Alighiero Boetti’s Tecnica Povera

Michele D’Aurizio

Alighiero Boetti, Rosso Gilera 60 1232, 1967, Industrial varnish on cardboard and cork letters and numbers, 71 x 71 cm, Private Collection, New York — Alighiero Boetti, *Rosso Gilera 60 1232*, 1967, Industrial varnish on cardboard and cork letters and numbers, 71 x 71 cm, Private Collection, New York

Alighiero Boetti, *Rosso Gilera 60 1232*, 1967, Industrial varnish on cardboard and cork letters and numbers, 71 x 71 cm, Private Collection, New York

This dissertation project explores art, craft, and design objects created in critical dialogue with the “Made in Italy” phenomenon, a brand of consumer items that emerged in the wake of Italy’s postwar “economic miracle.” The “Made in Italy” brand brought the country into the fold of the world market by leveraging consumers’ fetishization of Italy’s artisanal traditions and manufacturers’ retention of “backward” modes of production. The project argues that the country’s stunted industrialization reenacted an imperialist fixation on expanding the artisanal sector of dependent countries and considers art and critical design practices that sought to pry open the structural contradictions of Italy’s peripheral development.
The fellowship at the Bibliotheca Herziana served to sharpen the focus on a body of work by artist Alighiero Boetti, the Vernici industriali (Industrial Varnishes). In these objects, Boetti wrote the codes of various commercial paints by gluing cork letters on metal plaques and then spray-painting each collage with the corresponding color. Boetti lived in Turin, home to FIAT, Italy’s largest automobile maker. While critics have usually interpreted the Vernici as tautological exercises, the project treats them as critical reflections of the goods manufactured by the local automotive industry. In doing so, it argues that Boetti grew interested in the spray painting that FIAT workers still predominantly executed by hand – a solution largely facilitated by low-cost laborers migrating en masse to Turin from rural areas. When FIAT’s affordable cars achieved popularity on the world market, local and global capitalist dynamics began to mirror each other: the rural population provided the nation’s production centers with a surplus workforce as those centers became the world-system’s complementary suppliers.