Alighiero Boetti Retrospective at Museum of Modern Art Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan A detail from "Catasta" ("Stack"), made out of piled fiber-cement tubes, in the retrospective of Mr. Boetti's life's work, opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art. There's a bittersweet addition to the Museum of Modern Art's sculpture garden this summer. Half hidden in the shade of a tree, it's a life-size bronze statue of a gaunt-looking guy holding a fountainlike hose in one hand. When water spraying from it hits his head, steam rises, as if his brain were sizzling. The statue is a 1993 self-portrait of the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti, who died a year after it was made and who seems to have lived his life in a kind of fever delirium of ideas, many of which thread through "Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan," a magical survey of his art. Part of it is on view in the museum's atrium, with the rest to open on the sixth floor on Sunday. Boetti was born in 1940 in Turin, the Motor City of Italy and the home of Fiat. He came of age creatively in the 1960s. Influenced by Duchamp, by industrial culture and by a natural attraction to the intricacies of language and arcane systems of logic, he made work that at first was low on formal allure and packed tight with conceptual content. Certainly the first objects you see on MoMA's sixth floor are far from prepossessing: sheets of printed graph paper; a ziggurat-shaped column of rolled commercial cardboard; a seemingly half-finished piece of embroidery; a picture postcard of two look-alike men holding hands; a light bulb in a box. Yet each of these things, or groups of things, is a study in complication, a visual essay on the ambiguities that surround conventional notions of measurement, meaning, value and time. All the printed lines of the graph paper, for example, have, for no given reason, been traced over, freehand, in pencil, firmly here, shakily there, so that a common emblem of geometric exactitude has become personalized, like the lines of an encephalogram. The ziggurat sculpture is tall, and for that reason monumental, though it's also a giant toy, produced through a version of a trick that Boetti remembered performing as a child, when he put his finger in the center hole of a rolled tape measure and pulled upward to create a mini-tower. The embroidery, consisting of three patches of brown wool stitched by Boetti's first wife and collaborator, Annemarie Sauzeau, on an otherwise empty piece of cloth, looks like a work in progress, though it's as complete as it needs to be. The shapes of the stitched patches are quite specific: they exactly correspond to maps of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip printed in an Italian newspaper at the time of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The hand-holding twins on the postcard are easily identifiable as a double portrait of Boetti, who would repeatedly over the years present himself as a dual, left-brain-versus-right-brain personality. He trained himself to write and draw ambidextrously and transformed himself from solo artist to artist-team by adding a conjunction to his name: Alighiero Boetti became Alighiero e Boetti: Alighiero AND Boetti. Finally, there's the light bulb in the box, a clunky, self-effacing piece that turns out to be the most charismatic object of all. The bulb is programmed to turn on once a year, for a mere 11 seconds, and on a random schedule. Even Boetti couldn't predict when it might light, though the idea that it will at some point do so creates a tension of expectation. Maybe you'll be the one looking at it when the magic moment occurs. In these early concept-intensive works, Boetti laid out the fundamentals of his career. They include an interest in the concept of natural variation built into repetition and accident built into control; a preference for collaboration (including self-collaboration) as working method; a fascination with geography and the larger world beyond art; and a deep sense of investment, philosophical but also emotional, in the workings of time. In the mid-1960s, certain features of Boetti's art, notably its use of found and down-market materials, recommended him to a group of Italian experimental artists gathered under the rubric of Arte Povera. Initially, Boetti found their company stimulating and threw himself into collective activities. The MoMA show, organized in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London, includes a poster he designed in 1967, listing the names of the vanguard "poor art" crew, his own among them. "Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan" continues through Oct. 1 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.