The passing and marking of time is a recurrent theme of Boetti’s work; the Lampada annuale (Yearly Lamp) of 1966 is, for instance, a key piece: a dark, lacquered, wooden box stands on the floor and inside a light bulb is illuminated just once a year for 11, randomly programmed, seconds. In his Boetti monograph, Mark Godfrey cites the maxim ‘dare tempo al tempo’ (‘to give time to time’, also the title of a later embroidery work) as one of the four fundamental concepts of the artist’s work in the 1970s. It was a call to reconsider and to redefine one’s experience of time and thus to create a new relationship with the world. Unlike the illumination of the Lampada annuale, which the viewer is almost certain to miss, Boetti’s Orologi annuali, (Annual clocks) continually informed their wearers of the time and of the given year. He produced a version of the watch nearly every year from 1977–94 in editions from 50 to 200 that he first gave to friends, replacing the numbers on a clock dial with only the digits of that year. It is both precise and vague; striking a note that may be deadly serious or deadpan, the watches are symptomatic of much of Boetti’s mesmerising work.
Alighiero Boetti was born in Turin, in Italy’s industrial north, in 1940. Boetti was in Turin when the groundbreaking Arte Povera movement…
