Alighiero Boetti and "I Vedenti"

My wife and I had the good fortune today to catch MOMA's exhibit of the work of the late Italian conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti. The retrospective, which closes tomorrow, offers a marvelous display of Boetti's intellectual concerns and creative choices over three decades. Some of his directions, such as his fascination with Afghanistan prior to the 1982 Soviet invasion, were decidedly outside the art world's carefully considered orbits. Certain episodes, notably his break from the Italian "Arte Povera" movement, seemed more concerned with local Italian polemics than whatever issues moved the art world's major players.

Boetti's Senza Titolo (Untitled), 1969

All of this sounds like a prelude to a recondite exhibit. However, the MOMA show made Boetti's work both accessible and challenging, even for complete conceptual art greenhorns. (Count me among those in that category.) The artist's goal was to lead a viewer into thinking hard about visual and intellectual assumptions. To that end, the curator skillfully allowed only one way in or out of the exhibit, past a collection of pieces called I Vedenti. That translates to "the sighted," a reference to how the blind refer to those who can see. I Vedenti includes geometrically perfect or skewed pieces created from everyday materials whose juxtaposition stimulates a debate about mathematical perfection, duality, appropriate artistic materials, the nature of understanding, and especially how one learns to develop how to truly see.

If blindness is one's original state, how does one learn to see? This speculative outlook, which has been with us since the ancient Athenian philosophers, attempts to identify "pure" formal qualities and relationships that form the core of our perception. To find order amidst seeming disorder was a key goal of Boetti's art, as the work below explores.

Boetti also asserted art is created from what exists, rather than "created" out of thin air. This belief, and his mode of inquiry, carries over to Boetti's other work, notably his Afghan-influenced embroidered objects and a series of eight pieces called Storia Naturale della Moltiplicazione (Natural History of Multiplication).

Finally, the show demonstrated the importance of viewing the actual works. The reproductions, while capably executed by the MOMA staff, don't fully do justice to the objects' important textural qualities, subtle designs, wonderfully rendered colors, and skillfully chosen placement. Seeing the reproductions online was a poignant reminder of the shifting boundaries of blindness, sight, and insight.