Anyone who has spent a winter’s day in Turin catches the comic futility in the title of Alighiero Boetti’s sculpture Me Sunbathing in Turin on 19 January 1969. The north Italian city is often draped in a chilly fog at that time of year, and there is little likelihood that the thin sun could warm the prone body evoked by Boetti’s arrangement of hand-formed balls of cement. Pale as the plaster casts that capture the death throes of Vesuvius’s ancient victims, the life-size figure sprawls like a coroner’s silhouette. A butterfly perches daintily on its breast, a touch at once learned – it is an ancient Greek symbol for the soul – and cloying. Had Boetti been more punctilious about documenting the event (the invitation to the work’s 1969 exhibition at the Sperone Gallery gives an alternate date of 24 February), had he photographed a plein-air performance (as did Dennis Oppenhiem with Reading Position for Second Degree Burn), had he sublimated his narcissism more effectively (say by geometrically configuring the lumpy modules to form an “Etruscan Cement Circle” in the manner of Richard Long), the piece might lodge a bit more securely in the domain of Conceptual art. But the work, like Boetti, blithely flouts classification. And we are launched from information to imagination, forever envisioning the 28-year-old artist, dark-haired and bello, passive, foolhardy, extending his limbs to receive the sun’s embrace.

Boetti designed another sculptural self-portrait (1993) is likewise darker than the work which Boetti’s friends say is its distant inspiration, Bruce Nauman’s 1966 performance photo Self-Portrait as a Fountain, for which the bare-chested American spit a jet of water into the air. Boetti’s Self-Portrait presents a clothed effigy planted atop a mound of gravel and holding up a narrow hose from which water pours onto the figure’s head. There the water encounters an electric heating element. Some of the liquid evaporates with a soft hiss; the rest descends in sad rivulets.

Born in a country of proud fountains, where Neptune and Oceanus preside while dolphins spray, cherubs piss and voluptuous sirens lactate into ornamental basins, Boetti stands like the eternal butt of his won practical joke. Water pools in the sagging fabric above his ankle. Green stains etch his cheek and temple. Steam rises pointlessly from his overheated head. You don’t need to know the details of his heroin addiction and cancer to recognize that he is too thin in his belted trousers, too human, too haunted for anything but the most compromised and troubling of monuments.

Alpha and omega, the self-portraits bracketed a recent show at Chelsea’s Gagosian Gallery that summarized Boetti’s career with examples from three serial projects. There were a trio of “Camouflage” works (ca. 1967), pieces of military fabric which predate by two decades Warhol’s silkscreen-and-paint compositions based on the same theme; a half dozen embroidered “Maps,” the earliest from 1971-72 and the latest 1989-92, which present the nations of the world in the patterns of their respective flags and are bordered with block letter and Farsi inscriptions; and 25 of the 50 kilims that comprise Alternating from 1 to 100 and Vice Vera (1993), a visualization of counting vial woven grids. The maps and rugs were made by craftspeople from Afghanistan, where the peripatetic Boetti sometimes lived and operated a hotel for pilgrims like himself during the 1970’s.

The exhibition encapsulated many of the enduring concerns of Boetti’s 30-year career: strategies of visual communication and words as images, global culture and non-Western crafts, the unexpected poetry of mathematics and other rational systems, issues of authorship, the grid, the mercurial nature of his won identity. Perhaps all that was missing was a sense of how Boetti engaged with slight or demotic materials, an engagement that might seem casual at one moment and, in the next, grandly obsessive. His aspect of his art could be appreciated in a second exhibition, fortuitously scheduled to follow the Gagosian show, at Sperone Westwater Gallery in SoHo. The works, all from the later 1960s and 1970s, were from the collection of Gian Enzo Sperone, who became Boetti’s principal dealer in Turin and later Rome.

The highlight of the Sperone Westwater show was one of Boetti’s elaborate mail-art projects, Untitled – Victoria Boogie-Woogie (1972), which had not been exhibited since 1973. The work consists of 42 soberly framed collages, each composed of 120 envelopes arranged in overlapping registers, plus one more element, a title page, which explains the project thus: “Alighiero Boetti/’Untitled’ – Victoria Boogie-Woogie/1972/5,040 Envelopes/35,280 Stamps/All Permutations of Seven/Italian Stamps/The Letters Were All Mailed/By The Artist From Different/Cities To Himself In Turin.”

Each frame of Victoria Boogie-Woogie contains envelopes mailed from a single city on a single day, a procedure recorded by the post office’s circular cancellation marks, which float like bubble across the collages. The upper edge of every envelope carries seven stamps, all bearing the personification of the Italian republic but distinguished from one another by seven different colors that correspond to specific values in Italian lire. The possible permutations of ordering the seven stamps determined the need for 42 collages. Some envelopes carry a vivid red express-mail sticker. Al were stamped by Boetti with sequential numbers to facilitate their eventual archiving.

The envelopes must have been deposited in batches at the post office; they are too pristine (and they all arrived!) to have been dropped individually in mailboxes. Such a precaution does nothing to blunt the thrust of the work. Two diminutive and utilitarian modules – stamp and envelope – formally ordered in sufficient numbers, add up to a room-sized installation that dramatizes the intersection of several discreet cultural systems: a government sponsored communication network, monetary values, national geography, the calendar, the esteemed esthetic of the grid and the pop esthetic of the color chart. Thanks to the title, we are even invited to regard the collages in terms of the syncopated color blocks of Mondrian’s late works.

In its complexity and premeditation, Victoria Boogie-Woogie contrasts with City of Turin (1967), a small Photostat on Mylar of the plan of Turin on which Boetti indicated with names and lines the locations of seven contemporary artists’ studios, his won among them, as one might signal the sites of celebrated churches and palazzi. Names are also the principal feature of Manifesto 1967 (1970), a posterlike, nonalphabetical list of 16 Italian artists – Boetti again among them – annotated in a chartlike fashion with eight enigmatic symbols. The little emblems are provocative but fundamentally redundant: since the occurrences of each type of symbol line up in a vertical column, the marks indicate nothing more than checks or crosses would in their stead. The very notion of a textless manifesto has a mischievous and distinctively Italian flavor. From the time of the Futurists to the politicized alliances that mushroomed after World War II, Italy was a country of contentious artistic manifestos. It is as if a circumspect Boetti chose to disclose only a roster, keeping any programmatic points locked in a code known only to himself.

Also on hand at Sperone Westwater was Boetti’s first Afghan embroidery, 11 July 2023 – 16 December 2040 (1971). Bordered with zigzags and patterned with bright flowers like a sampler, the pair of cotton squares bear the date on which Boetti predicted h would die and that of the centenary of his birth. Brancusi-like, the work was realized in other materials, including incised wood and polished brass (the latter also at Sperone Westwater), which has a more obvious commemorative quality.

Having foreseen a generous 82 ½ year life span for himself, Boetti initiated, on May 4, 1971, a protracted series of 14 telegrams, really a variant of mail art, that would articulate the passage of time and conclude in 2017. Sent to Gian Enzo Sperone, the telegrams measured the days by doubling the intervals between messages (“Two days ago it was May 2, 1971,” “Four days ago it was May 2, 1971” and so on). The thirteenth a final telegram (“8, 192 days ago it was May 2, 1971”) was sent October 5, 1993, six months before Boetti died.

If Boetti was woefully mistaken about the year of his death, he was arguably fortunate in the timing of his professional debut. The art world of the mid- and late 1960s was wholly receptive to idea-driven objects and actions that cloaked subversion in simplicity and skated on the thin ice of logic. New on the scene, too, was the independent curator,” unencumbered by a collecting institution, poised to internationalize art movements and their protagonists with exhibitions of documents, photographs, linguistic games, on-site interventions and objects of dubious value or longevity. It was a congenial environment for Boetti, a high-school graduate with a bit of formal training in graphics but essentially self-educated in the galleries and museums of his native Turin and Paris. An autobiographical statement of 1967 describes a number of youthful operations and implies that Boetti had been a process artist since childhood:

In 1948 I tore a large sheet of brown paper to get little rectangular pieces that I piled up, and with which I erected a rather unstable column. In 1954 I straightened out a piece of corrugated cardboard with a surface area of a square meter. Since 1957, without interruption, I have been smoothing out the silver paper from cigarette boxes. . . Bending a piece of rubber between two fingers, rolling a sphere on a plane inclined by myself to this end, rolling up a soft wire inside a pencil, mixing different colored powders, these are the works carried out between March and April 1949. From 1946 onwards, I have continuously poked fires with the help of various materials.

Boetti went on to realize a group of columns in 1968, piling not cardboard but hundreds of scallop-edged pastry papers secured by an iron core. The earliest surviving works are a series of India ink drawings from 1964-65 in which he rendered details of mechanical objects and the patterns of Fiat auto trim. His first solo outing, in January 1967 at the Turin gallery of Christian Stein, packed an assortment of conceptual and material initiatives: a stack of modular lengths of the building material Eternit, a slender iron handrail positioned to demarcate a midgallery social space, a tower-like extended spiral of corrugated cardboard, a chair and ladder constructed with extra lengths of wood so as to be rendered useless, a cubic aluminum frame containing a zigzagging camouflage fabric, a wooden box outfitted with an incandescent bulb wired to go on a t an unpredictable time once a year for 11 seconds, and two electric signs that take turns displaying the words “Ping” and Pong” in emulation of the game’s rhythm.

More solo and group shows in Italy quickly followed, including the debut record of arte Povera in the fall of 1967 at Genoa’s Galleria La Bertesca. There Germano Celant introduced Boetti and five other artists as agents of a “guerrilla” movement prepared to undermine the material preoccupations of a coercive bourgeois culture by any means necessary. Celant's 1969 book Arte Povera, published in three languages, included American, British, Dutch and German artists along with an expanded cadre of Italians. That same year, Boetti was included in two landmark exhibitions of international conceptual art, “Square Pegs in Round holes” at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum and Harald Szeemann’s storied “When Attitudes Become Form” at the Berne Kunsthalle. Boetti’s internationalization was complete by 1972, when he participated in Documenta, the Venice Biennale and the Spoleto Festival.

That year, too, Boetti moved to Rome and began to divide his name using the conjunction “and” – Alighiero e Boetti- in a suggestion of duality whose implication deepened over time. Intimations of a double self could be read as Twins (1968), a postcard printed from a black-and-white photomontage that shows two images of Boetti (“identical” yet different, for they were shot a few hours apart) holding hands in a park. The postcard was sent out to fifty friends, as if to enlist mail art in conveying the happy tidings of a birth announcement. He subsequently staged a two-handed writing performance (spelling out the date simultaneously in standard and mirror writing); was photographed with his left and right hands holding an improbable two-necked banjo; and used an overhead photo of himself holding a pencil as the template for numerous doubled renderings of Alighiero e Boetti, the prolific twins, at work on opposite sides of projects. Any number of explanations, from the alchemical to the Lacanian, have been offered for Boetti’s preoccupation with another self. In the end, he seems to tell us that, like the teams which executed his embroideries and ballpoint-pen works, he was himself a multiple force, with the attendant potential for diversity and deviation.

Boetti had essentially plotted the principal issues and strategies of his art by 1973. Over the remaining two decades, these concerns were revisited and elaborated. The embroidered Maps, for instance, can be traced to an assisted readymade, a printed world map which Boetti hand-colored in 1969. In 1971, just months before initiating the first map, he completed Twelve Shapes from June 1967 (1967-71), a group of 12 copper plates, each the size of the Turinese daily La Stampa and each carrying the outline of a world hotspot (Bangladesh and Pakistan, the middle East, Northern Ireland, etc.), traced from that paper and positioned in the field to correspond to its original location on the front page. The date on which the story and its map were printed is recorded in the upper right. The geopolitical series, in turn, is related to an early embroidery, Occupied Territories (1969), which shows just the Israeli-occupied Sinai.

The political consciousness conveyed by the laconic means of information art survives in the more visually engaging and materially rich Maps. These are not the reassuring 48 states of Jasper Johns’s U.S. maps, but rather the unstable parameters of the postcolonial world. The earliest Maps include flags and borders that Boetti’s generation never learned about in school. The Afghani women who sewed the later Maps were exiled in Pakistan, refugees from the Soviet invasion. The very late Map (1989-92) shown at Gagosian displays the radical changes in the contours and flags of Europe and central Asia following the fall of the Berlin Wall an the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The foregoing account is a clear enough exercise in linear history. But consider the lettered inscriptions that frame the maps, and you are obliged to trace their connection to Boetti’s books and his grid-shaped work pieces – some embroidered, others cast in iron – as well as his fascination with the power of dates. Consider the global perspective of the maps, and the book and embroidery project that purports to list “The Thousand Longest Rivers in the World” enters the mix.

In this light, the final series of kilims stand as a summa, dense and comprehensive in its references but, perhaps unavoidably, less agile, less beguiling than the individual works whose many themes it subsumes. The 50 rugs of Alternating from 1 to 100 and Vice versa were created for a 1993 exhibition at the national contemporary art center in Grenoble. They all present black-and-white, checkerboard-like fields, framed by perimeters of chevrons, triangles and multicolored bars, and fringed along two sides. The 100 blocky squares of each kilim are subdivided into 10-by-10 grids of subordinate squares that are small enough to suggest a further diminution to scale of the weave itself. In one corner square of each rug, a single small unit, white or black, is set against a field of the opposing color. In the adjacent block, two small units are thus distinguished, then three and so on, until the number 100 is reached in a final square that is entirely white or entirely black.

The configurations for 50 sequences – 5,000 squares in all – were developed in graph-paper drawings by Boetti’s friends and by 30 teams of students at art schools across France. In a procedure that replicates the channels of the mail-art projects and complicates the layers of collaboration, the drawings were sent to Rome and organized as cartoons in Boetti’s studio. The cartoons were shipped to Peshawar, Pakistan, and woven. The rugs and files containing the original drawings were sent to Grenoble for an exhibition. The following year the rugs were dispersed.

The title of the work – its promise of “vice versa” – is something of a tease, for the ratios of black units to white might see-saw, but the order of the larger squares in each kilim is fixed: to reverse the sequence is to count from 0 to 99, not 1 to 100. The counting is straightforward, arithmetic, compared to, say, the cumulative progression of the medieval Fibonacci sequence favored by fellow poverist Mario Merz. Yet in their sheer plenitude and variety, the grids transform numbers into symbols that summon up a host of associations, from simple stripes and L shapes to stairs and coils, a swastika, a bar graph, the state of Utah, a basilica floor plan, a pixilated face, a ski sweater, a crossword puzzle, or an acreage pattern viewed from the sky.

Positioned on the floor, the kilims evoke a mosque as well as the gridded metal “rugs” of Carl Andre. Alternating is also a close cousin to the Serial objects begun by Sol LeWitt in the mid-1960s, which included gridded floor works and, more pertinently, graphic projects based on numerical variations of the 12 edges that outline a cube. LeWitt’s Schematic Drawing for Incomplete Open Cubes (1974), which displays those variations as linear patterns in a numbered grid, was printed on the announcement for his exhibition at the gallery of John Weber, who also represented Boetti in New York. LeWitt’s full-scale project, Incomplete Open Cubes, was shown at Sperone’s Turin space in 1975.

Boetti’s own experiments with wedding mathematical systems to symbols and grids go back at least to 1967, but his first known implementation of the progressive monochrome grid seen in alternating is a 1976 drawing for an Afghan embroidery. The many subsequent versions include a project for a municipal pavement designed by the citizens of Gavirate in Italy (1979) and a mosaic designed by students at the California State University at Northridge (1984). It survived the earthquake that devastated the campus 10 years later.

Doggedly tracking any given Boettian theme eventually leads to diminishing returns. The raw volume of objects and their seemingly infinite permutations can be daunting. Reflecting both his contempt for art-market conventions and his need for cash, Boetti all but mass-produced certain pieces and, de Chirico-like, created later versions of his earlier desirable works. As his production multiplied, small embroideries, some of them spurious, turned up in auctions on Italy’s telemarketing network.

Far better to think of that sprawling body of work as one grand articulation of the kind of concept that Victoria Boogie-Woogie can only synopsize, as an all-encompassing organic structure of intersecting systems, recombinant motifs and branching investigations that double back and reencounter one another to new effect. Boetti even left us a clue, a map if you will, to help us find our way.

I’ve worked a lot with the concept of order and disorder: disordering order or rather placing order into certain disorders, or even presenting a visual order that was actually the representation of a mental disorder. It’s only a question of knowing the rules of the game: if you don’t know them, you will never see the order that prevails in things just as when looking at a starry sky, if you don’t know the order of the stars, you’ll see only confusion where an astronomer, instead, will have a very clear vision of it all.

-Marcia Vetrocq