NAPLES.- In 1971, Alighiero Boetti began to use the phrase 'Mettere al mondo il mondo'. One translation is 'giving birth to the world', but another more prosaic translation is 'putting the world back into the world' which implies a way of making art that Boetti followed.

Instead of inventing images, constructing forms, or having things fabricated, Boetti took the stuff of the world, rearranged it, and put it back into the world as art. He used stamps, maps, the names and lengths of rivers, the colours of biro pens.

Boetti's idea of putting the world back into the world is one approach among the many that artists take when transforming used objects, and this exhibition that opens today and will continue through to 23 December 2022 at the Thomas Dane Gallery explores the different reasons they do this.




In the early 1970s, Cecilia Vicuña left her home in Chile to flee the military dictatorship. She started to make tiny constructions from things she found, calling them 'Precarios'. For her, such sculptures expressed the fragility of political exile. She makes 'Precarios' still, but increasingly they reflect the precariousness of the natural world.

Also in the early 1970s, Betye Saar began to collect objects from flea markets and build small shrines, drawing from many different cultures' ideas of spirituality.

For others in her wake, like Arthur Simms and Terry Adkins, the used object is not just a physical thing. It is charged, and magical, and carries a sense of the lost presence of its former owner.

Participating artists:

Terry Adkins
Abbas Akhavan
Alighiero Boetti
Abraham Cruzvillegas
Tacita Dean
Jimmie Durham
Jean-Luc Moulène
Betye Saar
Ser Serpas
Arthur Simms
Michael E. Smith
Cecilia Vicuña