. During this period, he established himself as a central figure on the Turin art scene, building relationships with fellow artists including Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto and others. The following year, the critic Germano Celant would coin the term ‘Arte Povera’ – meaning ‘poor art’ – uniting many of these artists through their allegiance to humble, non-traditional materials. Boetti, for his part, explored industrial media including plaster, masonite, plexiglass and light fixtures – the present works consist of painted iron and a bamboo stick respectively. Operating in the legacy of Dada and the ‘readymades’ of Marcel Duchamp, they chime with the currents of Minimal and Conceptual art that swept the world during this period – their positioning against the wall, in particular, poses a direct challenge to the nature of the art object. Artists such as Carl Andre, John McCracken, Donald Judd, Richard Long and Dan Flavin all played with these ideas: art, for them, was no longer an illusory window onto the world, but a statement of reality in and of itself.
Within this context, many other artists began to explore themes of counting, measurement and the passage of time. Numeric systems were interrogated in both visual and semantic terms – from Jasper Johns’ Numbers, to On Kawara’s Date Paintings and Roman Opałka’s bid to write every number from one to infinity. Boetti himself was fascinated by the codes and structures that organise human knowledge and experience – maps, graphs, dates, postage stamps, letters and language – and would spend his life devoted to exploring our propensity to seek order and meaning from life’s chaos. ‘The greatest joy on earth consists in inventing the world the way it is without inventing anything in the process’, he explained (A. Boetti, quoted in Alighiero Boetti, exh. cat., Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt Am Main, 1998, p. 297). In this, the present two works are prophetic: at once familiar and eerily divorced from all context, they shed light on fundamental meaninglessness of the regulations that govern our existence.