Press release

Alighiero e Boetti
“En alternant de 1 à 100 et vice versa”
“De bouche à oreille”
Exhibition 28 November 1993–27 March 1994


After a short period when his work was strictly Arte Povera, Boetti’s expressive space quickly became focused on the flat surface (and above all the sheet of paper), on which he transcribed and developed every last ounce of the potential of various “visualised mental processes” (to borrow the title of a very telling group show in Lucerne in 1970, which marked the beginnings of Conceptual Art). The mental, musical, mathematical, cosmic and other processes and rhythms that Boetti thus “worked through” are remarkably varied.

The two key works presented at Le Magasin are mature examples of this process at its culmination. Both are genuine mises-en-scènes, operative convergences in the cinematic more than orchestral sense of the term, as Boetti himself pointed out: the conductor, he said, controls with his hands only a homogenous group of musicians whereas the film director guides all the different technical trades.

To make Alternating 1 to 100, Boetti involved actual places of artistic apprenticeship: thirty art schools, and also worked with twenty art professionals. Their contribution consisted in filling in grids by putting black in the openings of the hundred boxes in each of the fifty sites. All Boetti did was define the rules: a quantitative progression; one black square, then two, then three black squares, all the way to the 99 of the last chequerboard, on which the single white square remaining suggests the possibility of a fresh start in the opposite direction, in which the number of white squares would increase). The system thus proposed is both a rigid code and the possibility of an almost infinite freedom to modulate the forms.

The “set” of plates thus drawn in black and white on cardboard was then distributed around another active “community”, that of kilim weavers in Pakistan, who made fifty rugs. Rugs with meditative rhythms, magic carpets. The exhibition catalogue features these kilims, together with texts by Adelina von Fürstenherg, Giovan-Battista Salerno and Angela Vettese.

De bouche à oreille is another choral work by Boetti, centring on the mechanism of a collective process of elaboration that was spread out both in time and in space. The partners on this occasion were the postmen of the French post office. This spectacularly big piece of mail art was made specially for the exhibition at Le Magasin. It will be exhibited in 1994 at the Paris Musée de la Poste, which will produce a publication about the work.

De bouche à oreille follows a numerical progression, a mathematical series of squares: one stamp on one envelope, four stamps on four envelopes (2x2), then nine (3x3) and all the way to 121 (11x11) – in other words, a total of 506 envelopes and 39,976 stamps! The system thus chosen constitutes a progressive invasion of space: the space of the stamp on the envelope, the space over which the letter (containing an unseen drawing) was transported and, finally, the space of the exhibition, where all the envelopes, and all the drawings, now at last made visible, will be laid out. The numerical progression is, furthermore, modulated in terms of permutation. For example, the four stamps (each one obviously being different) allow for four possible permutations, one on each of the four envelopes, etc.

This work is like a huge travel notebook whose dates and rhythm will be memorised thanks to each postmark, while the sites where each letter was posted will constitute a vast geographical web with the Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble - Le MAGASIN, at its centre.

Finally, as with every other work by Boetti, this postal piece sets up a tension between the logical necessity of a system and the risks of chance, involving the random action of stamping (postmarks, advertising), the handwritten annotations of the postmen, or the effects of rain, making the ink run or stamps peel off.