Alighiero Boetti

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Turin, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea; Villeneuve d'Ascq, Museé d'Arte Moderne; and Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Alighiero Boetti 1965-1994, 1996-97, p. 176, no. 48, illustrated 

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The paper has yellowed slightly over time and there are artist's pinholes in places along the horizontal edge. There is slight discolouration along the lower edge, visible in the catalogue illustration, as a result of minor water damage, which has since been restored. Close inspection reveals a few scattered spots of foxing and some minor creases to the extreme bottom edge. There is some slight undulation to the sheet towards the top right corner and some minor skinning in isolated places throughout.
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The present work belongs to Alighiero Boetti’s earliest incarnations from the remarkable corpus of panels comprising delicately hand-copied magazine covers. Selected at random yet confined to the date of publication prescribed by the title, the eighteen individual covers delineated in Novembre 1983 bear witness to the genesis of an ambitious typological enterprise that is at once timeless and anachronic, unveiling the irrationalities of history-making, and the order and disorder inherent to communal narratives. Alongside the present work, Octobre 1983 and Dicembre 1983 – the latter of which is housed in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York – form the beginnings of a grand project that in 1984 expanded to chart the course of entire years: Anno 1984, Anno 1986 (Central Museum, Tokyo), Anno 1988 and finally Anno 1990. These colossal twelve-part panoramas, with each panel comprising eighteen individual cover designs are among Boetti's most ambitious and expansive projects. Transposed from mechanical print into free-hand graphite, these works catalogue and archive scientific and political developments alongside trends in design, leisure, sport and popular culture. Although the scrutiny of time as telescoped by the conceptual projects of On Kawara or Roman Opalka, chime with the mesi and anni, Boetti's works are nonetheless charged by his defining engagement with a global politics.

The ephemerality of imagery – now plentiful but with time perishable – is captured eloquently in these works, whose tokenistic preservation of visual artefacts only reinforces the absence of their fuller original context. The inescapable whittling down of cultural material, comprising historical, fictional, scientific, and all other forms of knowledge, is cogently expressed by the diverse languages and subject matter represented on the magazine covers of Novembre 1983: from Kennedy on the cover of Time, Reagan and Mickey Mouse on Der Speigel, and the illustration of a space-destined satellite on Scienza 83, these international publications represent a selective time capsule of world events. Governed by pure chance, but influenced by structures and currents of power, politics and fashion, the preservation and erasure of images from our collective memory is a clear indicator of the artist’s fascination with the concept of chance. In 1984, referring to the unique panels of 1983 Boetti said: “In a month, there were millions of images. Today, perhaps there are only a hundred. Then there will only remain this once-coloured faded copy” (Alighiero Boetti quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, Ravenna, Pinacoteca Comunale, Alighiero & Boetti, 1984, p. 141). Mimicking this dynamic, Boetti instructed his studio assistants to purchase the source magazines from local stores at random and thus characteristically diffused authorial agency. 

Cover designs, less intellectual but replete with sex appeal and eye-catching graphics, resonate with the contemporaneous Pop movement and it’s hedonist embrace of mass visual culture. However, unlike the serial reprography of Pop media and its embracement of processes such as silkscreening, Novembre 1983 and its counterparts were drawn in pencil, as in Warhol's earlier newspaper pieces. Eschewing the anonymous emulation of mass reproduction, Anno 1984 painstakingly transcribes images too quickly generated, multiplied, consumed and discarded into a format unequivocally resistant to trivialisation. The ‘patience’ invested in their production accumulates a personal resonance – rekindling Walter Benjamin’s ‘aura’ – entirely unlike that witnessed in Pop appropriations of news media.  This vulnerable, subjective, and utterly human dimension was Boetti’s favoured and most pertinent source of disorder. Taken as a whole, the pioneering works from 1983 and twelve-panel Anno works stretching from 1984 to 1990 constitute a single catalogue rivalling the largest of Warhol’s or Rauschenberg’s multi-canvas environments, and today stand among the most extensively archival of conceptual art-installations.