Lot Essay
This work is registered in the Archivio Alighiero Boetti, Rome, under no. 6091 and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
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Mettere al Mondo il Mondo: A Collecting Journey in the World of Alighiero Boetti
ALIGHIERO BOETTI (1940-1994)
Mappa
Details
ALIGHIERO BOETTI (1940-1994)
Mappa
signed and inscribed 'alighiero e boetti KABUL AFGHANISTAN' (on the overlap)
embroidery on linen
47 ¼ x 65 1/8 in. (120 x 165.4 cm.)
Executed in 1979.
Mappa
signed and inscribed 'alighiero e boetti KABUL AFGHANISTAN' (on the overlap)
embroidery on linen
47 ¼ x 65 1/8 in. (120 x 165.4 cm.)
Executed in 1979.
Provenance
de Pury & Luxembourg Art, Geneva
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2000
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2000
Literature
J-C. Ammann, Alighiero Boetti catalogo generale, vol. II, Milan 2012, p. 395, no. 1224 (illustrated).
Further Details
“For me, the embroidered Mappa is the ultimate in beauty.” Alighiero Boetti
Alighiero Boetti’s embroidered maps of the world are the artist’s best-known and most loved creations. A series of radiant, large-scale, embroidered silk tapestries, painstakingly hand-crafted in Afghanistan and Pakistan using traditional methods, these works are ultimately optimistic images that reveal the geopolitical map of the world to be a fascinatingly diverse and colorful single entity held together in a state of perpetual flux. In recent years, these iconic and immediately understandable images have also come to be recognised as powerful and even perhaps prophetic icons of the fluid, fast-paced and ever-changing globalised world of the twenty-first century.
The present Mappa, executed in 1979, is one of the last examples of Boetti’s original series of Mappe made in Afghanistan between 1971 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979. A second phase of production was begun, remotely, after the Soviet invasion and this continued until 1986, when Boetti was again able to travel to visit his Afghan collaborators, then living in exile in Peshawar, to supervise a third phase of these works’ production until 1994. Boetti’s first series of Mappe are all distinguished by the various shades of blue that has been used to color their oceans: here, ripples of subtly different color and texture can be traced as the weavers change their rolls of thread, creating an exquisite, patchwork-like pattern across the seas.
“The world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them; in short, I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges, everything else requires no choosing.” Alighiero Boetti
Given the auspicious date of this work, it is fitting that its border inscription, rendered in an alternating sequence of black and white quadrati (squares), should appear to refer back to the principles that gave rise to the very first Mappe when, in 1969, Boetti himself had hand-colored in a black and white printed teacher’s map of the world to create his Planisfero politico. Coloring in this black-and-white map of the world solely in accordance with the national flags of each country provided a global image of Boetti’s oft-proclaimed principle of ordine e disordine—the inherent and interdependent relationship between order and disorder—at work within the geopolitical structure of the world itself. Boetti was thrilled with the result. “For that work I did nothing,” he recalled, ‘chose nothing, in the sense that: the world is as it is. The world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them; in short, I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges, everything else requires no choosing” (A. Boetti, 1974, quoted in A. Boetti, Alighiero e Boetti, Ravenna 1984, p. 122). While Jasper Johns was drawn to the subject matter in the 1960s for its ubiquitous iconography as a study of perception, Boetti considered the map to be more a marker of the passage of time.
Invoking this same principle of ordine e disordine and of using color to simultaneously both divide and unite, the border inscription on this 1979 Mappa reads: Si o no chiedere si o no bianco o nero oppure bianco e nero o colore e cosi dividere (“Yes or no, ask yes or no, black or white or otherwise black and white, or color, and divide like this”) and Coprire l’ordine nel disordine e mettere disordine nel l’ordine delle cose (“Covering order in disorder and putting disorder into the order of things”). These words are themselves split into alternating black and white letters in a way that indicates the same principle of order and disorder also at work within the structures of speech and language.
Unlike the Planisfero politico, the making of Boetti’s embroidered Mappe was part of a trans-continental, cross-cultural enterprise that involved the expansion of Boetti’s simple, original concept into a complex and often painstakingly slow process. Each Mappa involved the work of up to four Afghan women embroiderers and took at least a year to make: some took two years, and others sometimes as much as a decade. The process of making these works was, however, to completely transform Boetti’s art. “I love the Plansiferi [Planispheres],” he told Mirella Bandini, soon after making his first tapestry. “Doing these embroideries, with four women working on the canvas in Afghanistan, where they are the best embroidresses in the world…is a way of recovering something. I love the work. It is one of the few things I could see outside an art gallery and that amuses me a lot! … I could sell this anywhere because everybody likes it” (A. Boetti interviewed by M. Bandini, 1972, in Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2001, p. 190).
It was Boetti’s gallerist Gian Enzo Sperone who first argued that Boetti should create more than one Mappa. Although Sperone may have had pecuniary concerns uppermost in his mind, Boetti himself was quick to see the extraordinary power and potential of transforming these works into an open work of perpetual motion through the creation of an ongoing series. In this way, not only would each Mappa come to serve as a progressive temporal chart of the perpetually-changing borders of the world, but, hand-crafted in the traditional, artisanal way that they were, each would also be a unique, stand-alone work that sustained a permanent cross-border collaboration between him in Rome and his partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was also effectively through the perpetual cross-cultural exchange instigated by the Mappe that, as Rainald Schumacher has written, “the culture of ‘arts and crafts’ and the traditions of a ‘poor’ country found their entry into the greatest museums in the world” (R. Schumacher, Arte Povera: The Great Awakening, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, 2012, p. 68).
In the present Mappa, for example, there are a number of idiosyncrasies of the kind that both particularly appealed to Boetti and which made each example unique. Executed on the eve of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, this work is a poignant document of the world, shortly before its geopolitical map was to change so dramatically over the next few years—culminating, in 1990, with the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. As with many maps created in the late-1970s and early 1980s, the map of Namibia has here been rendered ‘flagless’ in a nondescript, brilliant white because, during these years, the country was under a state of civil war and correspondingly had no flag. Similarly, at the epicentre of the work, due to the equal uncertainty about the leadership in Afghanistan in 1979, the outlines of the Afghan weavers own homeland has also been rendered blank. In addition to these examples, also notable is the rare use of an especially vibrant turquoise silk thread in the rendering of the Argentinian and Mongolian national flags. In all these respects this Mappa serves as a prime example of Boetti’s belief in artists as “an alchemical factor of transmutation,” because it is they who are “certainly among those rare people who know how to transform certain unpleasant states, sadness or simply the malaise of being in the world, into beauty” (A. Boetti, ‘From Today to Tomorrow’, 1988, in Alighiero & Boetti: Bringing the World into Art, 1993-1962, exh. cat. MADRE, Naples 2009, p. 207).
Alighiero Boetti’s embroidered maps of the world are the artist’s best-known and most loved creations. A series of radiant, large-scale, embroidered silk tapestries, painstakingly hand-crafted in Afghanistan and Pakistan using traditional methods, these works are ultimately optimistic images that reveal the geopolitical map of the world to be a fascinatingly diverse and colorful single entity held together in a state of perpetual flux. In recent years, these iconic and immediately understandable images have also come to be recognised as powerful and even perhaps prophetic icons of the fluid, fast-paced and ever-changing globalised world of the twenty-first century.
The present Mappa, executed in 1979, is one of the last examples of Boetti’s original series of Mappe made in Afghanistan between 1971 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979. A second phase of production was begun, remotely, after the Soviet invasion and this continued until 1986, when Boetti was again able to travel to visit his Afghan collaborators, then living in exile in Peshawar, to supervise a third phase of these works’ production until 1994. Boetti’s first series of Mappe are all distinguished by the various shades of blue that has been used to color their oceans: here, ripples of subtly different color and texture can be traced as the weavers change their rolls of thread, creating an exquisite, patchwork-like pattern across the seas.
“The world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them; in short, I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges, everything else requires no choosing.” Alighiero Boetti
Given the auspicious date of this work, it is fitting that its border inscription, rendered in an alternating sequence of black and white quadrati (squares), should appear to refer back to the principles that gave rise to the very first Mappe when, in 1969, Boetti himself had hand-colored in a black and white printed teacher’s map of the world to create his Planisfero politico. Coloring in this black-and-white map of the world solely in accordance with the national flags of each country provided a global image of Boetti’s oft-proclaimed principle of ordine e disordine—the inherent and interdependent relationship between order and disorder—at work within the geopolitical structure of the world itself. Boetti was thrilled with the result. “For that work I did nothing,” he recalled, ‘chose nothing, in the sense that: the world is as it is. The world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them; in short, I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges, everything else requires no choosing” (A. Boetti, 1974, quoted in A. Boetti, Alighiero e Boetti, Ravenna 1984, p. 122). While Jasper Johns was drawn to the subject matter in the 1960s for its ubiquitous iconography as a study of perception, Boetti considered the map to be more a marker of the passage of time.
Invoking this same principle of ordine e disordine and of using color to simultaneously both divide and unite, the border inscription on this 1979 Mappa reads: Si o no chiedere si o no bianco o nero oppure bianco e nero o colore e cosi dividere (“Yes or no, ask yes or no, black or white or otherwise black and white, or color, and divide like this”) and Coprire l’ordine nel disordine e mettere disordine nel l’ordine delle cose (“Covering order in disorder and putting disorder into the order of things”). These words are themselves split into alternating black and white letters in a way that indicates the same principle of order and disorder also at work within the structures of speech and language.
Unlike the Planisfero politico, the making of Boetti’s embroidered Mappe was part of a trans-continental, cross-cultural enterprise that involved the expansion of Boetti’s simple, original concept into a complex and often painstakingly slow process. Each Mappa involved the work of up to four Afghan women embroiderers and took at least a year to make: some took two years, and others sometimes as much as a decade. The process of making these works was, however, to completely transform Boetti’s art. “I love the Plansiferi [Planispheres],” he told Mirella Bandini, soon after making his first tapestry. “Doing these embroideries, with four women working on the canvas in Afghanistan, where they are the best embroidresses in the world…is a way of recovering something. I love the work. It is one of the few things I could see outside an art gallery and that amuses me a lot! … I could sell this anywhere because everybody likes it” (A. Boetti interviewed by M. Bandini, 1972, in Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2001, p. 190).
It was Boetti’s gallerist Gian Enzo Sperone who first argued that Boetti should create more than one Mappa. Although Sperone may have had pecuniary concerns uppermost in his mind, Boetti himself was quick to see the extraordinary power and potential of transforming these works into an open work of perpetual motion through the creation of an ongoing series. In this way, not only would each Mappa come to serve as a progressive temporal chart of the perpetually-changing borders of the world, but, hand-crafted in the traditional, artisanal way that they were, each would also be a unique, stand-alone work that sustained a permanent cross-border collaboration between him in Rome and his partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was also effectively through the perpetual cross-cultural exchange instigated by the Mappe that, as Rainald Schumacher has written, “the culture of ‘arts and crafts’ and the traditions of a ‘poor’ country found their entry into the greatest museums in the world” (R. Schumacher, Arte Povera: The Great Awakening, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, 2012, p. 68).
In the present Mappa, for example, there are a number of idiosyncrasies of the kind that both particularly appealed to Boetti and which made each example unique. Executed on the eve of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, this work is a poignant document of the world, shortly before its geopolitical map was to change so dramatically over the next few years—culminating, in 1990, with the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. As with many maps created in the late-1970s and early 1980s, the map of Namibia has here been rendered ‘flagless’ in a nondescript, brilliant white because, during these years, the country was under a state of civil war and correspondingly had no flag. Similarly, at the epicentre of the work, due to the equal uncertainty about the leadership in Afghanistan in 1979, the outlines of the Afghan weavers own homeland has also been rendered blank. In addition to these examples, also notable is the rare use of an especially vibrant turquoise silk thread in the rendering of the Argentinian and Mongolian national flags. In all these respects this Mappa serves as a prime example of Boetti’s belief in artists as “an alchemical factor of transmutation,” because it is they who are “certainly among those rare people who know how to transform certain unpleasant states, sadness or simply the malaise of being in the world, into beauty” (A. Boetti, ‘From Today to Tomorrow’, 1988, in Alighiero & Boetti: Bringing the World into Art, 1993-1962, exh. cat. MADRE, Naples 2009, p. 207).
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