Alighiero Boetti exhibit at the MOMA

The retrospective exhibt @ MOMA of Alighiero Boetti's (1940-1994) is the largest amalgamation of his varied & copious work ever to be assembled in the U.S.  Boetti is considered one of Italy's most prominent and influential artists of the 20th C.  Boetti first emerged as part of the Arte Povera movement in the 60's; a group of poor artists who used various accessible and inexpensive materials in their art.  He quickly distanced himself from this movement and established himself as a maverick artist and  intellectual.  Best known for his order vs. disorder concept and his whimsical opposing of the rational and irrational.  Boetti said, "It is a knowing of the rules of the game.  Someone who doesn't know them will never see that order reigns in things.  It's like looking at a starry sky, someone who does not know the order of the stars will see only confusion."  I am content to look at the stars and marvel at their beauty and ponder their mysteries.  Boetti's tapestries are magnficient to behold yet much of his work will  remain an enigma to me.  I want to point out his self-portraits which are xerox copies in which he is covering parts of himself and his supine body sculpture, 'Me Sunbathing in Turin in Jan.' constructed of concrete balls with a yellow butterfly .  "Time is the only thing that is magical," Boetti.  Again, I disagree, I describe this exhibit as mystifying and intend to revisit perhaps to find order from chaos.