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拍品專文
This work is registered in the Archivio Alighiero Boetti, Rome, under number 88/RL/28.
From the apparent chaos of the jumbled letters that fill the large tapestry Untitled (Otto agosto), order and words emerge. In designing this work, Boetti has divided the surface into a grid of squares, most of which are four letters by four letters, as well as a central square that is larger and a cross form along the central axes (in the list of matrices in the 1998 Frankfurt exhibition catalogue, this format is cited as vatiant VIa). Reading the letters from top to bottom in sequence within each of these boxes, a number of thoughts and phrases central to Boetti's work appear. Starting with 'Le nuove autonomie' and the ever-pertinent 'immaginando tutto', as well as 'Alighiero e Boetti', 'Peshawar Pakistan' and inevitably 'Ordine e disordine'.
These words reveal Boetti's love of what he saw as the 'fortunate coincidences' of number and of language (Boetti, quoted in Alighiero Boetti: Mettere al mondo il mondo, exh.cat., Frankfurt, 1998, p. 317). By adding the 'e' to his own name, he had not only created his own personal incarnation of a twin persona, but had also managed to create a name that was sixteen letters long, that could be placed within the strict four by four grid. Likewise the other phrases reveal a strange recurrence of this sixteen letter pattern throughout the world. Revelling in revealing each of these fortuitous sixteen-letter phrases, Boetti hints at an underlying fabric of mystery and unity in the world. Here, his interest in Sufism, in the self-manifesting systems of the beautiful and the divine, comes to the fore. The interest in numerology is apparent not only in the encrypted layout and organisation of the letters in Untitled (Otto agosto), but also in his celebration of the recurrence of the number 8 at that moment in the central box, he points out that 'Today is the eighth day of the eighth month of the year nineteen hundred and eighty-eight by the Pantheon'. Considering that the work was created in 1981, it is clear that Boetti sometimes sought out his own coincidences. Yet it is this coincidence that allows him to obey his own edict in one of the left-hand boxes and 'Far quadrare tutto'.
From the apparent chaos of the jumbled letters that fill the large tapestry Untitled (Otto agosto), order and words emerge. In designing this work, Boetti has divided the surface into a grid of squares, most of which are four letters by four letters, as well as a central square that is larger and a cross form along the central axes (in the list of matrices in the 1998 Frankfurt exhibition catalogue, this format is cited as vatiant VIa). Reading the letters from top to bottom in sequence within each of these boxes, a number of thoughts and phrases central to Boetti's work appear. Starting with 'Le nuove autonomie' and the ever-pertinent 'immaginando tutto', as well as 'Alighiero e Boetti', 'Peshawar Pakistan' and inevitably 'Ordine e disordine'.
These words reveal Boetti's love of what he saw as the 'fortunate coincidences' of number and of language (Boetti, quoted in Alighiero Boetti: Mettere al mondo il mondo, exh.cat., Frankfurt, 1998, p. 317). By adding the 'e' to his own name, he had not only created his own personal incarnation of a twin persona, but had also managed to create a name that was sixteen letters long, that could be placed within the strict four by four grid. Likewise the other phrases reveal a strange recurrence of this sixteen letter pattern throughout the world. Revelling in revealing each of these fortuitous sixteen-letter phrases, Boetti hints at an underlying fabric of mystery and unity in the world. Here, his interest in Sufism, in the self-manifesting systems of the beautiful and the divine, comes to the fore. The interest in numerology is apparent not only in the encrypted layout and organisation of the letters in Untitled (Otto agosto), but also in his celebration of the recurrence of the number 8 at that moment in the central box, he points out that 'Today is the eighth day of the eighth month of the year nineteen hundred and eighty-eight by the Pantheon'. Considering that the work was created in 1981, it is clear that Boetti sometimes sought out his own coincidences. Yet it is this coincidence that allows him to obey his own edict in one of the left-hand boxes and 'Far quadrare tutto'.