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Sydney College of the Arts
The University of Sydney
MASTERS OF VISUAL ARTS
2002
RESEARCH PAPER
RE-EVALUATING THE ART AND CHESS OF MARCELDUCHAMP
by
Ian Randall
J\a'cI ' 2.0CLL
i
This volume is presented as a record of the work undertaken for the degree of Master of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts.
2
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations 5
Thesis Summary 6
Chapter 1. Methodology: "Where is Duchamp.. . ?" 9
The Archetypal Search for Duchamp Where is Duchamp . . . ?Paradigm ShiftsDuchamp and the Traversal of Paradigms Duchampian Chess
Chapter 2. Duchampian Chess in a Postmodern Historical Field 40
Duchamp the Chess "Idiot"Chess as a Modernist Historical ModelThe "Progress" of ModernityThe transition into PostmodemityScientific Developments as Reflecting the PostmodernChess as a Metaphor for a 'New' Perception in Science: the nth-DimensionDuchamp's place in Postmodernism
Chapter 3. Chess "Praxis" from Modernism to Postmodernism 72
The Histories of Marcel Duchamp as Chess Player A History of Chess: A Philosophy A History of Chess: An Origin A History of Chess: Theory Hypermodem Chess Chess and Art "reconciled"
The Chess Game (1910)Portrait of Chess Players (1911)The King and Queen (1912)Trebuchet / Trap (1917)Why No Sneeze Rose Selavy (1921), Poster for
the Third French Chess Championship (1925),& Pocket Chess Set with Rubber Glove (1944)
Nude Seated at a Chess Board
Plates 168Bibligraphy 190
Chapter 4. "Chess as an art form" 109
A recent debateDeveloping a philosophy of chess Duchamp as Chess Artist
Chapter 5. A thematic study of chess in the art of Marcel Duchamp 141
3
For Anna
my anti-Duchampian
Special thanks to
Christina Davidson
Dr. Eril Bailey
Professor Richard Dunn
Chris Hewett
List of Illustrations
In order of reference
PLATE Page.
1 The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) 168
2 The Chess Games 169
3 Portrait of Chess Players 170
4 Two Nudes: One Strong, One Swift 171
5 The King and Queen Traversed by Nudes at High Speed 172
6 The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes 173
7 The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes 174
8 1917 Studio Photograph 175
9 Trebuchet (Trap) 176
10 3 Draft Pistons 177
11 Unhappy Ready Made 178
12 Coffee Mill 179
13 Sad Young Man on a Train 180
14 Nude Descending a Staircase 181
15 1925 French Chess Championships 182
16 Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy? 183
17 1963 Chess Performance 184
18 1919 Carved Chess Set 185
19 Chess Designs 186
20 Six Studies for Portrait of Chess Players 187
21 The Chess Players 188
22 Pocket Chess Set with Rubber Glove 189
5
Thesis Summary
The need for a re-evaluation of the art and chess of Marcel Duchamp came about
when inconsistencies concerning the nature of chess and what was written about
Duchamp's involvement in the game were revealed during two unrelated studies.
When learning to play chess, I became interested in the historical development of
opening theories. During this time I was attempting to read extensively on
Duchamp and the postmodern as part of my undergraduate degree.
It became apparent that many of the dominant theories about Duchamp's art made
certain assumptions about chess that were false or misleading. The most
immediate were theories about Duchamp quitting art to play chess, and that his
works about chess were part of the erotic fascinations seen in his major works, The
Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even and Étant donnés.
The study opened up not only these anomalies but also a web of historical and
theoretical relationships with other disciplines and paradigms. It became apparent
that there were more convincing and compelling relationships between art and
chess in the life of Duchamp than had been commonly presented.
Throughout Duchamp's life, chess was going through a major paradigm shift of its
own. Duchamp made many a contribution to this as a player and theoretician.
Beyond the realms of art, it was not only chess that held Duchamp's interest, but
also science, mathematics, and music. These fields, like that of chess, were also
experiencing major historical shifts in theory and practice. The historical term
6
"Post-Modernism" is commonly used to express this shift. In unique ways,
Duchamp saw opportunities caused by these historical shifts to merge the theories
and practices of these disciplines with that of art. Duchamp merged science with
art, chess with art, music with art, but also science with chess, chess with
mathematics, and chess with music.
The first two chapters of this thesis explore the misconceptions about chess, and
present an exploration into paradigms as offering a solution. The solution looks
into the historical shifts from the modern to the postmodern and how it was
manifest in science, maths, chess and Duchamp's involvement therein.
The final three chapters look exclusively at chess: historically, philosophically,
theoretically as well as Duchamp's contributions to the game. The thesis concludes
by reflecting on Duchamp's works that specifically involve chess as a theme.
The significance of this thesis to contemporary art theory and practice is twofold;
Firstly, it offers a solution to the problems that continue to concern art and chess in
the life and work of Duchamp. Secondly, as Duchamp is often cited as the "Father
of Postmodernism" or arts "proto postmodernist," this thesis explores the multiple
paradigms and disciplines that characterised Duchamp's own art practice.
Contemporary art practice takes for granted the merging and blending of art with
the other. There is an inherent correlation to the way contemporary artists merge
the practices and theories of art with a myriad of other elements, images, stories,
cultures, traditions, practices, languages beyond that of art. Just as we traverse
7
with Duchamp into the paradigms of chess, science and mathematics through this
thesis, contemporary art historians and theoriests attempt to follow contemporary
artists into foreign realms and back again.
8
Chapter 1.
Methodology: "Where is Duchamp. .. ?"
The Archetypal Search for Duchamp:
a personalised theoretical analogy
As I walked with ease down the well lit corridor of art, the space was filled with
the echoes of my presence, my shoes sounding an authoritative tread with each
step. The corridor, filled with many familiar works, continually affirmed my
knowledge and gave me confidence in what I saw. The works fell, once again,
into the well structured and systematic understanding of history that I was taught.
I knew what art was, what an artist does, and what art history represents.
However, today I am in search of Marcel Duchamp. I had tripped over his work
many times when down this corridor. And had been forced into theoretical
corners as a student when a tutor asked, "Well what about Duchamp?!" Surely he
was an artist like any other that had walked this corridor. I was today attempting
to find Duchamp for myself. I began by reading many stories, histories, and
commentries. I found theorists, who write that as soon as we think we have found
Duchamp, he has disappeared from sight. These searches for Duchamp and
previously known theories concerning Duchamp and his actions, all pointed to the
one word: incommensurate.
Incommensurate: Not commensurable: having no common measure, or standard of comparison.1
1 Blair, The Macquarie Dictionary, UK, The Jacaranda Press, 1982, p.460
9
I began to formulate my own theories. I was not going to let Duchamp win this
game of hide and seek. Yet, ultimately my research led me to similar conclusions:
Duchamp presented a labyrinth of complexity and contradiction. Duchamp was
an artist whose work was made up of many different aspects that could not be
brought together, or understood by the one concept. Aspects that upset,
subverted, and disrupted the people who walked in this corridor and the way art
was seen. At times Duchamp acted like a "proper" artist, producing very palatable
Impressionist oil paintings like Church at Blainville (1902). He was a curator of
exhibitions and also a generous patron to the Arts. Yet at other times, Duchamp
was anything but "proper," with his 1917 act of submitting a urinal into an open
sculpture exhibition and signing it R.Mutt; as well as a major work upon glass and
another behind a locked door. The more I searched for Duchamp the more elusive
he became. Through my frustration I began to pen a list hoping to find a link or a
key that could reconcile all of the aspects of Duchamp's life and work. . . with no
result. I wrote,
Duchamp was French, American, a language teacher, librarian, philosopher, ascetic, bohemian, recluse, exhibitionist, An-artist, Anti Artist, film maker, musician, French National Chess Master, gambler, playboy, neglectful and devoted husband, father, painter, anti painter, sculptor, installationist, impressionist, cubist, surrealist, dadaist, cartoonist, writer, scientist, mathematician, satirist, . . .
As I picked up my books, my theories, my discouraged self, and turned to walk
out of the corridor of Art, I noticed a small pocket chess set that Duchamp had
made. Memories of playing chess with my father stirred within me. How I would
love to have a game of chess with Duchamp! It was then that I noticed a door
close to me that said "The Corridor of Chess." I thought to myself that at some
point Duchamp must have walked out of the corridor of Art through this very
door. Yet this door was not the only door Duchamp could have passed through. I
10
saw doors that led to the corridors of Maths, Science, Philosophy, and others,
doors that, at one stage, Duchamp opened and walked through, which led out of
the corridor of Art. I had not thought to search beyond the safety of Arts corridor.
I could not just walk into other corridors, as I did not know the language or the
customs of these corridors. Yet if I wanted my game of chess with Duchamp I
could not remain in this corridor any longer. So I held firmly to Duchamp's
pocket chess set, and slowly opened the door into the corridor of Chess. I
remembered that Duchamp had given permission to a group of children to play
games at the opening of "First papers of Surrealism" (New York, 1942). Quoting
the words of the children I said as I entered the corridor of chess, "Mr. Duchamp
said I could play here."2
2 Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp. Thames and Hudson, London, 1997, p.515
11
"Where is Duchamp... ?
. . . Between mysticism and games, between spiral movements and
chessboards, between silent gramophones, records and readymade
objects, between an ascetic studio and a bohemian world,
Duchamp is moving endlessly, with precision and astounding self-
assurance, to and fro, from the centre to the periphery of senso-
morphological experiments backwards and forwards between
Paris and New York, he is . . . the enigma of the sphinx.”3
During the 'search' for any historical figure the art historian4 will encounter many
degrees of incongruence. The passing of time hides the historical figure from the
art historian. The separation between the historian and their subject is a distance
the historian attempts to bridge via their chosen approach or methodology. An art
historian must deeply consider both their chosen historical methodology and their
final representation of their subject. A close link must be maintained between the
historian and the theorist5, as the historian will always adopt a particular
methodology and theoretical emphasis. Furthermore, the art historian must look,
as much as possible, to their (hidden) subject to inform and guide the process of
their investigation. For the imposing of a dominant historical theory or
methodology has the potential to be incompatible with their chosen historical
figures. The historian must not be the servant to their methodology but to their
historical subject. Each time the art historian presents a historical figure, there
will be aspects of the figure's life which will not fit neatly into a totalising
representation. As their words, actions, documents, works, lovers and friends can
3 Nicholas Calas, "Cheat to Cheat," View, ser. 5 no. 1 March 1945:p.20T4 The Art Historian: "one who works with, and has faith in, the rational process of art history. The art historian's task is to examine and to explain why art objects look the way they do."
Fernie, Art History and its methods: a critical anthology, London, Phaidon Press, 1996, p.326-85 The Art Theorist: "one who examines what is often unacknowledged or taken for granted and attempts to explain a number of apparently disparate factors."
(Ibid)
12
never conform to one dominant unifying theory or representation. Thus the art
historian and theorist must ask two questions: how does one attain
'understanding' of an historical figure, and how are the historian and theorist to
represent the historical figure?
Commonly art historians in search of Duchamp not only meet with the usual
complications of historical distance, methodology and representation but also a
particularly "elusive" historical figure. This understanding of Duchamp is caused
by many factors. This thesis will argue that the inability of art historians to move
beyond the paradigm of art has lead to a large degree of incommensurate aspects
in historical investigation, methodology, and the representation of Duchamp as a
historical figure. For Duchamp, as an art historical figure, traversed through
many paradigms during his life, and did not confine himself to the paradigm of
art. Yet commonly, art historians have viewed Duchamp from the comfort of the
paradigm of art when attempting to understand incongruent aspects of
Duchamp's life.
Art historians have applied their art theories to Duchamp's involvement in
paradigms beyond the realms of art, as though Duchamp's involvement in art and
these other arenas was one and the same. The art historian Arturo Schwarz is an
example of this.6 Schwarz's historical perspective has had much influence on the
way Duchamp the chess player and his works about chess are understood. He
presents a historical meta-narrative of Duchamp focused primarily upon the
thematic development of The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors even (Large Glass)
(1923) (PLATE 1). Here Schwarz applies this narrative of Duchamp's thematic
genealogy and creation of the Large Glass to all aspects of Duchamp's life
including his involvement in chess.
6 Schwarz, 1997
13
But by this time Duchamp's development was on a trajectory of its own, foreshadowed by his painting Bride, in which he had sought to liberate himself from all previously existing schools. A masterpiece in its own right, Bride, painted in 1912, is Duchamp's last conventional painting and marks, indeed, his farewell to the concept of art as it was understood at the time. 7
. . . the cycle of works that led to Bride. 8
This work [Dulcinea] points toward the representation of movement in Nude Descending a Staircase: and the gradual divestment of her clothing is another instance of Duchamp's preoccupation with the theme of disrobing, which would culminate in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. 9
The extraordinary logical and formal continuity of the works of this period becomes clear when seen in the following light: the Young Man of the 1911 Young Man and Girl in Spring is, in fact, the Nude in Nude Descending a Staircase of 1912: the Nude is transformed into the King in King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes: and subsequently the King becomes the mythical Bachelor of the Large Glass. Similarly, we shall recognise the Young Girl of the 1911 painting in the Queen surrounded by swift nudes, who in turn is transformed first into the Virgin, then into the Bride whom we see in the homonymous painting, in Passage o f Virgin to Bride, and eventually in the Large Glass as well.10
These quotations are examples of Schwarz's emphasis of a progression of works
towards a unifying summation. However, this thesis will argue that Duchamp
was not on one path alone but on many. By 1912 Duchamp had painted works
not on the thematic "trajectory" towards Bride or The Large Glass, but works which
were concerned with his passion for chess. For example; The Chess Game (1910)
(PLATE 2), Portrait o f Chess Players (1911) (PLATE 3), Two Nudes: One Strong and
One Swift (1912) (PLATE 4), The King and Queen Traversed by Nudes at High Speed
(1912) (PLATE 5), The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes (1912) (PLATE 6),
The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912) (PLATE 7). These works
listed here were concerned with Duchamp's investigations into chess. However,
7 Schwarz, 1997, p.218 ibid, p.199 ibid10 ibid, p.106
14
Schwarz's dominant monolithic theory draws these works on chess into the erotic
realms of the Bride/Glass.
Although Duchamp has confirmed more than once that his King and Queen were a chess king and queen, we have already seen that these two characters also seem to step right out of their alchemical models. We may also recognise in the King and Queen the characters of folktales and childhood fantasies in which they regularly stand for an idealised self and a mythical love - object.The fact that both the King and Queen in these sketches and in the
painting are traversed or surrounded by Nudes at high speed indicates their common erotic fantasies.11
Schwarz's Chess / Large Glass agenda produced many subsequent investigations
into Duchamp's chess by art theorists such as Hopkins (1998), Bailly (1996), and
Simons (1993). This misunderstanding of Duchamp as chess player, by art
historians and theorists, is due to the application of an inappropriate theoretical
and historical position that is unable to recognise the existence of non-art (chess)
perspectives on an art historical figure.
This thesis will argue that Duchamp's artistic investigations into chess did not
have this particular dominant erotic agenda. But also, Duchamp's investigations
into chess were multi-layered involving a number of perspectives. Duchamp was
engaged as a chess player at master level, a chess theorist, and also with the
relationship between art and chess, science and mathematics. Apart from the
above misreading, the most common historical misrepresentation of Duchamp
and chess was that he "quit" art to pursue chess which is exemplified by the
commonly quoted statement,
. . . he gave up the public production of art in favour of chess . . . "
12
11 ibid, p. 11412 Hughes, Shock of the New, London 1991, p.52
15
This common representation of Duchamp is a simplification of the complex
relationship between his art and chess. Art historians have considered Duchamp's
movement into the paradigm of chess as yet another inscrutable piece of the
mystery that surrounds Duchamp. The representing of Duchamp as an
incommensurate art historical figure has become the theoretical endpoint in the
'search' for, and the historical representation of, Marcel Duchamp. The further the
art-theorist attempts to represent the art-historical Duchamp the more elusive, as
Calas suggests, he is said to become.
Marcel Duchamp's elusiveness or, as Amelia Jones presents it in her text titled
"Postmodernism and the Engendering of Marcel Duchamp,"13 his 'detachment'
from the art world is an important aspect of the figure of Duchamp. Jones argues
that Art historians failure to 'locate' Duchamp is symptomatic of both modernist
art-historical and theoretical methodological tradition coupled with Duchamp’s
own attempts of subversion.
. . . I attribute a certain knowing agency to Duchamp in describing his disruptions of authorship and modernist art-historical interpretive paradigms, but do so in a highly self-conscious way.14
The failure of modernist methodology fed into or created the 'dominant
mythology' of Duchamp's 'slipperiness' as an incommensurable art-historical
figure. A slipperiness that, to some historians, continues to confirm the myth of
Duchamp's genius.15 Modernist practices of art historical and theoretical
investigation rely upon empirical assumptions, objective discoveries, and singular
'unified' representations. One major event pinpointed by Jones as a catalyst for
13 Jones, Postmodernism and the Engendering of Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge University Press, 199414 Ibid, p.65-615 Ibid, p.66-7
16
common perceptions of Duchamp's "withdrawal" or "quitting" was his rejection of
painting after 1918. From this point onwards Duchamp seemed only to re-appear
in the art world momentarily and then disappeared again. Duchamp re-appeared
in 1923 with the Large Glass and then vanished again. In an 1959 article titled "The
Silence of Marcel Duchamp" Andrew Forge writes:
The more closely the contradiction is stated, the more impossible it
becomes to do anything about it. The answer is silence. Duchamp
has done almost nothing since finishing the Large Glass almost
thirty years ago.16
Yet when the art-historian looks into this "nothing" of Duchamp, one finds a little
more "something" than would at first appear. Jones says:
*>
Duchamp's silence was always complex, seductive and cleverly
equivocal; he was speaking under his breath, or out of the side of
his mouth (with his tongue in his cheek), but was never actually
quiet.17
Duchamp was never actually quiet for he was always secretly working on
"something." At the same time he was subversive to interviewers, friends and
scholars about his art activities. Jones notes that this aspect of Duchamp's
character was present from 1923, after his Large Glass, and that this was
particularly prevalent during the 60's as Duchamp claimed "non-activity" while he
worked secretly on his last major work Étant donnés. The more his art career
developed the more he manipulated those looking for him, making the desire to
find him even more potent. However, Jones claims that Duchamp was never
actually 'absent' or 'silent' but was challenging what it meant to be an "Artist" and
16 Forge, The Silence of Marcel Duchamp, Listener, Nov 5, 1959: p.775-617 Jones 1994, p.67
17
to work in the paradigm of art. More to the point, Jones argues Duchamp's
'silence' was nothing more than Duchamp's own 'fabrication.'18
Duchamp's art making activities through the 1930’s, 1940's and 1950's exposed his 'silence' as a fabrication. They testify to Duchamp's role as artist and authority, even as he subverted authorship, and suggested that Duchamp, like any subject negotiating a social environment, experimented with various strategies to manipulate public perceptions to his own ultimate gain.19
It would seem that Jones has finally found and "checkmated" Duchamp. But Jones
continues to present this as only one aspect of the rich legacy of Duchampian
incommensurability, as Duchamp's role as the subversive artist and anti author,
continues to disrupt the understandings and presentations of Duchamp within
the paradigm of art.
Duchamp's self-promoted images of 'indifference' and 'silence' and
his incommensurable activities is only one of the most powerful
examples of the many contradictions informing the Duchampian
author-function. . . [understanding Duchamp] is not to be located
within Duchamp as living subject at all. It resides rather at
multiple sites; in the gaps between the maker, the making of the
object, the object as it exists in the world, and the perception,
reception, and codification of the object through interpretive
analysis . . . Duchamp takes place in schisms between idea and
expression of the idea, between his actions, statements, and
products and our readings of these. 20
Duchamp remained elusive, and the objects he created were not able to be viewed
as his predecessors viewed other works of art. The theories and histories within
the paradigm of art were not able to fully contain the scope of the Duchampian
18 {Ibid, p.76)19 (Ibid, p. 92)
20 (Ibid, p.103)
18
legacy. Hence, there are many elements of Duchamp's life and work that continue
to elude the art theorist in the search for Duchamp.
Although Jones establishes Duchamp as playing the game of deception down the
"corridor of Art", Jones acknowledges a point when Duchamp was clearly 'absent'
and 'permanently [silent];'
"Duchamp has turned to chess" 21
It was here that Jones, and others,* * consider Duchamp to cease to be an an 'artist,'
and to walk entirely out of the corridor of Art and into the corridor of Chess: the
artist became the chess player. With this move, Duchamp is understood to have
withdrawn from the paradigm of art, chess becomes the, ultimate silence and
separation. For this reason, Duchamp's involvement in chess holds little interest
to theorists. Jones writes little of Duchamp's chess involvement, briefly stating
that;
Duchamp stayed in the US off and on between 1915 and 1925, at
which time he returned to Europe to devote his energies to the
international chess circuit until 1932.22
and finally;
After a brief period from 1927-1932, during which he devoted
himself almost exclusively to playing chess, Duchamp threw his
energies into publishing a book on the chess endgame with Vitaly
Halberstadt, L'opposition et les cases conjuguées sont réconciliées.23
21 Ibid, p.67* Baily, Tomkins, Hughes, Hopkins, Masheck22 Ibid, p.7123 Ibid, p.86
19
At the chessboard Duchamp becomes truly 'silent,' a state of apparent irrelevance
to the art historian and theorist. Yet the role or activities of the art historian and
theorist needs to be able to contend with the art historical figure that was involved
in a paradigm as seemingly dissimilar to art, as chess. One solution to the
problem of representing the historical figure has come from postmodern
approaches to history.
The postmodern historian or theorist has solved the problem by not attempting to
'find' and 'represent' the historical figure as a unified singularity. Through
postmodern investigations and representations, Marcel Duchamp becomes not
one art-historical figure but many. The postmodern art-theorist understands the
complexity of Duchamp as an artist and anti artist, who moved through a number
of art 'styles', rejected traditional art practices, yet subsequently and
contradictorily adopted many established roles within the art world and
furthermore even 'played' with concepts of his own gender and identity. Thus,
within the artworld Duchamp . . . "is always on the verge of disappearing and
remerging elsewhere."24
Although the representation of Marcel Duchamp as 'many' assists the art historian
in the process of historical representation and methodology, it also continues the
segmentation of the various aspects of Duchamp's life. This is a particularly
convenient and simple representation of the relationship between art and chess in
the life of Duchamp. Chess is either used as evidence of how Duchamp continues
to elude the art historian, or through the use of a unifying theory, that we can
understand Duchamp's chess through the language, values and perspectives of
the paradigm of art.
2Albid, p.3
20
Art historian Pierre Cabanne, who conducted a series of interviews with
Duchamp, wrote about Duchamp's continual attempts to avoid this definition.
Cabanne, understanding that Duchamp attempted to distance himself as a
conscious act from those seeking him and the artworks he produced, wrote,
Some saw him as an artist, others as an engineer (a term he liked). For some he was a subversive, for others merely lucid. What can one say about a man who spent his entire life evading definition? A critic approaching the life and work of Marcel Duchamp needs to cultivate an elegance of his own, a sense of humour and even a hint of condescension. Evasion exists to establish a distance between subject and pursuer. It reflects the desire to live, perhaps even to act, without justifying oneself. It implies that opportunities and emotions can be treated with suspicion, money with indifference, and reputation (others will see to that) with circumspection. There remains the reductive pleasure of puns and epigrams with which to deflate anyone taking seriously the repertory of behaviour listed above.25
Andre Breton suggested an alternative way of understanding Duchamp's inability
to be defined by the paradigm of art as evidence of his status of genius. Breton,
who declared him, "the most intelligent man of the 20th century,"26 shifted his
focus from what characterised Duchamp as genius, to the failings of the paradigm
of art. Cabanne addresses Breton's declaration in his interviews with Duchamp,
who replied,
The word "intelligence" is the most elastic one can invent. There is a logical or Cartesian form of intelligence, but I think Breton meant to say something else. . . Breton and I are men of the same order - we share a community of vision, which is why I think I understand his idea of intelligence: enlarged, drawn out, extended, inflated if you wish.. . 27
Breton saw Duchamp's extension beyond the narrow established order of art into
new territories. To use Cabanne's words, "you yourself have enlarged, inflated,
25 Cabanne, Duchamp and Co., Paris, Terrail, 1997, p.826 Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, New York. Viking Press, 1971, p.1627 Ibid,
21
and exploded the limits of [art] creation according to your own "intelligence."28
Duchamp understood that Breton's perspective concerned the limitations of art
that they had both experienced. Duchamp then elaborated with Cabanne on the
narrow definition of art and his subversive theories which were critical of the
artist as "creator." Breton's view suggests that Duchamp's "intelligence" and
"mystery," which makes him unattainable, is due to the limitations of the
paradigm of art to move from its narrow understandings.29 The enigma of
Duchamp is the product of Duchamp's deliberate actions, the limitations of the
paradigm of art, and sustaining myths of Duchamp's 'genius'. This results in an
historical representation unable to deal with such elements as his relationship
with chess and Duchamp's own artworks about chess. These 'disappearances'
have caused, and continue to cause, a conflict of culture, language, role and
function of the artist "within" the artworld itself.30
The representation of Duchamp's relationship with chess is symptomatic of art
historians inability to move beyond the paradigm of art, and to follow him into
the paradigm of chess. For it is through traversing through the paradigms that
the historian and theorist is able to better comprehend the deep interest that
Duchamp held for the game. Art historians and theorists need to look beyond an
incommensurable conclusion and to ask questions concerning the methodology
they have used. Different expectations must be placed on the art historian and
theorist, a new way of thinking and a shift in methodology and theory.
Through investigations into the paradigm of art and into chess, this thesis will
'locate' Duchamp and present many important aspects of Duchamps
'disappearance/ Furthermore, this process will demonstrate the workings of
28 Ibid29Ibid, p.16-17 30 Jones, p.103
22
Duchamp's interest in multiple paradigms, like that of science and mathematics.
Thus this thesis will treat chess as an important springboard into the life and work
of Marcel Duchamp beyond the point of representing Duchamp as an
incommensurable art-historical figure. The relationship between art and chess,
draws the art theorist into many aspects of the historical figure Marcel Duchamp;
the readymade, aesthetics, scientific investigations into the nth or 4th dimensions,
(which dominated cubist thought, creating the theoretical structure for the Large
Glass, and notes contained in the 'Green Box'), the use of chess as a literal or
symbolic theme, the rejection of the 'retinal' or the 'visual' over the conceptual,
hypermodern chess praxis and theory, and chess as an art form. Duchamp's
move to chess will not be shown as presenting an absence from art but rather a
continuum when one considers the nature of art as a paradigm. If one is able to
reconcile Duchampian art practice and chess, one must ask what will we learn
from the relationship between these seemingly separate intellectual paradigms?
The art theorist and historian will need to leave the corridor of art and "play"
games down the corridor of chess and other intellectual paradigms. And in order
to do this we must walk through the same doors through which Duchamp
walked.
23
Paradigm Shifts
. I don't want to be pinned down to any position. My position is
the lack of position, but of course, you can't even talk about it, the
minute you talk you spoil the whole game.' - Marcel Duchamp
1969.
To conclude an historical representation of Marcel Duchamp as an 'enigma' raises
many concerns about historical and theoretical methodology. The art theorist and
historian needs to shift beyond an incommensurate endpoint. For this endpoint
reveals the way art historians and theorists have narrowly defined and represent
Duchamp and the paradigm of art. The endpoint calls for a new way of thinking
about many aspects of Duchamp-as-artist. It calls for a paradigm-shift in the way
Duchamp is represented, theorised and historicised. Regardless of what Duchamp
said about the close relationship between the paradigms of art and chess, art
historians and theorists have continually considered it 'outside,' and therefore
irrelevant. It is this view of ,art that needs to be challenged, as it inhibits our
understanding of historical figures like Duchamp who seemingly moved outside
of the walls of art to 'disappear' without trace. Theorists need to consider the
nature of the paradigm of art and how the concept of the paradigm itself offers a
new way of looking at the discipline of art, in an attempt to come to terms with
those, like Duchamp who inhabit and traverse the boundaries of other disciplines.
Art theorists, like Arturo Schwarz, have commonly acknowledged the links
between art and chess, as it is difficult to ignore the many statements by Duchamp
that speak of this close relationship between the two paradigms. Schwarz sees
that Duchamp as fundamentally and ultimately an artist to be understood from
art's standpoint. Art practices, languages and values are limited when theorising
about other paradigms. For example attempting to apply the language, values,
24
perspectives and theories of Duchampian art onto the world of Duchampian chess
(in an attempt to formulate a Duchampian meta-theory) will only lead to a
misunderstanding of Duchamp's engagement with chess. As though the
paradigm of art and chess were one and the same. Yet Duchamp cannot be
pinned down so easily, for at different times he adopted, rejected and blended the
practices, languages and values of various intellectual paradigms. Art theorists
become unstuck when Duchamp walks into a paradigm that is foreign. Theorists
have done their best to make a link based upon arts perspectives. As will be later
explored in detail, a few such theorists have sought to build a bridge between
images and diagrams in Duchamp's 1932 text on chess endgame theory,
L'Opposition et les cases conjuguées sont réconciliées (Opposition and Sister Squares are
Reconciled) and The Large Glass. For Duchamp, in writing this chess book, left the
paradigm of art by completely adopting the language and customs of the
paradigm of chess. Thus, Duchamp treated the paradigms of art and chess as
distinctly separate paradigms. The work was specifically written for an elite
theoretical chess audience and in no way is accommodating of the art paradigm.
Although there are some visual similarities between many of the diagrams
contained in this book and Duchamp's Large Glass, it is difficult to make any
substantial connection between the Large Glass and L'opposition. The theorist falls
once again into a trap when applying theories of art to all aspects of Duchamp's
life. The paradigm of art has continually failed to account for the incongruent
aspects as they frequently involve Duchamp's traversal into another paradigm.
Yet, if the art theorist looks into the aspects of Duchamp's life that are considered
incongruent without attempting to formulate a meta-theory, or looking only from
the paradigm of art, a greater understanding of Duchamp as an historical figure
will be gained. The creation of one all encompassing theory is unable to unite all
aspects of Duchamp's life and work. In the case of chess, in the life and work of
25
Duchamp, meta theories have distorted or hidden the anomalies presented to the
paradigm of art.
The concept of the paradigm is commonly understood as representing a system of
thought and inquiry, a model and way of working that is shared by a group of
people. At the same time a paradigm is a community of people who share
common values. It is important to understand that a paradigm is both the set of
rules that are layed down by a discipline that regulate practice and also the shared
values of that community. Within a discipline, like art, there will always be
differences in the methods and specific procedures used by those who belong to it.
When these methods and procedures are used to define the paradigm itself it can
cause divisions and place huge limitations on the nature of the discipline. Thus it
is important to look also to shared values. Commonly historians and theorists
have looked to the methods or practices of historical figures to determine which
paradigm the historical figure belonged to, rather than to the values the historical
figure held. This approach has continually caused misrepresentations of historical
figures, who have subverted traditional practices. Such figures are commonly
shown as practicing outside or apart from their chosen discipline. The difficulty of
looking to the practices of historical figures is that there will always be ambiguities
in the way shared values are translated into practice.31 An historical figure may
share the values of a paradigm and yet be practicing in a manner that the
paradigm itself does not recognise. Looking to the practices of the historical figure
led to misrepresentations of historical figures like Duchamp. For Duchamp
continually shared the values of the paradigm of art even though his practise was
not shared by others. Furthermore, Duchamp presents a paradoxical relationship
of paradigms as the artist in the paradigm of chess and the chess master in the
paradigm of art. Therefore, art historians researching art historical figures must
31 Kuhn, Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research? Chicago, University of Chicago, 1970 p.44
26
look to the values that they hold and not necessarily to the historical figure's
method of practice.
It is common for paradigms to acknowledge a legitimate set of laws and rules and
to overlook the values, attitudes, languages and philosophies.
a paradigm is a framework of thought within which scientific inquiry [thought] takes place in any given era. Thus scientists are constrained by institutional and peer pressure to conduct inquiry within the guidelines laid down by current accepted theories and their prescribed models of practice. This is what Kuhn regards to as 'normal science'. . . 32
The notion of 'normal science' has also proved very powerful in art resulting in
artists and their practices being rejected by the paradigm. Historically institutions
have maintained authority presenting the title of "Artist” to those deemed worthy
and "Art" to the objects and images sanctioned. A clear example of this was the
French Salon, under the jury system, during the 19th century. However when art
is considered a paradigm or a community, bound by common values, and not a set
of procedures and methods of practice, then Duchamp's life and his work can be
presented in a new way.
. . . shared values can be important determinants of group behaviour even though the members of the group do not all apply them in the same way. (If that were not the case, there would be no special philosophic problems about value theory or aesthetics.) Men did not all paint alike during the periods when representation was a primary value, but the developmental pattern of the plastic arts changed drastically when that value was abandoned.33
The theorist who has written most on the concept of the paradigm and the paradigm
shift is scientist Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn presents two components of the paradigm in
32 Sim, Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, London, Icon, 1998 p.33333 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962, p.186
27
his 1962 text The Structure o f Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn says of the term
paradigm;
A paradigm is what members of a scientific community share, and conversely a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm.34
A paradigm is able to represent an entire discipline, and at the same time
represent the shared values and practices of that discipline. A paradigm as
community: a paradigm as shared values. Kuhn presents the history of the
scientific paradigms as revealing a diverse and complex group of communities
with specific perspectives, values, histories, cultures, languages and institutions
that are continually moving through states of 'crises' and 'restoration', all the while
within the one broad paradigm of science.35 Kuhn understands the historical
movement of scientific development, for all paradigms, are characterised by the
paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts occur through critical levels of anomalies that
disrupts the common practices, methods, and laws of the paradigm, causing a
revolutionary change of approach.
Let us then assume that crises are a necessary precondition for the emergence of novel theories and ask next how scientists respond to their existence. Part of the answer, as obvious as it is important, can be discovered by noting first what scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies. Though they may begin to lose faith and then to consider alternatives, they do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis.. . . once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternative candidate is available to take its place.. . 36
A shift can only occur if there are new practices that address the anomalies. Kuhn
presents that the new set of practices are not 'better' than another but constitute
34 Ibid35 Masterman, The Nature of a Paradigm, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, L.Musgrave, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, p.8836 Kuhn, 1962, p.77
28
another way of understanding and practicing.37 Within the historical and
theoretical study of Marcel Duchamp, chess continues to operate as an anomaly.
Art historians and theorists continually have difficulty in representing Duchamp's
relationship with chess.
What we must ask of Duchamp and his relationship to chess is, did he value chess
in the same way as he did art? Did he look upon this activity as he did his art
work? If Duchamp shared the values of art, when in the paradigm of chess, then
there are no grounds for the much held theory that Duchamp "quit" art to play
chess. The answer is clearly not to be simplistic about Duchamp, for at various
times he held onto the values of many different paradigms, and operated in a
complex web of relationships. Duchamp's approach to chess, at times, was
identical to that of art, as he conceptualised and practiced chess through the
paradigm of art. Duchamp's perception of chess as art is clearly demonstrated
through the language and the illustrations he uses.
"And why . . . isn't my chess playing an art activity? A chess game
is very plastic. You construct it. It’s mechanical sculpture and with
chess one creates beautiful problems and that beauty is made with
the head and hands."38
"A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn’t
geometric in the static sense of the work, it is mechanical, since it
moves; it's a drawing, . . . In chess there are some extremely
beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual
domain. It’s the imagining of the movements or of the gesture that
makes the beauty, in this case. It's completely in one's grey matter."
39
37 Sim, p.298-9938 Avedon, Observations: Marcel Duchamp interview by Truman Capote, 1959, p.5539 Cabanne 1971, p.18-19
29
"In fact, when you have a chess game, it is a little as when you
sketch something, or as if you are building the machinery that will
make you win or lose. The competitive aspect of the game is
irrelevant, but the game itself is very plastic, it is probably that
which attracted me." 40
In the light of these comments, Duchamp introduces many aspects concerning his
interest in chess; the relationship between the physical, or plastic, realms and the
intellectual; the kinetic sculptural elements; the beauty of the movements within
the mind; but most importantly, he looks at chess in the same way as he looks at
art. Duchamp's aesthetic insights into chess are theoretically potent and
penetrating, and his representation of chess in art, demonstrate his ability to
successfully navigate and communicate across distinct and separate paradigms.
Images of Duchamp at his chess board, of which there are many, can be seen as
Duchamp at his proverbial easel.
Not only did Duchamp traverse into the paradigm of chess but also the paradigm
of science. Through the avant-garde of scientific theory Duchamp became
interested in the notion of the 4th or nth dimension. Other artists, like Picasso and
Braque, were interested in the representation of further dimensions. Duchamp,
having traversed into the paradigm of science brought back to the paradigm of art
new theories, practices and languages which informed his art making, leading to
fundamental aspects of the Large Glass. It was through the application of nth
dimension theories that Duchamp was able to express the intellectual world of the
chess player within the paradigm of art (this aspect will be explored in further
chapters). Duchamp rejected the traditional practices and methods of rendering
and representing objects in three dimensions. Instead, in his early Cubist paintings
like The King and Queen Surrounded by swift Nudes and in the Large Glass he
40 Sweeney, Interview with artist, 1955
30
adopted contemporary scientific theories concerning higher dimensions, the nth
dimension, These new scientific theories represented a significant paradigm shift
in method and practice for art and science. Duchamp and the proponents of the
nth or 4th dimension met much criticism over their 'faith' in the new perspectives
that rejected Euclid and the established foundational geometries. Mathematicians
like that of Henry Poincare, whose theories specifically influenced Duchamp,
considered that established empirical methodology was only 'convenient' for
certain approaches and could not be applied in all circumstances. Poincare
argued that since empirical science was unable to 'see' or certify to the existence of
higher dimensions it does not justify the conclusion that they do not exist.41
Duchamp spoke to Pierre Cabanne concerning avant garde science, the fourth
dimension and their relationship to the Large Glass saying,
Duchamp: . . . perspective was very important. The 'Large Glass" constitutes a rehabilitation of perspective, which had then been completely ignored and disparaged. For me, perspective became absolutely scientific..Cabanne: It was no longer a realistic perspective.
Duchamp: No. It's a mathematical, scientific perspective.
Cabanne: Was it based on calculations?Duchamp: Yes, and on dimensions. These were the important elements. . . .Simply, I thought of the idea of a projection, of an invisible fourth dimension, something you couldn't see with your eyes. Since I found that one could make a cast shadow from a three dimensional thing, any object whatsoever-just as the projecting of the sun on the earth makes two dimensions-I thought that, by simple intellectual analogy, the fourth dimension could project an object of three dimensions, or, to put it another way, any three-dimensional object, which we see dispassionately, is a projection of something four-dimensional, something we're not familiar with. 42
41 Henderson, The Fourth Dunension and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1983, p.1742 Cabanne 1971, p.38 -40
31
Thus to understand works like the Large Glass the theorist is called to enter the
paradigm of science. This is no longer Duchamp as artist viewed by the art
historian but calls for a separate paradigm of science, to inform the work.
In seeking to counter these ideas we should reject the idea that all historical writing is distortion, because if it is then there is no point in trying to correct it. 43
Marcel Duchamp has been described, through a modernist art historical
perspective, as an "enigma." The art historian and theorist Eric Fernie in 1996
called upon other historians to create a paradigm shift in the art historical
criticism that 'underpins' modernist art historical methodology. Fernie argues
that art historians and theorists need to investigate the relationship between the
'aesthetic realm' and the wider social paradigm or context. The 'aesthetic realm,'
represented by the narrow focus of modernist Greenbergian art historical
investigation, is not adequate as the only field of investigation for the art historian
and theorist. Fernie argues that any work of art needs to be understood from a
wider perspective, to incorporate social, historical, intellectual and cultural
paradigms. Jones likewise understands that the years of 'interpretive discourses'
have come about through many historical intellectual shifts, of Modernism,
Postmodernism and theories of Avant-garde practice.44 Thus the representation
of the art historical figure needs to be viewed from a wider perspective than from
merely within the paradigm of art.45 The art theorist and historian who use
modernist methodology, and continues to deem Marcel Duchamp as 'Artist'
(singular) will miss the complexities about Duchamp.
Fernie argues that when looking at any work of art one needs to understand that
the meaning of the work of art is not contained within the art object itself but lies
43 Fernie, p. 31444 Jones, p. 10345 Fernie, p.269
32
elsewhere, "beyond or behind its surface."46 Let this meaning of Duchamp's work
be found within the paradigms that brought the work into existence, the paradigm
that contains the work of art, the paradigm that engages with Duchamp's works of
art.
In creating an understanding of Marcel Duchamp and his relationships to various
intellectual paradigms we need to look to the historical and theoretical paradigm
of the Postmodern. As has been argued, the postmodern art historical
presentation of the historical figure is understood not as monolithic or as a
biographical account but is rather a fluid figure moving within an extensive arena.
A postmodern historical figure is contained within a variety of paradigms
incorporating various discourses, practices, and institutional configurations.47
This postmodern representation of the historical figure is able to encounter the
'absent' Duchamp when he entered the paradigm of chess. A postmodern
perspective is able to accept a 'multiple' as end point. Jones puts it this way; "It is,
in fact, because the Duchampian function is multiple, and thus performs the
contradictions embedded in postmodernism."48 Therefore, Duchamp presents an
overriding paradigm shift in art by demonstrating how the paradigm of art, or the
artist, can move through and into many other paradigms as opposed to a singular
art perspective.
^Ibid, p.28347 Jones, p.xiii48 Ibid, p. xiv
33
Duchamp and the Traversal of Paradigms
Art theorist Amelia Jones analyses the process by which we define Duchamp's
activity as an artist via an art historical and art theoretical analysis. It is through
this that Jones questions commonly held notions concerning Duchamp, the
readymades and their relationship to postmodernism.49 Duchampian chess raises
questions concerning Duchamp's relationship to various intellectual paradigms
via a postmodernist historical and theoretical analysis. Not forgetting that
Postmodernism is a very wide umbrella which can cover many approaches.
Commonly it has been said of Duchamp that he has not followed the rules and
practices that have governed the art world. One response to this is to conclude
that Duchamp was not practicing art but something outside art. However,
Duchamp never left the paradigm of art for he was always a part of the art
community holding onto the values, the language and the roles of art.
Furthermore, Duchamp's experience of art was part of an ever expanding
intellectual field, as early as 1905 it can be seen that Duchamp's involvement in art
was hand in hand with other paradigms. "Sundays at Puteaux" was a regular
social event for those of the Duchamp-Villon intellectual and artistic circle. The
Puteaux Cubists were deeply interested in popular discoveries concerning science
and philosophy and also were passionate about chess. It was there that Duchamp
is said to have learnt to paint and play chess at the same time.
Nearly every Sunday Marcel went out to Puteaux, where in good weather the artists and their friends spent the day . . . enjoying long, slow lunches at a table in the garden. Usually there would be a chess game in progress. Villon had taught Marcel to play chess when he was eleven, and all three brothers had a passion for the game.50
49 Jones, p.1850 Tomkins, Duchamp a biography, London, Random House, 1998, p.35
34
Duchamp throughout his life was deeply involved with artist circles like the
Arensberg's and individual artists like Man Ray, Max Ernst, and John Cage whose
passion and interest in chess is well known and documented.
If the art historian and theorist continues to look narrowly at Duchamp as 'Artist,'
and only encounters the art objects he created within the art world Duchamp will
continue to disappear. For clearly many of Duchamp's practices and methods
could not be considered 'normal' art. To understand Duchamp and his 'absence'
historians and theorists should not only be looking at what Duchamp 'produced'
but to the values he held within the paradigm of art and other paradigms. This
can be further illustrated through an understanding of Duchamp's readymades.
Here Duchamp is well known to have brought into the art paradigm objects that
were not common to art and that were not perceived as art. Traditional methods,
theories and practices of art deemed readymade objects as 'non' art objects. Yet
Duchamp, through the readymade, has demonstrated to the paradigm of art that
it is through the established language, conventions, and traditions of the
paradigm of art that we are to understand the readymade.
. . . as has been noted (by De Duve among others) Duchamp's texts
author(ise) objects otherwise understood to be outside the aesthetic
canon, allowing for their co-operation into an institutional context.
It is precisely him 'speaking' of them as art - by choosing and
signing them - that changes their status as objects.51
It is ironically the rules and discourses of art that inform and give 'aesthetic'
meaning to the readymade. In other words, the non-art-object becomes art by
entering the paradigm of art and being understood via the values, language,
culture, and history of art.52 Therefore, we are to understand Duchamp's intimate
51 Jones, p.13252 Ibid, p.107
35
relationship with chess through the paradigm of art in the same way as a
readymade, and not an activity that defines or represents Duchampian 'absence.'
The difficulty with chess, as opposed to the readymade, is that chess comes with
its own practices, values and language that are distinct from art. To comprehend
chess from the perspective of art a reconciliation of paradigms must take place. In
other words, art historians and theorists need to adopt the non art object - chess,
in a similar way they have done with Duchamp's fountain (1917). For the
paradigm of art has, with difficulty, come to terms with Duchamp's art prank and
now considers it to be an object of art.
36
Duchampian Chess
The comparison between the chronological order of [my] paintings and a game of chess is absolutely right . . . But when will I administer checkmate - or will I be mated? 53
Duchamp dropped clues along his way as to how we are to understand chess.
When Duchamp co-wrote a chess book on end-game with chess theorist Vitaly
Halberstadt, he collected all of the notes that he made in preparation for the book's
publication and placed them all in a 'box'. He titled this 'box' The box of 1932.
What is significant about the act of Duchamp 'boxing' his proofs and diagrams, is
that it identically reflects his act of 'boxing' all of the notes he made in preparation
for his Large Glass. Duchamp titled this box The Green Box, and used it to take the
viewer into the world of the 'bride' and the 'bachelors' the two major aspects of the
Large Glass. Thus the Box of 1932 is to the L'Opposition et les cases conjuguées sont
réconciliées as The Green Box is to the Large Glass. Many writers have noted this
mirroring of Duchampian art and chess practice, however in doing so, they draw
mainly upon aesthetic relationships between them. Duchamp did not make any
indication that his theoretical work on chess was to be understood through the
shattered glass of his Bride.
It is through the multiple paradigms in which Duchamp was involved, that we are
to understand and represent him as an historical figure. Duchamp as artist
sharing the values of other paradigms and bringing what is seen as
incommensurate into unity. Duchamp has offered an explanation as to how two
apparently incommensurate elements are united through the concept of
'inframince.'
33 Jones, p. 120
37
WHENTHE TABACCO SMOKE SMELLS ALSO OF THE MOUTHTHAT EXHALES IT THE TWO ODOURSARE MARRIEDINFRAMINCE.54
The smell of smoke and the mouth are distinct and separate entities, though
through the act of smoking, the two odours are combined forming a 'new
thought.'55 Thus through inframince the paradigms of art and chess are married
in the life and work of Marcel Duchamp. The relationship between art and chess
is very complex and multi layered, and is not able to be reduced to a meta theory
or solved by dismissing Duchamp's engagement with chess.
The many paradigms in which Duchamp 'worked' or 'played' need to be
understood as blending within the paradigm of art via this understanding of
inframince, like that of the smoke mixing with another odour. This proposed
historical methodology is not only relevant to Duchamp but to all historical
figures. The various contradictory positions held by historians and theorists
concerning Duchamp and his incommensurate activities can be understood by the
history of art. Art is what is brought into existence via a series of established
conventions and fulfils various criteria. Postmodernism offers a perspective that is
able to bring together that which was an anomaly to modernist historical
representation of Duchamp. It is through postmodernism that the 'sub-systems'
or sub-paradigms that Duchamp was part of can be understood and can become
54 View, ser. no.l, March 194553 Duchamp (R.Mutt), The Blind Man, New York, 1917
38
part of his historical representations. Unity can be created through
acknowledging the existence of these paradigms and the way in which Duchamp's
activities created 'inframince' with each other: art and chess, chess and art, chess
and science, science and art. Duchamp is 'found' through an historical and
theoretical methodology founded upon such postmodern multiplicity.
39
Chapter 2.
Duchampian Chess in a Postmodern Historical Field
Photographic documentation of Duchamp's studio in New York around 1917
(PLATE 8) presents a visual glimpse of the conceptual significance of chess.
Photographs show a large chess board hung on the side wall, illustrating a specific
chess position. Much of Duchamp's studio life was spent playing chess, studying
games and problems. Upon the floor is his readymade titled Trebuchet, or Trap:
(PLATE 9) a term taken directly out of theoretical chess terminology.1 What is
shown in this photograph, is rather elementary and observational, but is significant
in showing that in this one studio a merger has taken place between several
distinct and separate intellectual paradigms.
The game of chess stood at a junction of a number of paradigms in the life of
Marcel Duchamp. In particular many themes of Duchamp's reflect his intellectual
perspective on the relationship between art and chess. Therefore this presentation
of the Modern and Postmodern periods will focus upon the relationship between
rationalism and irrationalism, reason and romanticism, logic and mysticism or
religiosity, which are key themes adopted by Duchamp. This "game" captured not
only the theoretical imagination of Duchamp, but also the proponents of avant
garde scientific investigation who saw the intellectual dimensions of the chess
player as reflecting an ability to exist within an alteration of dimensions. Duchamp
was later to apply his own studies into these dimensional realities in the
conceptual formation of Duchamp's Large Glass (1923). Duchamp considered that
the three dimensional world was a projection of another dimension of which our
limited senses were unable to perceive. A large amount of Duchamp's own
1 Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-41, Cambridge, October, 1998, p.157-8
40
writings, The Green Box and The White Box (1912 - 20), deal with these questions.2
Chess symbolises a junction or merger in the life and art of Marcel Duchamp that is
symptomatic of a greater historical shift. A shift that brought into question the
authority and nature of modernist intellectual disciplines through a theoretical
merger with other systems of knowledge, values and languages. Although
Duchamp ante-dates what is commonly understood as Postmodernism (seen to
have occurred approximately around 1969), he is widely recognised as a
forerunner or a proto-postmodernist. Duchamp's postmodernism can be seen in
his fluid engagement, blending, dismantling, and subversion of multiple
intellectual paradigms. Duchamp's actions, within and beyond the paradigm of
art, present an understanding of the conventions, practices and ultimate
subversion of art. Duchamp as an artist could not be understood and represented
in the same way as art historical figures who were before him. His art and actions
are an anomaly to the paradigm of art. Duchamp needs to be understood
historically, as distinct from those who had come before, who caused art historians
and theorists to adopt an entirely new understanding, language, and perception of
an artist. An understanding of the historical prefix post as a construction is an
important aspect to the way Duchamp is approached. Duchamp must be
understood via a context of changing historical periods and the subsequent effects
upon intellectual and social paradigms of the Postmodern.
This chapter will explore the various historical conditions which positions chess in
relation to Duchamp's greater body of work, by locating Duchamp's involvement
in chess and art within the transitional historical period from the Modern into the
Postmodern period. It is important to explore the various ways Duchamp
experienced this historical shift in different intellectual paradigms. This shift
stimulated Duchamp's interaction with 'new sciences,' hypermodern chess, avant-
2 de Duve, The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993, p.254
41
garde art, and the amalgamation of the knowledge and practice of various
modernist intellectual paradigms. Finally, this chapter addresses, why the art
historical field has not adequately looked into the paradigms of chess in relation to
Marcel Duchamp as an art historical figure.
42
Duchamp the Chess "Idiot "
Damisch: . . . You remember Duchamp's famous print of two chess players . . . [I was furious] that idiot, Duchamp! He just managed to get $2,000 off me for his Chess Association and in exchange he gave me this horrible etching of chess players. . . . [And he] said that Art no longer had any internal necessity; it was now a pure convention!3
These words, spoken by art historian and theorist Hubert Damisch, tell of an
incident involving himself and Duchamp. It was during a period when Duchamp
devoted much time to the American Chess Foundation. In 1961 Duchamp
organised an auction of artworks with proceeds going directly to the foundation.
This story of Damisch being 'swindled' by Duchamp into purchasing a 'horrible'
work has possibilities for representing Duchamp's impact on the entire intellectual
paradigm of art. The work in question, an etching of his 1911 cubist painting The
Portrait of Chess players, is part of an incommensurate component of Duchamp's
artistic and historical repertoire: chess.
Duchamp's rich involvement with chess existed at many levels; through personal
financial support, research into endgame theory, gaining the title of "Chess
Master" as a player, and the use of chess as the basis of many art works. However
Damisch's response to the work is not unlike art historians' and theorists'
responses to Duchamp's entire involvement with the game. It is alarming that
chess was such an important aspect of his life and work and yet has been largely
misrepresented and overlooked within the paradigm of art. The connection
between chess and Duchamp’s greater artistic agenda, as expressed by Damisch, to
expose art for being nothing more than institutional 'conventions,' is fundamental
to understanding Duchamp as a historical figure. Furthermore, Chess is a ground
for exposing the multiplicities and complexities that are contained within
3 Bois, Hollier & Krauss, A conversation with Hnrbert Damisch, October #85 Summer, 1998, p.10
43
Duchamp's art practice and his involvement in a number of intellectual
paradigms.
The common historical representation reveals the perspective that Duchamp quit
art to play chess, this involved an entire and total 'binary' shift for Duchamp in
thought and practice. Tomkins, who has written extensively on Duchamp,
observes,
Although chess claimed a great deal of the energy that had been formerly devoted to his Large Glass, the usual statement that he abandoned art for chess is misleading. In fact, one of the essential facts about it is that while he has successfully avoided playing the role of artist since 1923, he has never left the art world. 4
Tomkins points out that the art paradigm has used a blunt instrument to separate
aspects of Duchamp's life. This understanding of Duchamp 'quitting' one
intellectual activity and his taking up of another is symptomatic of a particular
understanding about the way intellectual paradigms define historical figures.
Furthermore, particular uses of historical methodology place restrictions upon
how historical figures are investigated and subsequently represented. Jones takes
this point one step further by stating that the concept of art history has always
been embedded in Modernism.
Although art history is a vast field of inquiry that is riven with disagreements and contested definitions of its own hermeneutic functions and historiographic identity, in the broadest sense its praxis is deeply invested in a set of assumptions and regulations located within the discursive formation of the modern. Founded within the modernist regime, the discipline of art history is intertwined with modernism as its contiguous and constitutive discursive formation. 5
4 Tomkins, Ahead of the Game, Marmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 1965p.52-35 Jones, p.8
44
It is these assumptions of art historians that have led to the creation of a coherent
art narrative of Duchamp's life and work that has not allowed chess to disrupt or
to inform it. Duchamp's engagement in a variety of intellectual and cultural
paradigms disrupts such a clear cut understanding of Duchamp as artist. Such an
approach restricts the historical and critical understanding of Duchamp by
considering his activities outside the paradigm of art, as peculiar, inconsistent and
irrelevant. As 'an-Artist' Duchamp allowed diverse and distinctly different
institutions to converge, to interrelate, informing a complex philosophical
understanding of art and the intellectual milieu in which he was living. Duchamp,
the postmodernist, defies postmodernist definition.
45
' Post' as an Historical Concern
From within any historical investigation, questions are posed that cannot be
answered through historical investigations alone. History, as a finite human
construction, is always understood "retrospectively" and is unable to fully grasp
the ’totality' of any given moment in time. History seeks to create a set of defining
characteristics so as to develop a structure of understanding that is able to
encompass a progression from pre-history to the present.6 Theorists use history
to locate the present, attempting to answer questions by looking at what has been
before. This understanding of the past informs our concept of 'time' and its
movement as 'historical,' as a forward movement in a 'linear' and 'irreversible'
manner.7 Questions concerning cultural, economic, political, ecological,
biological, social, and national change are often presented to history to answer.
Theorists look to history to pinpoint 'origins' or the birth of specific periods and
their downfall or transition. If one can understand what has been, we are likely to
understand who we are now. However, it has been argued that this is only half of
the role that history should play. History should also be able to predict where
should we go from here?8 These points concerning historical understanding
were raised by Hubert Damisch in an article titled "A Conversation with Hubert
Damisch" presented in October 1998.9 His concern is that modernist
representations of historical developments seek to pinpoint 'origins' as distinct
moments in time10. In our efforts to find answers through history, we have asked
history to locate the birth of one epoch or its transition into the next. Such
structural models create a simplification of the ebbs and flow of time and
6 Bois et al., p.57 Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, Durham, Duke University Press, 1987, p.138 Bois et al., p.59 Ibid
10 In 1997 Damish curated an exhibition titled "Moves" at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, reviewed in Artforum by Yve-Alain Bois, Dec 1997, to illustrate the 'game' played by a gallery or a collection and an art audience.
46
historical change. The historical representation of figures is also subject to such
simplification. Duchamp is commonly located by historians as pinpointing a
historical shift into Postmodernity, yet chess in the life of Marcel Duchamp has
been left in the theoretical and historical wake. Each occurring stage is distinct
from the one before and defined in an ordered progression, as a result, our ability
to perceive history is only possible through the establishment of structured
segmented definable stages.11 One difficulty with this understanding and use of
history, is that we are unable to locate the present. That is the present is only able
to be located once it can be seen in the past. For example, the current definition of
the present in terms of 'post,' the Postmodern, is defined in terms of what the
present is not. The present has come after the Modern epoch and is unable to be
further defined. The result is that the present is always defined by the last
historical period that has been defined.
While it is true that we "make up" history, we do not have full and arbitrary latitude to make it up as we please. The line by Marx, to the effect that people make their history but not as they choose . . . something real is going on out there and a knowledge of past maybe helpful to us in our efforts to "read" it, interpret it, and possibly even to deal with it.12
Furthermore, when we hold fast to the concept of progressive, linear historical
development, each historical stage or transition is only understood through the
concept of 'aftermath.' The present is living in the aftermath of an event or
historical period. Thus we are forever condemned to understand the present with
the prefix "late" or "post," without ever being able to 'see' what defines the present
and subsequently projects our thinking into the future.13 Such defining labels as
"late" or "post" represent an understanding of our place in history, but reveal our
11 Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, MIT Press, 1994, p. 28-912 Janet Abu-Lughod "On the Remaking of History: How to invent the Past"Discussion in Contemporary Culture #4, (ed)Barbara Kruger & Phil Marinai, Seattle, Bay Press, 1989, p.12513 Yve-ALain Bois, Moves, Artforum, 1997, p.5
47
lack of understanding of the present. Due to this understanding of historical
progression we can only live with a sense of "belatedness," being tied to that
which is outmoded and surpassed by the present, which we are unable to see.
In 1989, a group of intellectuals gathered at Boston University to discuss this very
question; 'What period are we in?'14 Their conclusion was to speculate whether
our period was defined, not in a cultural term, like the Renaissance, or the Middle
Ages, but by any number of 'isms,' derived from political, social, economic,
environmental, racial, ecological, technological paradigms, prefixed with 'post' or
'late.' The use of historical terms such as 'post' or 'late' by now inferred an
overtone of 'inferiority' in comparison to the preceding movement, however the
prefix did indicate 'an absence of positive periodising by not allowing this period
to be self defining or significant in its own right. Such prefixes are never free from
'evaluative bias' or prejudices as all historical systemisation is produced by
'hierocratic constructs.'15 The terminologies and descriptions used to represent an
historical period indicate how one is to perceive this period in comparison to
others. Thus modernist histories create a comparison between the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance, with one historical period preferenced above the other
through the use of the descriptive metaphors; 'light' and 'dark.' Damisch argues
that problems associated with the way history is perceived can be illustrated using
chess as a historical model.
14 Jenks, What is Post-Modernism?, London, Academy, 1996, p .ll15 Calinescu, p.133
48
Chess as a Modernist Historical Model
Despite Damisch's dislike of Duchamp's 'horrible etching of chess/ he holds with
Duchamp a common interest in the game. Damisch says that chess offers us a
model for perceiving the questions that history poses, yet is unable to answer. 16
The relationship between history and chess can be seen through the way a game is
played, documented and studied, when viewed in its entirety. A complete game
is divided into three distinct stages; the 'opening' phase, the 'middle game' and the
'ending.' A game is seen as a natural historical progression from pre-history to the
present. The theoretical language of chess also stresses the importance of progress
and piece 'development' that effects the control or power over the board that each
piece possesses. A chess player is constantly asking of history; 'Where has this
piece been?' 'What were the choices that have led to each stage?' and finally 'What
choices should be made next?' If a viewer has witnessed all of the moves of each
player, chess presents a complete or pure experience of its history. In chess a
spectator is given perfect and complete information, packaged upon a unifying
structure of a grid or chessboard, with only a limited amount of reasonable and
legal possible moves. The difference between history and chess is that the chess
players and viewer have access to all of the information determining the outcome.
On the other hand, the historical figure has only a limited perspective of the
present position, has only witnessed a few moves, has a limited knowledge of
what has past, and thus is not able to perceive the best moves or choices of the
future.17 As a consequence, historians who reduce the movements of history to
'chess like' binary shifts (light and dark) lose the subtle and entwined
characteristics of the historical periods. However Damisch stresses that history
never works in a structured way as each phase is inherently inter-connected with
16 Yve-ALain Bois, p.717 Ibid, p.5
49
the phase before. Damisch claims "that a great period of art is founded on
everything that came before it."18
During the Modern historical period, historical representation and investigation
has been understood to operate within a grid or rigid structure. The grid in turn
has become symbolic of the modernist historical, intellectual and aesthetic
paradigms.19 For the grid operates as a defining structure that creates stable
systems of structure in which all intellectual investigations can take place. The
modernist historian believes they are watching, documenting and investigating
something like a chess game. The events of history are seen by modernist
historical practice to be played out, one after the other, in a neat and structured
progression. Yet as Eric Fernie points out
There are no overwhelming arguments in favour of the past being divisible into periods as opposed to being an uninterrupted flow of events, but, as Wolfflin noted, we have to divide it up in order to maintain our sanity. Periods as concepts come in a number of different forms, including, cycles, progressive stages, styles, centuries and things such as reigns, all of which may be divided into early, middle and late phases.20
And are able to set out the precise structure of historical progress and,
to describe the past as it really was, through the careful accumulation of what they considered to be an incontrovertible mass of fact, art history and its methods.21
This 'grid' or structure was likewise applied to understand the intellectual
paradigms that operated throughout the Modern historical period. Modern
civilisation was seen to be built upon the intellectual foundations of science,
mathematics, politics, economics, and the arts. Such institutions or paradigms
18 Ibid, p.619 Ibid, p.720 Fernie, p. 35021 Ibid p.335
developed a complete trust in systems and structures of knowledge that came to
be considered infallible.22 A consequence of modernist institutionalisation was the
creation of metaphorical boundaries that surrounded each paradigm thereby
making them distinct and exclusive. Historical figures were understood to cohabit
such paradigms in this way. Duchamp is not defined by any other paradigm
other than art. Due to this rigid modernist structure there is a flattening out of the
inconsistent, and the contradictory. An artist's life and development is presented
as a progression from one artistic phase to the next in a compact and unified
structure. The artist also operates as an end point for interpretation and ultimately
the 'narrator' of their own meaning.23 Thus the artist who is also chess player
becomes a construct of the art historical institution founded in Modernism and
consequently loses the title of chess player.
Historical investigations into the practice of the artist Marcel Duchamp meet with
various problems, complexities, and contradictions. Duchamp is understood as
an artist who disrupts the foundations of the modern epitome, tied up in the
development and maintenance of systems of knowledge which are subsequently
brought into question. Many look to Duchamp as the 'origin' of the 'post'
modern.24 But in so doing they are unable to make sense of the relationship
between art and chess. This is due to the continual adoption of the modernist art
historical paradigm in investigations into Duchamp. No longer is such a binary
representation of Duchamp adequate.
22 Jones, 1994, p.223 Ibid, p.11-1224 Ibid, p.3
51
The " Progress " of Modernity
Greenberg's Modernism, one of the most dominant theories of modernist practice,
as presented in his essay "Modernist Painting," most succinctly codifies a positivist
view of history. It is in this view of history that representations of Duchamp as an
artist fail to deal with Duchamp as chess player and all of the complexity that this
relationship entails. Modernist art historical practice looks to the artist, and their
works from within the paradigm of art. Thus when an artist, like Duchamp,
moves beyond the borders of art, modern art history deems that they have
disappeared. This is highly problematic for Duchamp's theories, works and
actions as he traversed across many paradigms forming something quite unknown
to art.
One word is able to sum up the dominant ideology of the period from the
Renaissance until well into the Nineteenth Century: 'Progress.' Modernity
expresses itself in a continual progression of intellectual, political, economic,
scientific, artistic, technological, and physical developments.25 Progress was
expressed in the never ending developments of science, medicine, mathematics
and encapsulated in the theories of Charles Darwin and Adam Smith. Within the
intellectual discipline of art, historians and theorists began to view artistic
developments, movements and stylistic changes in time, from one 'ism' to the
next, bound up in a belief of modernist advancement and 'progress.' Modernist
art historians theorised that the developments of modern art were reacting to the
failings of past historical periods, and were progressing towards a pure and
universal end.26 This further developed as theorists and artists proclaiming the
creation of a universal aesthetics and universal meaning in art. That through art
25 Ibid p.826 Ibid, p.6
52
an unbridled 'creativity' and freedom of expression will produce a universal
language.
Duchamp, the Kantian Idea of the supersensible, or his sensus communis, states that it is a requirement of reason that anyone be endowed, de jure if not de facto, with the faculty of making art. Not only taste but also genius, or better, to use the modem term that conflated them, creativity, ought to be assumed as an ability shared by humanity - itself an Idea of reason, by the way - so that the claim to conceptual objectivity laid down by the judgement "this is art," which is however merely aesthetic and subjective, be grounded and justified; so that the modernist quest for an ontological definition of art, its striving for theory, its self referential reduction to essential conventions, be meaningful; so that neither the enthusiasm with which so many modem artist prophesied the advent of a universal language.27
A faith in modern rationality, closely associated with objective judgements,
became secured within established institutional conventions. The 'cult' of reason
sought to establish a 'conceptual' objectivity to surround and define what it
deemed as art. The pursuit of an 'ontological' systemisation saw a development
in art theory as an essential component in the creation of objective structured
meaning. The Modern period encompassed a belief in the ability of humanity to
use critical reason to progress into the future; a future in which we have control.
However, alongside modernity runs a distrust of rationality and a fear of progress,
and sees civilisation at the mercy of nature, disorder, and restlessness about the
future. This is clearly seen in the rise of the Romantic movements of the
nineteenth century and further with the Dada and Surrealist movements of the
20th Century from which Postmodernism grew.28
Art historical systems that once enabled 'truth' to be perceived and meaning or
cognition to be created and transmitted, fail at the hands of Marcel Duchamp.
One unified representation of the historical figure is not able to accommodate all
27 de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1996, p.32328 Barzun, Classic, Romantic and Modem, London, Seeker and Warburg, 1961, p.37
53
of the complex, incommensurate positions that are presented to the art historian.29
For in Duchamp a 'tension' is created between the conventions and structures of
the modern period by his art and in particular non-art actions. For example,
Duchamp's investigations into elite end game studies in chess are not able to be
carried or transmitted via the paradigm of art. Attempting to apply 'modernist'
ideologies and intellectual historical systems to Marcel Duchamp, the complexities
of discourses between the paradigms Duchamp traversed, what he created, how
the paradigm of art perceives, reads, and analyses them, continues to produce a
multitude of understandings, misunderstandings, readings and mis-readings.30
'Modernist' art practice has become defined by these theories of Clement
Greenberg, as he presentes in "Modernist Painting" (1965), which specifically
relates to artistic developments from Courbet and his lineage into the twentieth
century.31
What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general, but also in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself. By doing this each art would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of this area all the more secure. . . Thereby each art would be rendered 'pure' and in its 'purity' find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. 'Purity' meant selfdefinition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.32
And it is this 'narrowing down' and 'purification' of each art that has rendered
Duchamp as an artist and a chess player as a deviation from the Modern epoch.
For the art of Duchamp is informed by a number of intellectual paradigms and is
in no way a narrowing down but an integration or expanding out of the fields of
29 Joselit, p.330 Jones, p.10331 Ibid, p.432 Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting. Art and Literature No. 4 spring 1965 .pp 193-201.
54
art and the roles of the artist. Duchamp as artist was dependant, as opposed to
independent, on the developments, languages and practices beyond 'pure' fields
of art.
The investigation into Duchamp's relationships with other paradigms beyond art
needs to take into consideration the historical context of each paradigm. In
particular the shift from the Modern to the Postmodern. An awareness of the
Postmodern period is one that has dawned gradually, and was not a sudden
binary historical shift at one particular moment in time.33 The understanding of
what it meant to be modern had altered. The modern began to be viewed as
something that was passing into history, an old fashioned ideal or a familiar
sentiment.34 In seeking theoretical clarity, many writers on Postmodernism
depend upon establishing clear boundaries or limitations on their dialogue, for the
Postmodern, as seen with the Modern, means many different things depending on
the discourse and context in which one is speaking.35 In conducting a study across
a number of different intellectual paradigms, the theorist is faced with an ever
increasing difficulty in understanding the way the term Postmodern is used and
understood by each paradigm. Thus the progression from the Modern into the
Postmodern in the art and life of the historical figure Duchamp is a complex
dialogue between the varying aspects of the Modern and of that which is beyond.
33 Calinescu, p.13434 Barzun, p.11535 Hollinger, Pragmatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism, Westport, Connecticut, London, Praeger, 1995, p.257
55
The transition into Postmodernism
The intellectual paradigms of Modernism were experiencing events, disruptions
and developments that could no longer be understood or systemised within the
structure or 'progress' of modernism. Within art Duchamp was blamed for this
disruption. Art movements like Dada, in which Duchamp had a critical role,
reacted seriously against modernist beliefs in progress and rationalism.36 The
modernist paradigms and institutions like art, science, economics, and
mathematics that developed as separate, distinguishable and definable entities,
were now merging and interrelating into hybrid fields that were often
indistinguishable. To reduce an understanding of postmodernism to a long list of
binary oppositions to modernity, (otherwise know as, 'anti's;' anti epistemological
standpoints; anti binarisms; anti essentialism; anti realism; anti foundationalism;
opposition to transcendental arguments and transcendental standpoints; rejection
of the picture of knowledge as accurately represented; rejection of truth as
correspondence to reality; rejection of canonical descriptions; rejection of final
vocabularies; suspicion of grand narratives, or meta-narratives37) is to not
understand how integral the Postmodern historical shift is to the Modern
historical period.
Charles Jenks stresses the importance of modernist/postmodernist position when
defining the Postmodern. Jenks establishes that Postmodernism is intrinsically
connected both with modernism and its 'transcendence.' The connection of
Postmodernism with the Modern period is significant as an understanding of the
non-binary flow of history, the complexities and problems in establishing 'origins’
or linear shifts. Postmodernism, Jenks claims, is not anti-modernism, but a
36 Jones, p.637 Hollinger, p.260
56
subversion of the progressivist linear agendas of modernity. Postmodernism is a
continuation of the modernist 'project.' Yet, as Jenks says, postmodernism
contains a 'double coding': the coupling of modernity with its own
transcendence.38
The shift from the Modern to the Postmodern can be said to occur when the very
fabric of authority is 'destabilised,' when an institution's definition of 'purity'
moves from the institution into the hands of another.39 However, the adoption of
postmodernist thought created a relief from the 'highbrow,' and 'arrogant'
modernist positions, through the acknowledgment of minority groups and
perspectives. This new age saw a revival of interest in anti-rationality,
romanticism, and irresponsibility coupled with a deep sense of self awareness.40
This self awareness led to various critiques of modernist assumptions producing a
rejection of various traditional authorities, and in particular dismissed the 'dogma'
of progress and rationality.41 One example from the paradigm of chess is that
post-war players rejected the dogma of the modern school which relied on self
declared scientific principles and a "classical" aesthetic. Post war players returned
to pre-modern or Romantic (1600-1870) styles and values, whilst maintaining
mathematical and scientific practices. Thus a hybrid of scientific/rationalistic
practice coupled with romantic values was formed called Hypermodernism, of
which Duchamp was an important proponent. The Postmodern is not only
concerned with the disruption of institutional authority but is critical of the
perceptions and influences upon the individual.42 The Postmodern moves each
paradigm clear of the modernist establishment. The debate that once existed
between orthodoxy and heretical positions within each modernist paradigm has
38 Jenks, p.1539 Jones, p.1640 Calinescu, p.13941 Ibid, p.26542 Barzun, p.117
57
merged and blended to create a 'new' understanding of the nature of progress,
that of time itself. Time, once understood to be taking each intellectual paradigm
forward towards a unifying end (be that pure maths, pure science, or high art),
saw a regress and an integration with other paradigms, pre-modern developments
and periods. Science can merge with art, maths with literature, politics with
ecology.43 Science itself transcended its central pillar, 'reason', when it engaged in
studies into the human mind and different non-physical dimensions (fourth
dimensions or n-dimensions), where it was said "Reason has no knowledge."44
Science further embraced postmodernist consciousness through self reflection and
critiques of traditional assumptions about praxis and theoretical-epistemology.45
The notion of 'infallible' science toppled before the force of the scepticism that
surrounds empirical methodology. In turn this created a desire for answers and
solid evidence, facts for the new perspectives, hypotheses and arenas that
postmodern scientific investigation embarked upon.46
The threat of postmodernism to modernist institutions is obvious: each
institution's ability to define and to maintain its own historical authority over a
field or a position within a wider social or cultural context is challenged. The
tendency of a 'modernist' perspective is to see the blending and merging of the
disciplines and characteristics of postmodernism as negative and destructive.
From a postmodern perspective a sense of both 'unity' and 'disunity' has been
created. No longer can each intellectual paradigm be understood as 'autonomous,'
and 'progressive,' because Postmodernism has dismantled the 'privileged'
positions, conventions and traditions that defines each intellectual institution.47
Duchamp and other artists consciously set out to destroy the autonomy of each
43 Calinescu, p.6444 Ibid,, p.13445 Ibid, p.27046 Tomkins, 1998, p.58-947 Jones, p.12
58
institution as represented within a modernist conception of intellectual institutions
and histories. Duchamp's work clearly portrays the disruption of arts autonomy
by bringing scientific and mathematical theories concerning the nth dimension
and non-Euclidean geometry to form a unity with art. This plays a major role in
the formation of the Large Glass. At the same time the "disunity" in such works as
Duchamp's Large Glass can be seen to show how foreign and alien modernist
intellectual paradigms can be to each other. The rendering of theoretical science
and mathematics in the realms of art was entirely foreign.
The rigid structure of modernism that separated the mass public from notions of
'high' or elite positions within an institution was also criticised by Duchamp. The
authority invested in art, to define and to interpret meaning and value, and to
assign privileged positions to those the institution confirmed, was broken down
by Duchamp. He questioned what was considered to be art, how the artist is to
work, and how the viewer is to submit to both the work and the artist. Raymonde
Moulin said Duchamp enabled the art world to 'elevate the paving-stone into a
work of art,'48 and likewise the viewer into the artist.49 Duchamp acknowledged
the authority of the viewer. Each interpreter "gives his particular note to his
interpretation, which is interesting only when you consider the man who wrote
the interpretation."50 Duchamp desired to involve the audience in the 'creative
process.'
"The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert m atter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the aesthetic scale. All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by
48 Moulin, Living Without Selling, Art and confrontation New York Graphic society, 1970, p.13349 Jones, p.1350 Ibid, p.10
59
deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act." 51
51 Duchamp The creative act, Art news, Vol.56, no.4 summer 1957
60
Scientific Developments as Reflecting the Postmodern
One of the areas of Postmodern science that became of critical interest to
Duchamp, and many cubist artists, was that of the fourth dimension, or nth-
dimension (that is any number of dimensions) and non-Euclidean geometry. The
'modernist' understanding of the representation of space stems directly from
antiquity through the Greek geometer Euclid, and was confirmed in the writings
of Kant. Euclid established the framework for mathematical geometry and the
representation of three dimensional space on a two dimensional surface. This
method of geometry is commonly know as Plane, Line and Point geometry, as each
of these elements were able to articulate the physical world. Euclid's foundations
became the basis of geometry in visual representation in western art and went
unchallenged from the Renaissance through to the end of the 19th century. Euclid,
Kant and the moderns understood rationality and observation to be the
foundation of perspective. The laws of perspective and 'empirical' observation are
established and continually affirmed via our perception, movement and
interaction within space.52
What is derived from experience has only comparative universality, namely, that which is obtained through induction. We should therefore only be able to say that, so far as hitherto observed, no space has been found which has more than three dimensions.53
The continual dialogue with the 'ancients' was an ever present element of
Modernism. All advancements within the Modern period were seen to be an
extension of 'Antiquity.' However, as early as the 1820's alternative methods and
approaches to geometry were thought to be possible. The first system was
formulated in the 1850's and was centred around a distinction between
52 Henderson, 1983, p.1353 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, London, Macmillan and Co, 1929,p69
61
unbounded space and infinite space, through the study of curves in any number
of dimensions. These new approaches to geometry concluded that space is either
seen as 'linear' (Euclidean) or irregular and curved. Such notions interested early
twentieth century artists as these new theories 'transcended' perspective systems
that were firmly established since the time of the Renaissance.54 Duchamp himself
developed or "played" with these theories of new dimensions in his Large Glass
and Green Box. In the top section of the Large Glass, called brides domain, the 3
Draft Pistons (PLATE 10) show the influence of new geometry, non-Euclidean and
nth dimension in Duchamp's art.
The gauze, cut to form a perfect square, assumed different shapes as it was stirred by the air current. The series of chance images as a result of the deformations of th e . square were recorded photographically in 1914. Duchamp chose gauze because its wide- meshed, regular texture allowed him to "avoid any play of light" while "the form of points or small squares equal and at equal distances from each other" enabled him to obtain "on a flat surface a conventional representation of the 3 draft pistons.55
I wanted to register the changes in the surface of that square, and used in my Glass the curves of the lines distorted by the wind. So I used a gauze which has natural straight lines. When at rest, the gauze was perfectly square- and the lines perfectly straight - as in the case in graph paper. I took the pictures when the gauze was moving in the draft to obtain the required distortion of the mesh.56
Draft is a force. If you capture it, you can make a piston move.57
In this case Duchamp created iconographical references to geometry through the
perfect square and the lines like that of graph paper, though Duchamp took the
theoretical world of geometry and placed it in the physical world. The physical
element of wind distorts the principles of the grid and harnesses or captures
54 Henderson, 1983, p.555 Schwarz , 1997, p.12556 Duchamp to Schwarz 1959-68, Ibid, p.12557 Duchamp, Notes and Projects, Note 81, p 128; Note 82, p. 130
62
another element or dimension. This distortion of the two dimensional surface
within a three dimensional world, was then represented upon the two
dimensional surface of the Large Glass.
Duchamp's rendering of the fourth dimension in a three dimensional world then
rendering it upon a two dimensional surface reflects that the hypothetical
philosophical analogies were used to demonstrate how the existence of a third
dimension operated within a two dimensional world. Duchamp mirrored
mathematicians in using analogical models or images to describe and represent
nth dimensions. For example one analogy was created to show how a being in a
two dimensional world would experience a third dimension. "Flat Beings" that
exist upon a horizontal two dimensional plane only experienced length and•>
breadth, not height. Within a two dimensional world the effect of raising a being
from this plane would be to make it vanish, however the being has not vanished
but has entered into a third dimension; height. It was argued that if this analogy
is 'projected' to a three dimensional space and one enters a fourth dimension,
which is said to be perpendicular to Euclidean height, length and breadth, one
would disappear.58 Such philosophical musings were not based on fundamental
mathematical principles or precise reasoning, yet came from theorists within the
paradigm of mathematics. These new dimensions were unable to be understood
through rational and empirical scientific methods, and further still, they were
unable to be experienced.
It was like being blind from birth and being told what colour is; one does not have the language nor the deductive methods, nor experience to give a meaningful representation.59
58 Henderson, 1983, p.959 Ibid, p.13
63
Studies into the fourth dimension that had originally adopted the rational
mathematical approaches gave way to philosophical and mystical explanations
and expositions. However the language and the perspectives of mathematics were
insufficient in expressing these concepts and mathematicians looked beyond their
paradigm for solutions. One paradigm in which they found assistance was chess.
64
Chess as a Metaphor for a ' New ' Perception
in Science: the nth-Dimension
The philosophical impact of non-Euclidean geometry in the Nineteenth century . . . shook the foundations of mathematics and science, branches of learning that for two thousand years had depended on the truth of Euclid's axioms. As a result, optimistic belief in man's ability to acquire absolute truth gradually gave way during the later nineteenth century to a recognition of the relativity of knowledge.. . . For certain Artists in the early twentieth century, non-Euclidean geometry was to be synonymous with the rejection of tradition and even with revolution.60
Scientific writings concerning the fourth dimension moved out of the paradigm of
science and entered the popular domains. The debates surrounding the fourth
dimension drew artists and intellectuals out of other intellectual paradigms and
into science. Towards the end of the 19th century articles on the fourth dimension
and non Euclidean geometry began appearing in the popular mainstream press.
Interest and involvement in science and mathematics flowed into other intellectual
paradigms such as literature, art and the public domain. H.G Wells The Time
Machine published in 1895 is a case in point. The Time Machine helped create the
popular impression that the fourth dimension was time, however it was non-
Euclidean geometry and the movement through higher dimensions of space that
proponents of non-Euclidean were concerned about.61 Science was on the street -
the notion of popular science was born. Breaking down the walls of science and
mathematics and transcending its founding 'fathers,' its methods and ideologies
captivated the imagination of many twentieth century artists. Non-Euclidean
geometry and the fourth dimension were no longer contained within the
modernist, progressivist linear and distinct paradigms of maths and science, but
entered into other intellectual paradigms. It was from this time that the artist
Marcel Duchamp moved out of the paradigm of art into the paradigm of science,
60 Ibid, p. 1761 Ibid, p.10
65
or it could be said that the paradigm of science merged with the paradigm of art,
and engaged with Marcel Duchamp.
Francois Le Lionnais (a contemporary of Duchamp's) in an interview by Ralph
Rumney about the extent of Duchamp's scientific investigations says,
Francois Le Lionnais . . . . [Duchamp] liked talking to people with scientific backgrounds, and he asked them questions; he talked about mathematics. But until the end of his life he was stuck at Henri Poincare.. . . He had read a lot of books - not mathanatical texts which he would have been unable to understand, b u t . . philosophical works . . . Popular science.. . That is the philosophical musings of a great mathematician, which combine philosophical and mathematical qualities. This influenced him a lot. 62
One geometer called Jouffret, who affirmed the existence of higher dimensions,
had many doubts about whether it was possible for the fourth dimension to be
physically represented or even visualised. He suggested that it was equivalent to
a chess player playing blindfolded a number of different games at the one time.63
Attempts to visualise the fourth dimension created much debate. Jouffret
suggested that it was possible; "one who devoted his life to it could perhaps
eventually be able to picture the fourth dimension."64 What was needed was to
stretch one's intelligence to the point of breaking, beyond the 'plane' that exists
between the third and fourth dimensions. One other French Mathematician,
Henry Poincare, suggested the problem of representation or 'proving' lies not with
the fourth dimension but, with the methods that were being employed. He
argued that the criteria used for empirical science are only a set of conventionally
'convenient' methodology used to study specific phenomena. When conventional
methodology was applied to a fourth dimensional study empiricism is found to be
wanting. Which is to say that one set of scientific conventions are no more valid
62 Rumney, Marcel Duchamp as a Chess Player: Francois Le Lionnais Interviewed by Ralph Rumney, Studio International 189 no. 972, Jan-Feb 197563 Henderson, 1983, p.7364 Ibid
66
then any other. It is only the differing conventions, applied to differing
circumstances that produce the required results. When a set of scientific
conventions is not able to operate within the fourth dimension, the conclusion is
not that the fourth dimension does not exist, rather that the methodology
employed is not appropriate for the task. Not being able to visualise or validate
higher dimensions does not prove or falsify the existence of Euclidean or non-
Euclidean geometry.65
65 Ibid, p.16
67
Duchamp's place in Postmodernism
The relationship between Duchamp, chess, non-Euclidean geometry and the
fourth dimension offers a way of understanding or representing the various
complexities that came into play within a postmodern historical context. Aspects
of moving beyond the boundaries of particular intellectual paradigms or the
relaxing of the parameters to allow other paradigms to merge, became a rallying
point for artists within Cubism, Surrealism and Dada.66 Duchamp distinguished
himself from these artists by applying scientific and mathematical theories to his
art by making that which was unknown within the paradigm of art. In addition
he abandoned conventional art materials and adopted alien media which he
considered more appropriate to his subject matter.
To this end he considered paint, canvas, and brushes to be hopelessly outdated tools. They seemed to him to be no longer adequate to express modern thought or to take up the artistic challenge presented by increasingly complicated realities. . . In order to enter this discourse Duchamp had to invent a pictorial method that could not be compared to anything that had been know as art until then.67
Duchamp became interested in the work of Henry Poincare, whose theories were
considered .to have shaken the 'foundations of all exact knowledge.'68 The
representation of the fourth dimension was understood by Poincare to be
impossible for the observer to determine the top from the bottom, or left from
right, as the fourth dimension contained a relativity of space. The moving from
one dimension to another is clearly demonstrated by Duchamp's studio. Looking
once again to the 1917 photograph of Duchamp's New York studio, and with this
in mind, Duchamp nailed his coat rack, Trebuchet (trap), to the floor rather than the
66 Jones, p.667 de Duve, The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993, p. 24568 Ibid, p.243
68
wall, and upon the wall he hung a chessboard each object being displaced to
occupy a new dimension. In another move, Duchamp attempted to show the
fallibility of conventional geometry in a wedding gift to his sister Suzanne. A
geometry textbook was hung out in the 'elements' (a reference to Euclid's original
text titled Elements), where the wind and the rain ripped through the pages to
destroy the very principles it contained. The work was titled Unhappy Readymade
(PLATE 11).
The transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth has been termed "a
period of doubts," where the very foundations of science were 'transcended' by
'idealism and agnosticism.'69 At the time science had encountered physical
anomalies that put into question Newton's classical mechanics, a foundation stone
of scientific empiricism; x-rays (1895); radioactivity (1896); and the electron (1897).
The resulting perception was that science was at a crisis point. During this time
when most people believed in the stability of institutional science, Duchamp took
hold of its developments and its transition, incorporating them into his thinking
and his art practice. Duchamp's aim was to do to art what had been done to
science.70
The anaesthesia of logical thought, the "cretinization" of reason, was Duchamp's lifelong artistic occupation. Although he was indebted to the sciences for his revolutionising of the visual arts as hardly any other artist in this century, Duchamp was basically hostile to scientific rationalism, which had assumed the role of religion and philosophy as the principal means to explain reality.71
Duchamp's approach to science developed into 'hostility' toward any form of
rationalism, progress and empiricism, and suggested that the only way to
69 Ibid, p.24470 Ibid, p.24571 Ibid, p. 257
69
understand reality was to use 'religion and philosophy.' This hostility towards
progress was also applied to his attitudes about art.
Art is produced by a succession of individuals expressing themselves; it is not a question of progress. Progress is merely an enormous pretension on our part. - Marcel Duchamp, 1946.
Evidence of Duchamp's interest in the developments of maths and science can be
clearly seen in his writings published in the White Box, (a collection of notes and
diagrams by the artist from 1912 - 1920). One of the central themes of this
document is the attempt to visualise the fourth dimension. The White Box and
Duchamp's continual interest in science culminated in his 'masterpiece' The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. In this work Duchamp challenged the viewer
to 'visualise' and to understand the mystifying forms, and cryptic notes concerning
the nth dimension.
The quest to visualise the fourth dimension, as proposed by the mathematician
Jouffret, to be like that of a blindfolded chess player, captivated the mind of
Duchamp. By 1911 chess had become a recurring theme in his work and will be
further explored in chapter five. Duchamp said of The Portrait of Chess Players
1911, "I painted the heads of my two brothers playing chess, not in a garden this
time, but in indefinite space."72 In October 1911 Duchamp created a series of
'Cubist' drawings in preparation for this work. Each sketch draws on the theme of
visualising the psychological states and mental activity of the players. Through
interlocking planes, segmentation and dislocation, each player can be read as
attempting to break down the dimensional barrier between themselves and the
'mental chessboard.' Duchamp was not content with the success of this early form
of 'Cubist visualisation,' instead he introduced an element that has been mistaken
72 referring to "The Game of Chess" 1910 (Duchamp, ”A Propose of Myself," unpublished lecture delivered at the City Art Museum of St. Louis, Missouri, 24 Nov. 1964.)
70
for Futurism, yet here the technique is a rendering of Cubism coupled with a
movement of forms or "static representation of movement." This can be seen in
works like; Coffee Mill (1911) (PLATE 12), Sad Young Man on a Train (1911) (PLATE
13), Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) (PLATE 14), The King and Queen Surrounded
by Swift Nudes. (1912). In the Coffee Mill we see not only a cubist use of the x-ray
technique but also the movement of coffee through the mill and into the draw. In
this work Duchamp further enhanced the theme of movement by adding
directional symbols to show the motion of the coffee mill's handle. The static
cubist chess forms of The Portrait o f Chess Players (1911) were superseded by the
adoption of futurist iconography of movement representing organic/mechanical
forms in eternal motion. The King and Queen represented a 'dream like' reality of
the movement of human thought, 'swift' in motion, within a psychological
framework that surrounds the static chess pieces as they sit upon the chess board.
chess = a design on slate / that one erases, / the beauty of which / one can
reproduce without the / intervention of the "hand" 73
Within a postmodern historical field chess had also, for Duchamp, became more
closely associated with the act of making art itself. He understood that chess could
also be considered as a 'painting of precision' and that it contained the 'beauty of
indifference,' as was understood by Duchamp's readymades. Chess was a
mechanical means of 'drawing' in a way that destroyed the artists touch, or hand,
and therefore the 'aura' that was associated with modernist works of art.
73 Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. and Trans. Paul Matisse, Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983, note 273. unpaginated.
71
Chapter 3.
Chess "Praxis" from Modernism to Postmodernism
RALPH RUMNEY You say he was not a Dadaist as a chess player.. . hut was he an innovator? 1
This chapter will position Marcel Duchamp as a chess player, within the
intellectual paradigm of chess, his importance, contributions and achievements. It
will focus upon Duchamp's involvement with Hypermodernism and the historical
institution of chess. The book Duchamp co-wrote with Halberstadt (1932) will also
be considered. Chess will be presented as a playing surface on which to place the
Duchampian chess pieces, which will serve to highlight his achievements, his
associations, and the theoretical positions that he held as a chess player and the
critical chess theories that relate. This chapter is a move, with Duchamp, into the
historical paradigm of chess so to locate Duchamp the chess player and to reflect
back to Duchamp the artist. This chapter will focus closely upon chess as a distinct
and separate entity yet when presented from a postmodern perspective will
explore chess as a paradigm that is deeply connected to a wider historical arena
(The historical and theoretical development of chess from the Modern to
Postmodern, the "post" renaissance modern "classical" school to postmodern
"hypermodernist" praxis). The history of chess offers a rich way to place Duchamp
and his work in a historical and intellectual Postmodern paradigm. This mirrors
historical methodologies which understands that history is complex and intricate
and does not move in neat binary shifts from one period to the next. These
historical periods will be explored to demonstrate how historical change affected
chess in fundamental and lasting ways. Chess as a game is an embodiment of
1 Rumney 1975
72
modernity as philosophically it possesses many elements that the modern period
has considered important: the intellect, domination, conquest, progress, science,
rationalism, and logic. At the same time chess is closely associated with the
irrational, mystical, and illogical. Finally, the relationships between chess and art
will be woven into this study to explore Duchamps theoretical position.
It has been noted by a number of Duchampian and chess scholars that there is an
increasing acknowledgment of the importance of chess to the life and art of Marcel
Duchamp.2 What is significant, is that there is still little understanding concerning
the relationship between the two intellectual paradigms of art and chess. There is
one other reason why research into the relationship between Duchampian chess
and art has remained so undernourished. That is very few people have both an
understanding of Duchamp art work and an understanding of chess history,
development, and theory. As discussed in the previous chapter Postmodernism
presents an intermingling of various intellectual institutions and paradigms.
2 Humble, Keene, Damisch
73
The Histories of Marcel Duchamp as Chess Player
. . . comparatively little has been written about Duchamp’s chess as a form of artistic activity, how it relates to his other artistic interests, and what it reveals about his attitude to art in general. A few writers have commented on these matters, but their views tend to be underdeveloped and are often highly speculative. Roger Cardinal summed it up when he remarked that "nobody has entirely assessed the significance of chess in Duchamp's career."3
When attempting to address the nature of chess in the life of Marcel Duchamp one
is met with many contradictions. Even within the paradigm of chess there is
debate over his approach to the game. The following section will present the scope
of the debate within the paradigm of chess and show how attempts have failed to
bridge the theoretical distance to reflect upon his art. Within the paradigm of
chess, theorists have attempted to determine Duchamp’s playing style via the
complexities of conservative Classical chess play and Avant-garde
Hypermodernism. Yet due to misunderstandings concerning historical
hypermodernism in chess and of Dada in art, the theorists make false conclusions
about Duchamp the chess player. There is much understanding to gain about
Duchamp as artist and chess player from an investigation into the nature of
Hypermodern chess.
It is tempting for the art historians, like Arturo Schwarz, to adopt a systematic
approach when writing about Marcel Duchamp and to create a theory through
which all of his work can be seen. However one must be wary of theories that
claim to unlock the system or pattern behind Duchamp's work. For such dominant
or meta theories have greatly affected how aspects of Duchamp's life and works
are understood. Francis Naumann in his article titled "Marcel Duchamp: A
3 Humble, Marcel Duchamp: Chess Aesthete and Anartist Unreconciled, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol.32 no.2,1998, p.41
74
Reconciliation of Opposites/'4 warns that any attempt to formulate Duchamp
"would be - in the humble opinion of the present author - an entirely futile
endeavour."5 Francis Naumann suggests that Duchamp himself has given us his
response to those that attempt to unlock the Duchamp mystery by saying "There is
no solution, because there is no problem."6 In understanding the nature, role and
significance of Duchampian chess one needs to see beyond the problem / solution
dilemma and operate at a different cognitive level involving multiplicity and
complexity. This thesis aims to demonstrate a multiplicity of the complex
relationships between Duchamp as artist and as chess player. The importance for
this approach, as Naumann states, is that Duchamp himself moved through a
number of contemporary artistic styles and each time developed a unique
approach of self consciously "defying convenient categorisation."7 To support this
claim Naumann offers a series of quotations by Duchamp emphasising the
importance of change and the defiance in his work to any tradition or "taste."
"'It was always the idea of changing, of not repeating myself." "Repeating the same thing long enough, and it becomes taste," a qualitative judgment he had repeatedly identified as "the enemy of Art," that is, as he put it, art with a capital A.’" (Duchamp interviewed by Sweeney, 1956)
Humble's assertion that current published views on Duchamp’s chess as art are
"underdeveloped and often highly speculative is, he suggests, due to the reason
that nobody is entirely sure how to understand or to define chess itself. Humble
muses that chess players themselves debate whether chess is a game, sport,
science, or art?
4 de Duve, 1993, p. 415 de Duve 1993, p.416As quoted in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1969: 2nd rev. ed., 1970),p. 201.7 de Duve 1993, p.41
75
With this being said, the mystery of chess in the life of Marcel Duchamp is a
subject that has often been approached in a formulaic manner. Questions like;
"What type of player was Duchamp?," "What was the role of chess in his life?," and
"What is the relationship between chess and art?" have been presented in a
simplistic and minimalistic fashion. One example of this is an article by grand
master and chess theoretician Raymond Keene titled Marcel Duchamp: The Chess
Mind. 8 In this article Keene discusses Duchamp's achievements, his associations,
his theoretical positions, and attempts to establish a relationship between art and
chess. Primarily his analysis focuses upon the nature of Hypermodernist chess
praxis and the dada art movement. Keene seeks to show that Duchamp as well as
being a dadaist, was also a hypermodernist chess player and thereby establish that
the relationship between chess and art is dada. In this way, Hypermodernism is
often equated with dada, yet the similarities have more to do with the look and feel
of the game rather than theory. In comparison to Classical or Modern games
hypermodernism seems absurd and illogical.
Keene's theoretical analysis of Duchamp's chess play had to dismiss comments
made by chess player and dadaist contemporary of Duchamp, Francis Le Lionnais.
Le Lionnais defeated Duchamp in 1932 in Paris, and later stated that Duchamp was
a not a dada chess player, but a player who adopted a conventional, conformist, or
classical style of play.9 To counter this claim, Keene looks closely at the influence
and the similarities between Duchamp and the founder of hypermodernism,
Grand master Aaron Nimzowitsch. Keene cites Duchamp's 'borrowing' a chess
opening at the world Championship of 1927 that had been introduced by
Nimzowitsch the previous year. Keene's theories concerning the relationship
between chess and art are convincing. Keene argues that the tactical talent
displayed in his love for "paradoxical hidden points" is fundamentally Dada.
8 Raymond Keene, Marcel Duchamp: The Chess Mind, Modern Painters, vol.2, no. 4, winter 19899 Rumney, 1975
76
Keene mirrors Duchamp's comments that chess was a "violent sport" with that of
Nimzowitsch who said "chess was a struggle like that of life."10 Further, Keene
shows Duchamp's continuing dedication to Nimzowitsch. In the course of his
research Keene visited Teene Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp's wife, and found a copy
of Nimzowitsch's Chess Praxis that Duchamp had hand written.
Keene demonstrates the associations between Duchamp and Nimzowitsch and
dispels the comments made by Le Lionnais. Keene establishes a close association
between Duchamp and Nimzowitsch, arguing that Nimzowitsch was a
hypermodernist and therefore that Marcel Duchamp was one also. Keene's
conclusion is not far off, yet, it maintains an understanding of Hypermodernism
that is misleading. Keene adopts a very clear theoretical methodology of forming
binary opposites. His use of opposites, or opposition, is essential for the creation of
a distinction between classical and hypermodern chess. Yet this position implies a
conflict between the two styles of chess play that is not necessarily true. One of the
intrinsic characteristics of Hypermodernism is its connectedness with the
movement surpassed followed.
The relationship does lie in the realms of Hypermodernism and Dada and yet it
goes much further, as Duchamp goes further than Dada. Thus, Keene's whole
approach to find the solution to the problem of Duchampian chess is mistaken.
An interview between Ralph Rumney and Francois Le Lionnais was the catalyst
for this thesis and investigation. I set out to determine which one of the theorists
was correct, and it was not until I reconsidered my methodology that an
alternative conclusion could be reached. Ralph Rumney has just asked Le Lionnais
to describe Duchamp's qualities as a player,
10 Duchamp quoted by Bandy, Schwarz 1975, p.70
77
FRANCOIS LE LIONNAIS I don’t know how well I can do that. . . in his style of play I saw no trace of . . . a Dada or anarchist style though this is perfectly possible. To bring Dada ideas to chess one would have to be a chess genius rather than a Dada genius. In my opinion Nimzowitsch, a great chess player was a dadaist before Dada. But he knew nothing of Dada. He introduced an anticonformism of apparently stupid ideas which won. For me that’s real Dada. I don't see this Dada aspect in Duchamp’s style-----
RALPH RUMNEY You say he was not a Dadaist as a chess player.. . but was he an innovator?
FRANCOIS LE LIONNAIS Absolutely not. He applied absolutely classic principles, he was strong on theory - he'd studied chess theory in books. He was very conformist which is an excellent way of playing. In chess conformism is much better than anarchy unless you are Nimzowitsch, a genius.
This musing ends with Rumney posing a question:
It seems to me that the extremely conformist style of Duchamp's chess which you describe has parallels in everything lie did, and that perhaps instead of looking for evidence of Dada in the way he played chess we should be looking for aspects of this conformism in his most anticonformist action? 11
Le Lionnais, it would seem, contradicts Keene's understanding of Duchamp's
chess. Instead of looking for conformity within Duchamp's art, Keene refutes the
very grounds for such an inquiry by stating that Duchamp was a Dadaist chess
player and did not adopt a conformist or classical style. Yet even the investigation
suggested by Rumney will bring us to a binary end. Lionnais claims to have seen
no evidence of Duchamp's dadaist or hypermodernist chess play but instead a
classical approach. Duchamp is either a conformist or a non- conformist artist, and
Duchamp is either a conformist or non-conformist chess player. In the end this
will not bring us to an understanding of Duchampian chess, but a series of binary
oppositions. Keene reached this conclusion even though the original question was
11 Rumney 1975
78
what sort o f player was Duchamp? This investigation into Duchamp's chess is met
with two opposing views; he is either a Hypermodernist or a Classicist. The
historian is being asked to determine whether Keene or Lionnais is correct.
Hubert Damisch begins his article on Duchamp as chess player, The Duchamp
Defense, with an outline of Duchamp's chess career.12 Damisch introduces his
article primarily to construct a 'narrative' of the grand achievements attained by
Duchamp in the realm of chess. The reading of this is impressive. However,
Damisch then poses the questions, how does such a narrative serve in attempting
to understand Marcel Duchamp? What is the purpose of such a narrative? In
developing an understanding of Duchamp the artist what is the purpose of
understanding Duchamp the chess player? Damisch says that this narrative
should not just be told for the love of a story but to establish the value or worth
chess held for Duchamp. Damisch stresses,
above all is his belief that [Duchamp] was never more interested inchess than after he had ceased being interested in painting.13
This narrative shows that Duchamp's involvement in chess was not a side-line
interest but rather Duchamp's dedication to chess was with "all the ambition and
single minded passion of a professional."14 Yet, as Damisch states, this passion
12 Damisch points out that Duchamp was interested in chess as a young man as shown by an etching by Jacques Villon (Marcel's brother) showing Marcel playing chess with his sister at the age of seventeen. Duchamp played in the 1924 World Amateur Championship, four French championships from 1924 to 1928, and four Olympiads from 1928 to 1933. He tied for first place at Hyeres 1928 and won the Paris championship in 1932. He drew a game with Grand Master Tartakower in 1928. Several times he beat Belgian Champion Koltanowsky in 1929. He was awarded the chess title of Master in 1929. In 1931 Duchamp became a member of the Committee of French Chess Federation and the French delegate to the World Chess Federation. In 1931 Duchamp co-wrote a book on chess with Halberstadt titled VOpposition et les cases conjures sont reconciliees. In 1935 Duchamp was Captain of the French Correspondence Olympic team.
13 Here it is important not to read painting as meaning art. But to understand the importance of Duchamp's ceasing painting in his career as an artist.14 Damisch, The Duchamp Defense, October 10, Fall, 1979, p.8
79
that would dominate his time and intellect for over twenty years of his life . . . "was
no more than a game."15 Thus if the aim is to understand his art work it has been
common practice to dismiss such an investigation in Duchampian chess as an
incongruous aspect of his life.
15 Ibid, p.5-9
80
A History of Chess: A Philosophy
Chess is an artefact, a human construction that has its own history, which
interconnects with many other cultural histories and developments. The modern
game as we know it, is itself in a state of change and development as the rules of
the game have to be updated each year. But the idea of chess has remained the
same for centuries. Many historical variations of chess involve the movement of
figures upon a board to simulate a battle, hunt or escape. These games involved
various numbers of pieces, different sized grids, dice, and other external factors.
The conditions for chess to exist can be established through the following
definition: symbolic, imagined or 'plastic'* objects moved upon a grid. Although
the size of the grid, method of movement and the laws that govern 'play' have
been in constant change throughout the history of chess one aspect remains
constant: Chess is a symbolic battle between two parties, a war that ends with the
extinction of one or other side.16
Attempting to answer the question: How do we define chess? the historian H.G.
Schonberg writes,
On its highest level, chess, as played by a handful of exponents, is as much a search for perfection as mathematics, art, or any other undertaking of the creative mind. Instead of using notes on ruled paper, or oils, or stone, or words, or formulae, the chess player uses the pieces at his disposal. These are his raw materials. His aim is to take these raw materials and from them forge a continuity that expresses his own personality. What can result is a conception that has a high level of expression and imagination and creativity, and it involves the ability to see, or sense, possibilities hidden to less refined minds.17
* In the philosophical sense of having physical existence.16 Lasker, Lasker's Manual of Chess, New York, Dover, 1947, p.1-217 Schonberg 1973, p.23
81
Schonberg's text points to the duality within or paradoxical nature of chess: the
rationalistic and the romantic. Chess is beyond our mental capacities, and can
symbolise a quest into an unknown mental state.18 Chess offers a world of its own
where discovery is endless and perfection is never reached. It was this very
paradox that drew Duchamp to its table.
Chess has been said to be based upon very rationalistic and mathematical
principals yet a chess game possesses its own kind of logic, similar to nothing but
itself.19 It is said, "On the chessboard lies and hypocrisy do not survive long, " 20 for
the capturing of the King is proof of weakness and defeat. On the other hand some
chess theoreticians and schools of chess have seen chess to be "as irrational as life
itself."21 Full of mistakes, oversights, misjudgments, fortuitous events, everything
that is opposed to logic and rationality. Whenever one places a structure, formal
sequencing, dogmas, or rules of play onto a game of chess a player is always met
with exceptions.22
There are many qualities of the game of chess that have drawn noblemen, lunatics,
artists, and commoners to its table. Francis Bacon used chess methodology and
imagery to expound many scientific and philosophical lessons. Likewise, Voltaire
considered chess to reflect what was most honoured about the human mind and
wit.23 Throughout the history of chess, great players were given the title of 'genius.'
The game offers an approach through both a scientific / rationalistic mythology
and a mystical / romantic aesthetic. It was this that attracted Marcel Duchamp to
18 For example, chess symbolised the mental visualisation of the fourth dimension and investigations into non-Euclidean space -as was seen in the previous chapter.19 Schonberg Grandmasters of Chess, 1973, p.220 Lasker, p.ix21 Ibid, p.ix-x22 Ibid, p. 9-1023 Golombek, A History of Chess, London, Walter Parrish International, 1976, p.114
82
the chess board. He wove the games qualities of rationalism, mysticism and
chance into many of his art works. For example in 1924 Duchamp made a chess
poster for the Third French Chess Championships (1925) (PLATE 15) . This poster
showed a cluster of cubes falling, by chance, similar to the marble cubes in Why
Not Sneeze Rose Selavy? (1921) (PLATE 16).
Chess presents an astounding number of possibilities, and in so doing raises
questions about our finite minds ability to conquer a seemingly infinite field using
only a pure mathematical or rationalistic approach.24 The story of Rousseau
attempting to learn by rote opening moves and combinational sequences is an apt
illustration.
I shut myself up in my room, and spent days and nights in trying to learn all the openings by heart, in stuffing them into my head by force, and in playing by myself without rest or relaxation. After two or three months of this praiseworthy occupation and these incredible efforts, I went to the cafe, thin, sallow and almost stupid. I tried my hand, . . .he beat me once, twice, twenty times; all the different combinations had become mixed up in my head, and my imagination was so enfeebled, that I saw nothing but a cloud beforemy eyes............. to practise myself in studying different games, thesame thing happened to me; and after exhausting myself with fatigue, I found myself weaker than before. . . . I did not finish the first attempt, until I no longer had strength to continue it. When I left my room, I looked like a corpse, and, if I had continued to live in the same manner, I should certainly not have remained long above ground. 25
The invention of the printing press revolutionised the game as new theories and
methods were more easily circulated. The human mind attempted to defeat
infinity through the recording and documenting of games in 'book' form and the
study of moves, opening sequences, and board positions. This methodology
developed into a dogmatism with schools of chess players devoting themselves to
24 It is has been calculated by Maurice Kraitchik, in his Mathematical recreations, that the number of possible moves in chess after each player have moved only ten times is169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000,000, or expressed 25x10(115).25 Golombek 1976, p.116
83
the study and rote memorisation of hundreds of games, openings, and 'rules.' This
became the standard approach to the mastery of chess but many theorists
questioned the success of these efforts. The memorisation of books does not give
one knowledge of chess for one is only confined to the obligatory moves, and is
helpless if a player makes an unexpected move. Znosko-Borovski, a Romantic
chess master, said that "chess is a game of understanding, not a game of memory."
The application of laws, sequences and established variations is less important
than an understanding of chess.26
For Duchamp, chess was made up of many factors: intellectual, aesthetic,
paradoxical, 'plastic,' and symbolic. But for the purpose of introduction Duchamp
said of his interest in chess was founded upon the mechanics of the game.
". . . mechanics in the sense that the pieces move, interact, destroy each other, they're in constant motion and that's what attracts me. Chess figures placed in a passive position have no visual or aesthetic appeal. Its the possible movements that can be played from that position that makes it more or less beautiful."27
Chess represented . . .
The esoteric can't be said in words What's written in books doesn't matter . . . do not need to explain.Mistrust the capacity of Modem Rationalism to find solutions.28
In the documentary by Jean Marie Drot "A game of chess with Marcel Duchamp"
the interviewer plays chess with Duchamp and at the same time tries to ask
questions. As the interviewer struggled to ask questions while at the same time
trying to remember how the Knight should move, Duchamp made some profound
26 Damisch 1979, p.1827 Duchamp in Drot, A game of chess with Marcel Duchamp, L'institut National de l'Audiovisuael Direction des Archives: RM Associates/Public Media, 198728 Ibid)
84
comments about chess. For Duchamp "Chess is a construct of logic, a Cartesian
construct, of mathematics, mechanics of motion."29
29 Ibid
85
A History o f Chess: An Origin
The earliest evidence of a recognisable form of chess, Chaturanga, is around 600 AD. Before that, all is speculation.30
The history of chess is little understood but to understand Duchamp's position as a
chess player it is essential to place him within the theoretical and historical context
of chess.31 It is common for writers on chess to present a historical narrative of
chess for it is not commonly known.32 This chapter focus' only upon the
movements and aspects of chess most critical to Duchamp.
Speculation about the first person to move a chess piece upon a chess board has
captured the imagination of many chess historians. Many writers want to trace the
origin to a single person at a specific point in time. Placing a marker upon the
birth of chess is a modernist concern. It is an attempt to systemise historical
development by placing a structure upon the past. To suggest that chess was the
invention of one person in one place and time is to misrepresent the complexities
of history itself.
A history of chess written by Golombek in 1976, confronts many of the myths
about chess history that had been presented by historians as fact. In particular he
challenges Murray, whose 1913 text titled History of Chess, is considered seminal.
Murray locates the birth of the game to a single man in north west India during the
sixth century. Even today such specific and singular hypotheses are still
considered plausible. Golombek begins his historical sweep with the comment
that there are many wrong assumptions concerning the age of the game. Firstly
30 Whyld, The Oxford Companion to Chess, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, p.17331 Lasker, p.l32 Simons, (Check)Mating the Grand Masters: The Gendered, Sexualized Politics of Chess in Renaissance Italy, The Oxford Art Journal, 16/1,1993
86
many believe that chess dates from antiquity as there are many myths about
Romulus and Remus playing as children or Ulysses and Achilles who are said to
have played chess.
It is true that boards constructed of squares indicating some sort of game have been found in tombs or in ruins [of Egypt, Rome and Greece]. But they are not boards for games which either anticipate or form the origin of chess. If they were, then quite clearly references would have appeared to them as such in the literature . . 33
Golombek makes the point that the Classical period had its own form of play upon
a grid, but there is very little to indicate the nature of how the game was played, or
whether it has any relationship to chess at all. This classical game ended with the
fall of the Roman Empire.34 Therefore the chess of today could not have had its
origin in the Grecko-Roman period. On the other hand, there is evidence to
support chess ancestry in the east predating the Grecko-Roman's. A chess-like
game called Zatrikion appeared during the Byzantium Empire but was
increasingly considered in the west as morally questionable and was associated
with "Persian debauchery". The Emperor Lexis Comnena was served by a body
guard who turned religious leader at Mount Athos who wrote against the game.
Inasmuch as some of the Bishops and clergy leave virtuous paths and play zatrikion or dice or drink to excess, the Rule ordains that such shall cease to do so or be excluded. 35
In its defence the princess Anna Comnena wrote in Alexiad that the game was
'discovered in the luxury of the Assyrians, and was brought to us.36 Golombek
muses that from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 some scholarly refugees made
33 Golombek, Writers Who Have Changed Chess History, London, Faber and Faber, 1968, p .ll34 Golombek 1976, p.28-935 Ibid36 Ibid
87
their way to Florence with zatrikion and perhaps influenced the dramatic
transformations in the form of chess which existed there.37
A version more akin to the game of chess as it is played today is said to have been
established in India during the sixth century. In the court of the poet Bana, (625 -
40 AD) a document called harschcharita is said to contain the first reference to chess,
or as it was known, Chaturanga. 38
The historical development of chess was central to the investigation by chess
theorist and historian Schonberg (1973), in his publication concerning the
development of the chess "Grandmaster" as a historical figure. Schonberg begins
with the adoption of Chaturanga by the Arabian empire (600ad). From here the
game spread quickly throughout Persia and Arabia. It was with the rise of science
under Islam during the eight to the tenth centuries that the highest levels of
Chaturanga are considered to have been produced. This period saw the rise of at
least one "Grand Master", by contemporary standards, and the publication of
mathematical and scientific investigations into the game, including the circulation
of problems and puzzles based upon Chaturanga positions. It has been suggested
that it was not until the nineteenth century that we see equal levels of skill and
theory in chess. By the eleventh century Chaturanga spread throughout Medieval
Europe via Arabic merchant trade routes. The game of chess had become a part
of social life during the Middle Ages. References and chess documentation became
abundant throughout many religious orders; popular with travelling entertainers;
soldiers and nomadic groups.39 Chess also became popular in the aristocratic
classes in Spain and there it remained unchanged for several centuries. At this
time there were many variations and not until the Renaissance was there a
37 Golombek 1968, p.2938 Whyld, p.17339 Ibid
88
consolidation of the rules. Yet, even then specialised rules like 'castling' were local
'flavours' until it penetrated the social and intellectual life of Italy and became the
universal game we play today.40 Chess is said to have come to Italy via merchant
trade routes, through such ports as Venice and Genoa.41 Golombek uses the
history of chess to show how the Renaissance was a complete shift from the period
that preceded it. It has been speculated that due to the developments in
mathematics, science, warfare, technology and the arts, chess players considered
the medieval game outmoded. A new 'spirit' was created for the game: from the
slow moving and static medieval version, the Renaissance created a game that was
fast and dynamic. Every piece was altered in strength, value and movability
(except the Knight as it was already considered very dynamic). News of the
changes quickly spread and players came to Rome to learn about the
developments. Thus the new game quickly spread throughout the known world.42
As in medieval times, the game became popular with many types of people, and
was established in many royal courts. It became synonymous with intellectual
prowess and it became common for a chess board to be featured in portraiture,
symbolising the subject's intellect. Golombek highlights that intellectual boasting
often didn't equate to knowledge of the basic moves.43
During the period from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century the centre for
chess shifted form Italy to France and then to England. By the sixteenth century in
England it was considered to be an essential part of a Gentleman's education. As
evidenced by a 1531 publication by Thomas Elyot titled Governor.
The chesse, of all games wherein is no bodity exercise, is mooste to be commended; for therein is right subtle engine, wherby the wytte is made more sharpe and remembrance quickened. A n d it is the more
40 Lasker, p.1-241 Schonberg, p.5142 Golombek 1976, p.81-8343 Ibid, p.84
89
commendable and also more commodiouse if the players have radde the moralization of the chess , and when they playe do thinke upon hit; whiche bokes be in Englisshe. But they be very scarse, by causefewe men do seeke in plaies for vertue or wisedome.44
It was not until the 20th Century that chess began to assume a global significance.
In 1914 Tsar Nicholas II gathered the world's leading chess players to a tournament
at the St. Petersburg Chess Society. Prize money was posted as 1000 Rubles to play
for the title of "Grandmaster," thus coining the phrase.45 Most significant perhaps
was that chess had begun to be seen in terms of an institution through the
gathering together of the world's finest players and the awarding of titles.
44 Golombek 1976, p.9345 Schonberg, p.13-14
90
A History of Chess: Theory
The development of the Renaissance chess style moved swiftly throughout Europe
and encouraged developments of the many chess ideas and theories. It is
important to present a continuum which establishes a theoretical context for
Hypermodern chess, of which Duchamp made an important theoretical
contribution.
The first peoples to adopt chess theory were the Arabs, who developed a very
modernist approach to the game, coupling theory with scientific and mathematical
methods. Golomek suggests that until the Muslim expansion chess theory was
"feeble and elementary." He claims the Arabs actually established the style and
standards for theoretical analysis that are in use today. In particular, Arabian
chess masters conscientiously documented their games and undertook extensive
studies into opening theory. Each Arabian opening was named after its inventor
and, as in contemporary chess, players were expected to commit them to memory.
Despite the expansion of chess throughout Europe during the Middle Ages few
contributions were made to the development of chess theory. Opening moves
were made haphazardly, relying on the skill of the player to work with the
situation in which they found themselves. It was not until the Renaissance that
chess opening theory was reborn. Players began to recognise that specific
openings put them in a better playing position and the game became dynamic.
With that came the need to document these discoveries and with the aid of the
printing press circulated the findings.46 To mirror the Arabian approach the
Renaissance players began to give names to specific moves, develop terminologies
and to learn the openings by heart. The first important work was completed in
46 Lasker, p.39-40
91
1497 by the Spanish player Lucerna. His manuscript was a collection of 100
documented games in Latin and beautifully illustrated.47 However, players began
to realise that it was impossible to memorise all the possible openings that were
being compiled. Interest was subsequently raised in the theories that lay behind
the opening moves, which could be applied in any situation.48
It was not until the French Revolution that the next great transition in chess theory
came about. Revolutionary fervour had an effect of its own upon the game.
Known as the romantic period of chess, it was a parallel movement to that of art
and music.
The new ideas spawned by the . . . French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and new poetry of Wordsworth, Byron and Goethe, the startlingly free music of Beethoven. What ever it was, . . . launched the romantic period in Chess - and it was as romantic as Byron or Berlioz, or the newfangled paintings of Delacroix 49
The romantic school was set to have an (international) effect far beyond any
previous school. This movement emphasised attack and cunning, a surprising
combination that involved dramatic sacrifices of important pieces and the taking of
intense risks with the aim of checkmating as swiftly as possible. The Romantic
school lasted for seventy five years, but it has been said to have produced the most
exciting games of chess ever played. Schonberg writes,
Now the idea . . . was attack and combination, a free-for-all over the board, with pieces grandly and recklessly sacrificed in the mad urge to give checkmate . . . A chess game was war, a battle to the death. This was not very precise chess, but . . . the romantic period in chess gave birth to some of the wildest, maddest, most exhilarating,
47 Golombek 1976, p.9848 It was not until early eighteenth century that the first 'rule' was discovered: Sortez les pieces or Get the pieces out. A chess piece is a term applied to anything other than a pawn and King. eg. Rook, Knight, Bishop, and Queen. The player with the most power in a fighting position was seen to be in a better position to capture the opponents King.49 Schonberg, p.38
92
most exciting, most ingenious, and most exasperating games in the literature of chess.50
Schonberg writes of Romantic chess, "continuing aesthetic qualities" and that the
very nature of romantic chess was a "quest for beauty."51 The games played held
an aesthetic quality that was unique and distinct. The reproduced game is a fine
example of Romantic chess play. It is fast dramatic and with many exchanges of
pieces. At the climax of this game white appears to have sacrificed all of his
important pieces yet disguised in his last pieces is a surprising checkmate.
Anderssen vs. Kieseritzky, London 1851
Universally known as "The Immortal Ga me t h i s magnificent example o f Anderssen's combinative * *powers is still without a peer in the annals of chess.
1 P-K4 P-K42 P-KB4 PxP3 B-B4The Bishop's Gambit is less imaginative but more tenacious than 3 Kt-KB3.
3 . . . . Q-R5 chA reflex check, a stillborn manoeuvre
4 K-Bl P-QKt4The Bryan Counter-Gambit. Instead of this lateral demonstration intended to sectionalise the attacker's impetus, many other schemes are available .. .
5 BxB Kt-KB36 Kt-KB3Bastening to drive the Queen away . . .
6 ........ Q-R3Easier would be 6 . . . . QR4 and . . . . P-Kt4
7 P-Q3 Kt-R4Here again 7 . . . . P-Kt-4 is a more natural way of defending the gambit pawn
8 Kt-R4A battle guard against 8 . . . . Kt-Kt6 ch, but 8 K-Ktl (or 8 K-B2) would be a blunder on account of 8 . . . . Q-Kt3ch, followed by . . . . QxB.
50 Ibid, p.3951 Schonberg p.200-1* combinational chess involved the ability to see several moves ahead and taking a risk that a player will make a sequence of moves or have the power to determine that sequence.
93
8 . . . . Q-Kt4This simultaneous attack on two pieces proves illusory. Better would be 8 . . . . P-KKt4; 9 Kt-B5, Q- KKt3.
9 Kt-B5 P-QB3In order at last to free the QP and to rid himself of the adverse KKt. There is nothing in 9 . . . . P- Kt3, because of 10 P-KR4, Q-B3; 11 Kt-B3, and White maintains his advanced posts.
10 R-KtlThis very profound sacrifice pursues without respite the active policy inaugurated by Whites 8th move. The sequel is forced.
10 PxB
11 P-KKt4 Kt-KB312 P-KR4 Q-Kt313 P-R5 Q-Kt414 Q-B3Threatening to win the encircled Queen by 15 BxP
14 . . . . Kt-Ktl15 BxP Q-B316 Kt-B3
White has forged two fresh threats in 17 Kt-Q5 and 17 KtxP.
16 . . . . B-B4Black seeks salvation in a counter-attack.
17 Kt-Q5A grandiose conception, giving up both Rooks when already one piece down . . . trying to hold his own.
17 . . . . QxPNearing the climax
18 B-Q6And here is the "immortal" sacrifice.
18 . . . . QxRchAfter 18 . . . . BxB, White mates in four.
19 K-K2 BxRA slight chance of a draw is afforded by 19 . . . . Q-Kt7, etc.
20 P-K5With a renewed threat of mate in two.
20 . . . . Kt-QR3
21 KtxP ch K-Ql22 Q-B6 ch A last exploit
22 . . . . KtxQ
94
23 B-K7 mateA forced mate by three minor pieces against the full array of the black forces! (Dr.S.Tartakower, T.DuMont 500 Master Games of Chess, Dover, NY, 1975, p.291-293)
The Romantic period of attack and combination was followed by a period of
dogmatic positional play called the Classical period. As opposed to combination
and attack, positional play was concerned in building up a strong defensive
position that would eventually force the collapse of the opponent. The classical
school advocated caution, symmetry, balance, and adherence to strict rules of
development. The aim of a classical game was to create an overall balance between
white and black as each player attempted to neutralise the other, making moves of
the same strength and value. Classical players and theorists believed their style
was purely logical, scientific and objective. Players sort to wear down their
opponent through the slow gaining of position and material, as opposed to risky
dramatic attacks.
Steinitz vs. Blackburne, London, 1876
In this game we are shown how to weaken the black squares in the enemy camp. How to exploit such weaknesses is even more difficult. Here it is achieved by Steinitz in a scintillating manner.
1 P-K4 P-K42 Kt-KB3 Kt-QB33 B-Kt5 P-QR34 B-R4 Kt-B35 P-Q3 P-Q36 P-B3Quiet but energetic strategy. After 6 Kt-B3 or Castles, Black could eliminate the "Spanish Bishop" by 6 . . . . P-QKt4; 7 B-Kt3, Kt-QR4, followed by 8 . . . . KtxB, etc
6 . . . . B-K2Some players prefer 6 . . . . P-KKt3, followed by . . . . B-Kt2, etc
7 P-KR3Useful as is this manoeuvre, White could also get his pieces into action at once by 7 QKt-Q2, Castles: 8 Kt-Bl, P-QKt4 (or at once 8 . . . . B-K3; 9 Kt-Kt3, etc. It is to be noted that the white QKt, in this variation, effects a clever itinerary "behind the front," which would not be possible after 7 Castles.
7 ___ Castles8 Q-K2 Kt-KlAs the intended 9 . . . . P-B4 is going to be prevented, a better plan would be 8 . . . . P-QKt4: 9 B-B2, P-Q4, with play in the centre.
95
9 P-KKt4 P-QKt410 B-B2 B-Kt2This Bishop would co-operate more effectually after 10 . . . . B-K3
11 QKt-Q2 Q-Q212 Kt-BlThis regrouping behind the front is characteristic of this variation.
12 . . . . Kt-Ql13 Kt-K3 Kt-K3Over-hasty. More cautious would be 13 . . . . P-Kt3; and although White can try to roll up the K side, there is now a Bishop (Black's KB) which can keep the black squares under observation.
14 Kt-B5 P-Kt3Black underestimates the effect of the next move, as regards the black square complex in his game and its deterioration.
15 KtxBch QxKt16 B-K3 Kt(Kl)-Kt217 Castles QRThe ideal of "flexibility" caused White to refrain from castling prematurely on the seventh move, and to reserve for himself the option of castling on either side.
17 . . . . P-QB418 P-Q4At last the opening up of the centre.
18 . . . . KPxP19 PxP P-B520 P-Q5 Kt-B221 Q-Q2 P-QR422 B-Q4The influence of this Bishop, now established on the long diagonal, leaves its mark on the further course of the game.
22 . . . . P-B323 Q-R6 P-Kt5In order to drive off the terrible QB by KKt-Kt4; but White is in no mood to wait.
24 P-Kt5The first breach
24 . . . . P-B425 B-B6 Q-B226 PxP PxP
27 P-Kt6The break-through. A furious onslaught
27 . . . . QxP28 BxKtA beautiful final point. Black cannot avoid the loss of a piece.
2829 BxQ
QxQ ch R-B3
96
R-Kt330 KR-Ktl ch31 BxPIncreasing his advantage. Blackbume could resign here.
32 BxRch33 Kt-Kt5ch34 KR-K1
31 K-B2PxBK-KtlResigns.
(Dr.S.Tartakower, T.DuMont 500 Master Games of Chess. Dover, NY, 1975, p.119-120)
In comparison to the Romantic school, their games were slow, uninspiring, and
lacking in beauty.52 No longer were there the combinational methods the
Romantics adopted, but a structural, positional build up of force. Many games of
the Classical period ended with a draw or stalemate.
52 Lasker 1947, p.ix
97
Hypermodern Chess
The Hypermodern revolution was a chess movement - parallel to the postwar ferment in the other arts - which sought to overturn all the principles of the classical school. Like their allies in modem art who introduced everything from Cubism to Surrealism . . . . [they] were able to create new works of lasting value.53
After World War One many thought the Classical school had put chess in a dire
situation, it seemed all of the life had been taken out of the game. Theorists
considered how to subvert the dogma the Classical school had established. In an
attempt to overthrow the Classical school a group of players, who became later
known as Hypermoderns introduced new theories that proved successful.
Although this subversive school was not fully recognised until after the war, its
proponents, like Nimzowitsch and Capablanca, had caused many disruptions
several years before.
The development of hypermodernism needs to be understood in a way similar to
that in which postmodern is understood - in both hypermodernism and
postmodernism we see a double coding: a rejection and an extension of the
modern.54 Hypermodernism challenged the laws, methods, lines of play that had
been established through the Classical period of chess, and took their scientific
approach to a new level. In so doing it made a paradoxical use of the dogmas of
the classical school.
The essence of the Hypermodern philosophy was the affirmation of the individuality of each position, and thus a rejection of the notion of the [classical] school that general rules always apply. Thorough iconoclasts, the Hypermoderns spurned the almost sanctified dogmas of the [classical] school to the point of the bizarre (thus the hypermoderns resembled their contemporaries in music and
53 Saidy & Norman, The World of Chess, New York, Random House, 1974, p.15454 This is also reflected by Postmodernism's dialogue with 'ism's,' for example with say Marxism. (Sim ,p.8)
98
painting, Stravinsky and Duchamp. The Great War had shown the bankruptcy of values handed down by the old society).55
In practice this sometimes meant doing the complete opposite of the 'laws/ and at
other times adopting them completely. It is important to note that before long the
Hypermoderns achieved debate and dialogue with the classical school, whose
principles crumbled under the strength of the hypermodern games. These
dramatic changes took place whilst Marcel Duchamp was creating paintings
specifically on the subject of chess.
One of the key proponents of Hypermodernism was Aaron Nimzowitsch. He
developed many strange and bizarre openings unsettling to leading classical
players. Nimzowitsch played in a Romantic style, yet his theories were grounded
in the highest levels of scientific and mathematical theory.56 Facing defeat, those of
the Modern Classical school warned against the new developments of
Hypermodernism, but could not prevent the revolutionary upheavals within the
game. In short, Hypermodern players were beating the formal, Classical,
Modernist players. Nimzowitsch said that "the [Classical] School is dead, and you
cannot flog a dead horse."57 Nimzowitsch had this to say about the approach of
the Classical school, that it had become the symbol of conventionalism within
chess,
Followers of the so-called classic school had a marked preference, which is today difficult to understand, for symmetrical variations. Not only that, but they managed to surround this unpleasing circumstance with a scientific cloak. The belief gained ground that many positions and openings had a natural tendency towards symmetry, and that it would be sacrificing the intellect to wish to avoid this heaven-sent gift, and that, therefore, any such attempts
55 Saidy, The Battle of Chess Ideas, Batsford, London, 1972, p.2556 Saidy & Norma, p.17357 Nimzowitsch, Chess Praxis, New York, Dover, 1962, p.329
99
were bound to be incorrect and to lead to a loss against sound opposition.58
Nimzowitsch argued that the Classical school believed their theories were
grounded in objective scientific methodology, when in fact it was pure artifice.
Nimzowitsch not only exposed their deceptive science but also their deceptive
classical aesthetics of symmetry, balance and structure. The hypermodern games
had an extremely exotic feel, for they simultaneously used a dynamic use of
combinations and movement, coupled with a solid "restriction" of play through a
use of "over-protection," which had previously created stagnant positions.
Furthermore they paradoxically put to use a very high form of logic and thought,
but at the same time are considered "mysterious" and "discordant." Two words
came to be used to summarise the approach of the Hypermodernists: dynamism
and offence. The Hypermodernists introduced a new aesthetic to the game that
was considered to be ugly in comparison to the beauty of the balance and
symmetry of the Classical school. Nimzowitsch remarks,
Today after the [hyper] modern idea has won all along the line, it is surprising to everybody how such a genuine, beautiful and deep line of play . . . could ever be thought ugly.59
Nimzowitsch stresses that any aesthetic that is adopted within chess must be
founded in true theory, or suffer the same fate as the aesthetics of the Classical
school,
"He who goes by appearances only, can easily arrive at that state in which moves will appear to him to be ugly, which by no means deserve the appellation. Beauty in Chess, after all is said and done, exists only in thought." 60
d8 Nimzowitsch , My System, London, G.Bell & Sons, 1925, p.29859 Nimzowitsch 1962, p. 32960 Ibid
100
It is this relationship between beauty and thought that Nimzowitsch felt separated
Hypermodernism from any other chess school.
Nimzowitsch wrote two manuals on chess that are now considered to be the most
significant contributions to chess theory by an individual.61 In 1929 Nimzowitsch
published his first book entitled My System. It was a misnomer for Nimzowitsch to
use the word system, for only a very small aspect of the book deals with a
seemingly 'modernist system'. The title is in fact intended to be a play on words of
the title of a popular body building and health book of the time of the same
name.62 His book was one of the first to deal with the game of chess in its entirety
in the same way the body building book dealt with the entire body. Most chess
books at the time dealt solely with the openings, or the endings, or one specific
aspect of the game. My System brought many isolated concepts, ideas and theories
that had existed since the Renaissance together and unified them in a schema of
inter-relating principles Instead of presenting a list of laws or procedures on how
to establish a certain position, Nimzowitsch presents the theories behind such
situations.
Generally Nimzowitsch does not explain how one's game would be built up, or how a player might aim for positions of a certain kind; instead he discusses how to deal with such positions should they arise. This practical advice, copiously illustrated, is of more use to a student than generalisations, often negative, about how to set up his game.63
This form of instruction; that is instruction directed to a very specific situation is
mirrored by Duchamp's 1931 treatise on the game.
61 Ibid, introduction to 1936 edition by W.H. Wattes62 Whyld, p.27363 Ibid, p.173
101
Returning to the original interview between Ralph Rumney and chess player
Francois Le Lionnais, coupled with Keene's commentary, the debate on whether
Duchamp was a classical player or a Hypermodernist can be reconciled given the
historical perspective as discussed. Within the context of historical
postmodernism, as reflected in hypermodern chess, we see in both a rejection of
classical theory and its extension. One is able to see in the games of
Hypermodernism a modernist scientific approach and the extension of many of
the laws founded in the classical chess period. At the same time one is able to see
the paradoxical use of these laws in the games of Duchamp both in a classical and
a paradoxical approach. Le Lionnais and Keene, did not take into account the
theoretical nature of hypermodernism within Duchamp's chess play.
Thus Keene's comments;
The tactical tricks Duchamp produced in that game, his evident love of paradoxical solutions, bowled over his distinguished opponent with extreme speed.64
and Lionnais'. . . in his style of play I saw no trace o f . . . a Dada or anarchist style.
65
are able to be reconciled for the nature of hypermodernism informs us that both
qualities are present at one and the same time.
64 Keene, Marcel Duchamp: The Chess Mind, Modem Painters, 2, no.4, Winter, 198965 Rumney 1975
102
Chess and Art "reconciled "
A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn't geometric in the static sense of the word, it is mechanical, since it moves: it's a drawing, it’s a mechanical reality. The pieces aren't pretty in themselves, any more than is the form of the game, but what is pretty - if the word "pretty" can be used - is the movement . . . In chess there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain. Its the imagining of the movement or the gesture that makes the beauty, in this case. It’s completely in ones grey matter.66
It is important to make a connection between many of the theories of Nimzowitsch
and that of Duchamp, in particular those of aesthetics and thought. Duchamp
made many statements that his art was an intellectual activity and he was critical
of what he termed 'retinal' art. This is similar to the criticism that the
Hypermodern chess players had for the classical school: classical theories were
based on (formalistic) aesthetics and not on the intellect or logic. Duchamp's
interest in the intellect went beyond the realms of chess and he wished for a
similar intellectual direction to take place in art.
This is the direction in which art should turn: to an intellectual expression.67
There is a mental end implied when you look at the formation of the pieces on the board. The transformation of the visual aspect to the gray matter is what always happens in chess and what should happen in art.68
The observation that the words of Duchamp mirror those of Nimzowitsch have
been made by a number of theorists. Some even go so far as to suggest that
Duchamp's Large Glass mirrors diagrams that Nimzowitsch used in his 1925
publication, which divided the chess board in two.69 This is not to suggest that the
way to understand Duchamps art is through his chess, but it is helpful to break
66 Cabanne 1971, p.1867 Sweeny, A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp, Wisdom: Conversation with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day, New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1958, p.94-568 Marcel Duchamp interview - Gold p.viii69 Masheck, Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1975, p.19
103
down the intellectual barriers that exist between the paradigms of art and chess
thus forming a reconciliation of these two paradigms in the person Duchamp.
In 1932, Duchamp, in collaboration with Vitaly Halberstadt, wrote a study on a
specific end game situation titled L'Opposition et les cases conjuguées sont réconciliées
(Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled). Duchamp spoke of it as purely
an intellectual study with no real practical application, for the situations being
presented rarely came about.70 He said to Cabanne,
The endgames on which this fact turns are of no interest to any chess player: and that's the funniest thing about it. Only three or four people in the world are interested in it, and they're the ones who've tried the same lines of research as Halberstadt and myself. Since we wrote the book together, chess champions never read this book, because the problem it poses never really turns up more than once in a lifetime. These are possible endgame problems, but they're so rare that they're almost utopian.71
Duchamp called his work a "linguistic study," which Damisch claims the Duchamp
/ Halberstadt text is built around the notion of 'opposition.'72 Using the language
from a number of paradigms, especially from aesthetics and philosophy, to explain
scientific and mathematical foundations of his chess theories.
Duchamp's and Halberstadt's discussion in L'Opposition et les cases conjuguées sont réconciliées involve end-game problem, and their discussions are very much couched in geometrical language, involving 'translation,' 'displacement,' and 'rotation' around 'charnière' or 'hinges.' Charnière' is the term that Duchamp used in his mathematical notes to mean an 'axis o rotation.'73
70 Damisch 1979, p.19-2171 Cabanne 1971, p.145-672 Damisch, 1979, p.2273 Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes for the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis. Mich., Ann Arbor, p.63
104
Saussure directly uses the model of chess to introduce his oppositional theories of
language. Damisch quotes from a small section where Saussure explains that it is
only through words opposing one another that meaning is created;
a given term having . . . no value except through difference and through its opposition to the other terms in the language.74
and Damisch explains that the relationship between languages and chess is,
Just as the game of chess is entirely in the combination of the different chess pieces, language is characterised as a system based entirely on the opposition of its concrete units.75
The end game is fundamentally a stage of opposition, where the only pieces that
remain are the two Kings and some pawns.76 Opposition is defined during the
end game when symmetry is presented by the position of the Kings and pawns.
The aspect of the end game that Duchamp and Halberstadt were concerned about
was when a symmetry or a formalist structure arise and each player is struggling
74 Damisch 1979, p.1475 Ibid76This work is concerned with that very special point of the endgame in chess when all the pieces have been lost, only the Kings and a few pawns remain on the board. And this special 'lone-pawns' situation is treated only from the even more particular situation in which the pawns have been blocked and only the Kings can play. This situation is called zugzwang, a German term of international use that indicates this blocked position in which only certain moves, and in a limited number, are possible. In this case (pawns blocked and only the Kings being able to move), even though they make use of conclusions already established by Abbe Durand, Drtina, Bianchette, etc., Duchamp and Halberstadt are the first to have noticed the synchronisation of the moves of the black King and the white King. This synchronisation is analysed at length and forms the basis of their system.
In order to win, a white King cannot move indiscriminately without regard for the colour of the square on which he finds himself. Using the terminology of the authors of the book, he must choose a 'heterodox opposition' with respect to the colour of the square occupied by the black King. This 'heterodox opposition,' which represents the real contribution of Duchamp and Halberstadt to the theory of chess, would demand a technical explanation too lengthy to be given here. At any rate, for clarity I would add that the game of chess does contain the idea of 'opposition,' and that Duchamp and Halberstadt have renamed it 'orthodox opposition' in order to distinguish it form the 'heterodox opposition' that they have discovered. This 'orthodox opposition' is something that all chess players know about, and it is far form being a mystery. It is a sure means of winning in certain situations. In fact, 'heterodox opposition' is no more than an amplification of opposition. It is simply applied to a longer number of squares, and it adopts various forms that are missing in the rigid 'orthodox opposition.' (Massot, Bibl. 198/a, p. 51)
105
to keep equilibrium for survival. For there is security in symmetry during such
situations because a player is able to restrict or control the moves available to the
opponent. At the same time, due to the symmetry, a player may be forced into
making a move that will cause their own defeat, otherwise known as a Trap or
Trebuchet (the title of his 1917 Readymade).77 In opposition there is a paradoxical
element that interested both Duchamp and Nimzowitsch. Duchamp and
Halberstadt's book attempted to reconcile the two components of symmetrical
endgame situations; opposition and sister squares. The squares represent the
squares on the chess board that remain relevant to the chess pieces in symmetry.
Hence the title of Duchamp's book "Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled."
The way that Duchamp explained it is as such,
The "opposition" is a system that allows you to do such - and - such a thing. The "sister squares" are the same thing as opposition, but it's a more recent invention, which was given a different name. Naturally, the defenders of the old system were always wrangling with the defenders of the new one. I added "reconciled" because I had found a system that did away with antithesis." 78
It is important to notice that within Duchamp's study of endgames there is not an
attempt to create further opposition by Duchamp positioning himself with one side
or the other. Duchamp separates himself from the debates between the Classical
school or "old system" and the hypermoderns. He was able to see that with
hypermodernism there was an opportunity to create a synthesis between these two
opposing understandings of end game theory. In so doing he displays a typically
Hypermodern paradoxical attitude to classical theory.
Let us take this one step further towards Duchamp 'reconciling' art and chess.
Damisch makes the point that Duchamp's chess poster designed for the 1925 Third
77 Trap or Le Tabuche is a highly technical chess term, and is also the subject of a readymade by Duchamp78 cited in Damisch 1979, p.24
106
French Chess Championship mirrored his theory of reconciliation. Duchamp
extended the checkers of the chess board until they became cubes with one white,
black and a third grey side, grey being the side of reconciliation. In the game of
chess it is the opposition between black and white that gives the game its meaning.
However, the 'binary' opposition of chess is defeated by Duchamp in the presence
of the grey surfaces.79
Let us return to Naumann's article and interview contained in De Duve's "The
definitively unfinished Marcel Duchamp." Francis Naumann presents Duchamp's
involvement in philosophical 'reconciliation' in the context of the German
philosopher Stirner and the philosophical beliefs of existentialism and nihilism:
That each position or situation exists as a unique entity, thus unable to be located
within specific systematic constraints. Naumann points out that reconciliation is
not only found in the works of Stirner but has a philosophical tradition that goes
back to Plato.80 More than that, 'reconciliation' is present in contemporary theories
of structuralist theory, molecular biology, metaphysical poetry, and French
symbolist poets. Thus this theme of 'reconciliation of opposites’ is present in a
number of intellectual paradigms. The theme is similarly reflected in writings
since medieval times up until the time of Carl Jung who specifically wrote on the
subject in Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of
Psychic Opposites in Alchemy.81 Yet Naumann warns us that one must be careful in
the creation of a theory about Duchamp, for he consciously set out never to repeat
himself and thus be defined. Naumann says;
No matter what his sources may have been -if any- his exploration of opposites and their reconciliation seems to have been motivated more by his unwillingness to repeat himself than by any possible willingness to conform to the dictates of a previously established
79 Ibid, p.25-680 d e Duve 1993, p.5581 Ibid, p.53-7
107
system - philosophical, literary - or otherwise. His working method involved a constant search for alternatives - alternatives not only to accepted artistic practice, but also to his own earlier work.82
Naumann states that Duchamp was familiar with many aspects of reconciliation in
maths, science, linguistics and philosophy. Therefore the relationship between
chess and art in the historical figure Duchamp is contained within a wide
intellectual field involving a number of paradigms.
Historian Calvin Tomkins makes the similar observation that Duchamp's
fascination with art and chess seems to be bound up in mathematics.83 The
importance of logic, rationalism and Cartesian thought are an integral part of
Duchamp's work coupled with an anti-rationalistic interest, as seen in the works of
Raymond Roussel and Alfred Jarry. Also Duchamp's use of the term Cartesian is
implicit of Descartes idea of man as a thinking mind, and matter an extension of
motion. In terms of chess this duality is clearly seen, the movements of chess
pieces upon a board are the physical expression of the chess player's cognition. In
an interview with Tomkins, Duchamp says;
"Chess is a marvellous piece of Cartesianism, and so imaginative that it doesn't even look Cartesian at first. The beautiful combinations that chess players invent - you don't see them coming,
• but afterward there is no mystery - it's a pure logical conclusion."84
When the life and actions of Duchamp are placed within the historical context of
Postmodernity where we find the merger or reconciliation of a variety of
intellectual paradigms. Duchamp's studies into chess drew upon the knowledge
and language of science, mathematics, and linguistics. Thus in order to
82 Ibid, p,5783 Tomkins 1998, p.21184 Ibid
108
understand the life and actions of Marcel Duchamp we must strive to understand
the various paradigms that are reconciled.
109
Chapter 4
"Chess as an art form"
A recent debate
Chess is a sport. A violent sport. This detracts from it most artistic connections... If it is anything, it is a struggle.1
It is not uncommon, for chess commentaries and histories, to suggest that chess is
an art form. Marcel Duchamp amplified this sentiment by saying that "every chess
player is an artist."2 Yet, there has been little writing or investigation into what
Duchamp considered the artfulness of the chess player or the artfulness of the
game of chess. To what extent was Duchamp able to say that chess is an art
form?3 The importance of this investigation is to determine whether Duchamp
was able to look upon the chess player in the same way as he did the artist. And
further, to reflect upon how Duchamp the artist and chess player understood the
relationship between each paradigm.
The attempts that have been made to investigate the aesthetic nature of chess have
strived to establish a common set of criteria for both art and chess. These
comparative studies into art and chess rely upon generalisations about art that
relate purely to a western modernist perspective founded within Classical art. I
will explore a recent theoretical debate between Humble, Osborne, and Ravilious
demonstrating the difficulties of their methodologies and theories and to offer a
1 Schwarz 1975, p.70, M.D. quoted by Brandy2 Duchamp, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. papers, August 30,19523 Humble, 1998, p.41
110
solution to their shortcomings. These three theorists have each conducted their
investigations in the same manner but each display subtle differences in their
argument.
The theoretical basis for these three recent investigations into chess and art all are
based on false premises about the nature of the intellectual paradigm of art. These
theorists took the paradigm of art and read classical art and classical aesthetics. In
doing so they excluded the art of the Pre and Postmoderns and of course the art of
non-western civilisations. A set of categories, by definition, excludes all forms that
do not conform to the classification. A contemporary classification of art is not
defined as a clear set of established characteristics and criteria. Ultimately the
paradigms of art and chess, I argue, are not founded upon such generalisation but
exist distinctly from one another and are unable to be compared in such a way.
Investigations into the artfulness of chess needs to determine what values are
commonly held between chess and art. An approach that acknowledges the
multiple characteristics, products, values, attitudes, and histories of each paradigm
needs to be adopted. Although each of these theorists begins with these
limitations, each makes valuable contributions that lead to a theoretical solution to
Duchamp’s relationship between art and chess.
P.N Humble, writing in the British Journal of Aesthetics, attempted to address the
question, of whether chess is an art form.4 Humble states that this question is one
that should be of great interest to the philosopher and the aesthetician due to
chess's extensive history, and depth of intellectual activity. He wishes to address a
perceived lack in the serious consideration of chess as an art form. However,
Humble’s only understanding of art is the classical one. He aims to establish a set
of common criteria between chess and art, thereby raising chess to the level of an
4 Humble, Chess as an Art Form, British Journal of Aesthetics, 33 no.l, 1993
111
art form. In his article Humble remarks that, to his knowledge, very few writers
have given thorough consideration to what degree chess can be considered an art
form. Quoting Poincare, Hardy and Aristotle, Humble attempts to establish that
the aesthetics of chess relates to a universal order of aesthetics. The great works of
chess are said to demonstrate qualities of precision, order, commensurability, and
harmony, with no trace of ugliness. Humble argues that if the aesthetic criteria is
considered universal then the aesthetics of chess and art must be comparative.
Humble's investigation begins by looking into the criteria that are used within the
paradigm of chess to determine what constitutes a beautiful game. It is common
for chess tournaments to award a ’brilliancy' prize now that a ’beautiful’ chess
game has become a definable entity. For Humble the brilliance prize is evidence
that the paradigm of chess acknowledges the aesthetic nature of the game. The
paradigm of chess understands or defines aesthetics through a process of
comparison with an established aesthetic order. Duchamp's long time chess
opponent Le Lionnais lists the criteria he has used for judging a beautiful chess
game. The criteria is very specific and descriptive.
Correctness, (a). A winning combination (ie, a unified sequence of moves usually involving two or more pieces) must be correct in the sense that it cannot be refuted by skilful defence. It is not judged beautiful if it succeeds owing to an opponent's blunder. (2) Correctness (b). The combination must be the most economical way of winning material or giving checkmate; it should not indulge in pyrotechnics for its own sake. (3) Difficulty. A game should be judged beautiful in proportion to the difficulties each player sets the other and how well each overcomes the difficulties he has been set. Mistakes on the part of either player detract from a game's merit, while dangerous moves enhance it. (4) Vivacity. Dull moves diminish a game’s merit: spectacular moves increase it. Sacrifices in which a player gives up pieces to obtain a stronger position or attack are especially praiseworthy. (5) Originality. A game or combination must be unique. Combinations of a novel, imaginative nature contribute to a game's aesthetic merit. (6) Richness. The greater the variety of combinations, the more beautiful the game is to be judged. As well as combinations that are actually played, there are 'hidden' ones or threats. Although these threats being anticipated and countered by the opponent do not materialise, they give a game greater depth and profundity. (7) Logical Unity. A
112
greatly, it can be said that it is aesthetic feeling w h i c h __oirlwintellectual towards searching, and leads it there.7 8 \9i9/iJii«bfii
Reaching this end point, Humble directly compares the work of t h e c I d arlJlcnhow!
and the artist, by summarising the main qualities that Bronstein p r e s e n t ^ ^ J-n939iqni9i2nc
chess offers a medium in which players s t r i v e ^ v i i J z eisyßlq rf: intellectual objects of beauty and im a g in a tiv e sviißnigßmi bnspectator's appreciation. We may on the basis of t h i s czz> eirü loeiÄßds/iJn of chess as a work of art in terms of n e c e s s a ry s l — ißegsDsn to ar conditions. A game of chess is a work of art if, a n d o n o bnß fi tiß toiio produced primarily with the intention of r e w a r d . = Jfc> * iß W 9 i lo nobre contemplation; (b) exhibits aesthetic features and ( c ) i s e i(D ) b/KæiuJd:
Once again the problematic nature of this methodology arises. B x -o j c o ’i B .aaaiie
Humble, falls into the trap of attempting to establish a set of c r i t ^ r * J fc ^ e ih D lo 198 b
determine the artistic nature of the chess game. Bronstein a t te m p ts L J siqm9tt6 ni9lc
paradigm of chess to operate as the paradigm of art. U n fo r tu n a te ly ylsifinuholnU
excludes much of art. Art is not determined by the intellect nor by b e a t ___r yd ion M
possible to generalise about originality! Humble's analysis f i n d s sb n il eigylfi/iB
unifying the two distinct intellectual paradigms of chess and a r t d i f i bne aagdo
acknowledges this dichotomy in his investigation into the a e s th e tic s c n > sDil9/it296 9/it
he considers the aesthetics of chess are the bi-product of chess by yd 289/iolo
aesthetics of chess "yield to the imperatives of the contest." U l t i m a i±jsmillU ".fcgti
concludes that "chess is a sport," yet making reference to Osborne^ I d A— I ^ sm o d e O o l ;
that this is able to be overcome. For Osborne, chess:
"offers scope for the creation of intellectual objects c h i d o eb9(do lEuiDsIfebeauty." 9
7 Bronstein and Smaloya, Chess in the Eighties, Pergamon Press, 1982,p.27-8 cited b y H i ___» H yd b9ib8-\£.qv!8 Ibid, quoted in Humble 1993, p.649 Osborne, Notes on the Aesthetics of Chess and the Concept of Intellectual Beauty, B ritis l a 1 TQ riednO Aesthetics, 4 No. 2,1964,p.163
Here, Osborne is using the methodology of comparing characteristics to form a
generalisation of art and chess that they are dependent on intellect and beauty. By
doing so, Osborne has excluded a substantial number of canonical art objects,
valued by the paradigm of art, that contain neither of these qualities. For example,
the art movement Surrealism was founded upon anything but intellect, rationality
and beauty. It is the nature of intellectual beauty that presents the most pressing
problems for Osborne's investigation. For what criteria is one to use when
assessing the artness of intellectual beauty when intellectual beauty does not fully
characterise art? Osborne suggests that it is because of the contest that we are able
to see the aesthetics of the game. In other words, it is the contest that enables the
beauty to arise. The implication of Osborne's position is that the competition is
similar to the process of creating the artwork. For without the process the work of
art is unable to be appreciated. Likewise, without the contest the aesthetics of the
game could not be created.
Humble's investigation into the artistic nature of chess concludes that if chess is an
art form, and was adopted into the discipline of art, then it could only be
considered a "minor" art form. For to Humble "great art" is able to "comment upon
the deep human themes."10
C.P. Ravilious responded to Humble's inquiry by recognising a major aspect of
Humble's argument that was absent. Ravilious argued that when comparing art
and chess one must look to the chess composition, otherwise known as the chess
problem.11 The chess composition presents the most similarities between chess and
art. Ravilious' methodology was distinguishable from Humble's by adopting
specific limitations on his assumptions of art even though his procedure was
10 Humble 1993,p.290n Ibid, p.62, The chess problem and chess composition is a hypothetical arrangement of pieces that has been design to pose a particular puzzle to a single player.
115
identical. The chess composition was able to be seen as an art form for it had many
similarities with a specific form of art. Unlike Humble, who appealed to sweeping
generalisations concerning art, Ravilious considered that the chess composition
was closely associated with classical architecture and music.
For if the chess problem is an art form it is essentially a classical art form, valuing above all the qualities of harmony, proportion and the subordination of means to ends which are evidenced alike by classical architecture and music.12
Ravilious, from this perspective, suggests that it is the chess composer or the
problemist that is most closely associated with the artist. For the problemist is not
concerned with the interaction with a human opponent. Rather, the chess
composition is formulated by the "contemplative interaction with raw material,"
the pieces and rules of chess.13 Ravilious even goes so far as to say that the chess
composer works much like the musical composer using the diatonic scale to create
multitudes of original combinations.14
Ravilious refutes the suggestion that chess is a 'minor' art form.15 Ravilious refers
to the musical form of a sonata, as being also unable to "express deep human
themes," showing that the chess problem (even chess itself) is fundamentally
concerned with form and the creation of aesthetic effects. Ravilious concludes by
stating that it is important to understand the kind rather than the degree of
expression that each art form is able to achieve.
Humble takes issue with Ravilious' suggestion that chess composition is more
closely associated with art than a 'real time’ game of chess. Humble states that it is
12 Ravilious, The Aesthetics of Chess and the Chess Problem, British Journal of Aesthetics, 5 no.4,1994, p.28913 Ibid, p.28714 Ibid,,p.286-28915 Ibid
116
through a game that each player is able to display increasing degrees of intellect
and creativity. Humble argues that if black plays a powerful move then white
must respond with even greater creativity. Thus the pressure of the competition
produces even greater levels of artistic, creative expression and invention than
does the chess composition.
However it is Humble's parting gesture that (unknowingly) presents a clue to an
approach that enables an investigation into chess and art and does not fall into his,
Osborne's, and Ravilious' repeated theoretical trap. He says that "whatever else it
may be, chess is first and foremost an art form whose games are to be enjoyed as
works of art."16(my italics) It is from this perspective that an investigation will
provide the most reward. It means we are able to view or enjoy chess as art, as
opposed to arguing that chess is art. The difference may seem subtle but it is
significant. For we are legitimately able to adopt the values, history, and cultures
of the paradigm of art and from this position gaze upon chess. A perspective that
was common to Duchamp.
In summary, the argument and methodology of Humble, Osborne and Ravilious
attempts to closely link the characteristics of art with chess. Humble and Osborne,
make generalisations about both art and chess, while Ravilious makes close
associations with a specific form of art. Yet Humble, Osborne and Ravilious see art
as the dominant discipline and attempt to show why chess should be valued in the
same way, or assessed from within it. Each ultimately fails. Art and chess
continue to operate as distinct and separate paradigms. Chess and art continue to
elude set criteria.
16 Humble 1993,p.65
117
Developing a philosophy of chess
The chessboard is the world: the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.17
Philosophical questions that continue to be raised within the discipline of chess
centre around its identity or classification within a broad intellectual field. This
tends to be expressed by the question "what is chess?" The problem of identifying
chess in relation to any other field is that chess needs to be made legitimate by
relationship. Chess tends to be considered marginal to, or a minor discipline of,
more dominant social, historical and cultural intellectual institutions.
We have previously seen that postmodern historical methodology offers, via a
merging of paradigms, a way of understanding historical figures like Duchamp.
This merger has only been able to take place as historical figures have traversed
paradigms and bring the values, practices, languages and knowledge with them,
thus allowing each paradigm to have a dialogue. This is most clearly evident in
the art works of Duchamp that have drawn on other paradigms.
Chess has had a rich and diverse history that offers significant intellectual,
aesthetic, philosophic and historical insights that continue to be over-looked by
other intellectual arenas. Chess needs to be considered and understood as a
distinct paradigm unto itself. Chess is chess. From this perspective we are able to
determine where chess fits into the known, historical, cultural, and social worlds.
We can also better understand the artist, mathematician, musician, philosopher,
17 Anonymous, Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews, "A Liberal Education", 1870
118
who enters the paradigm of chess for we are able to comprehend the arena in
which they are entering.
"Is chess a paradigm of life?" was a question asked by William Cluley in the first
philosophy of chess published in 1857. The importance of Cluley's investigation
was to determine to what degree is chess associated with the "real" world or to
what degree is chess a distinct paradigm. In other words, is chess a continuation
of life and its experience or is chess a separate world in its own right? Cluley
argues that chess is deeply connected to the experience of life itself. Chess is an
arena of imperfection, where faultless play is impossible, which directly reflects
life itself.18 Cluley takes the position that chess is symbolic, representational, or a
simulation of something other than itself. Cluley goes on to say that the skill of
chess "is susceptible of the most practical application," a life skill.19 Thus Cluley
argues that to understand the philosophical heart of chess we must understand
that it is symbolic of life itself.
Historians commonly use the symbolism of chess as a basis for speculation on the
origins of chess, some suggesting that the game was invented to occupy soldiers
awaiting battle. In other words, it symbolised the battle they were due to enter. It
is unlikely that the origin of chess will ever be fully known, however the
importance of this question is to draw attention to issues concerning the
symbolism and representation of chess. Over the course of history, the names,
actions, rules, and associations with the chess pieces have changed dramatically.
The pieces that remain today hold little similarity to those when the game
originated. However, the representational associations of chess continue to play a
significant role in our understanding of the meaning of the game. Indeed, the
18 Why Id, p.30619 Schonberg, p.22
119
symbolism connected with chess has created such a powerful influence that, to a
large degree, it has blinded many philosophical investigations of the game.
The symbolism of chess has been placed onto the game in many layers rather than
being inherent in the pieces. It is easily overlooked that modern standardised
chess pieces were only established in 1849. In many countries, it is still common to
use found objects like shells, or stones for pieces. There are even events where no
pieces are used at all. This point may be understood in two ways, that chess pieces
are arbitrary objects used to hold all of the layers of meaning built up over the
centuries. Or, that the symbolic nature of the chess pieces hold no fundamental
meaning to chess other than to distinguish one piece from another, to distinguish
their role, power, and movement upon the chess board or grid. Both of these
readings are valid. Many pieces of the game are formed as direct visual references;
a King, Queen, Bishop, or Knight. The most powerful contemporary chess piece is
the Queen who was originally called Vizir or Firz meaning "counsellor," and
when translated into Latin the word became Fercia meaning "virgin".20 During the
Renaissance, when the game became modernised the Queen was given far
reaching powers akin to her status in real life. Other pieces have a symbolic way
of moving. The Knight, for example, can jump over other pieces, mimicking the
way a horse strides over and around fences and obstacles in its path. Yet there
are pieces that remain without a logical symbolism. The Rook was only
introduced in the 1500's and is a deviation from the Sanskrit ratha, meaning
"chariot." It derives from the Italian rocco meaning "tower." A tower of stone* *
capable of moving presents an incongruent use of symbolism.
20 Whyld, p.328* Rooks are commonly carved with the markings of a stone wall.
120
Many writers have gone to great lengths, to draw conclusions about the
symbolism of chess and the fundamental role of giving meaning to the game. One
such writer developed a Freudian psychological theory of chess. Psychologist and
International Chess Grandmaster Reuben Fine states in "The Psychology of the
Chess Player",
The King becomes the central figure in the symbolism of the game. . . . the King is indispensable, all-important, irreplaceable, yet weak and requiring protection. These qualities lead to the overdetermination of its symbolic meaning. First of all, it stands for the boy's penis in the phallic stage, and hence re-arouses the castration anxiety characteristic of a self-image, and hence would appeal to those men who have a picture of themselves as indispensable, all- important and irreplaceable.21
This aspect is pushed even further when Fine looks to the symbolism of the
conflict in the game and how it is commonly played by men and taught from
'father to son.'
Put together, the chess board as a whole may readily symbolise the family situation. This would explain the fascination of the game. Lost in thought, the player can work out in fantasy what he has never been able to do in reality.22
Beyond the symbolic meaning of the pieces, Fine gives the social customs of the
game a deeper symbolic meaning.
In view of the profuse phallic symbolism of the game, the taboo on touching has unconsciously two meanings, or, put another way, the ego wards off two threats. One is masturbation (do not touch your penis; do not touch your pieces, and if you do, have an excuse ready). The other threat is homosexuality, or bodily contact between the two men, especially mutual masturbation.23
21 Fine, The Psychology o f the Chess Player, New York, Dover, 1967,p. 1222 Ibid,p.1423 Ibid
121
Fine summarised that chess is ultimately a contest that symbolises a horrific
psychic conflict.24 In Fine's theory of chess, the symbolism of the game constitutes
the game itself. Deep psycho-sexual processes are played out which connect in a
far reaching way to a fundamental human condition. Chess is seen as deeply
connected to and a representation of something other than itself.
It would seem impossible to disassociate the layers of symbolism that have been
placed upon chess and to look at what lies underneath. But Fine, acknowledges
that chess is a world unto itself, a world apart from what it symbolises. Fine
makes the point that chess players enter a world where all else is forgotten; time,
wife, friends, family and business. This resonates with the isolated world of chess
experienced by interviewer Jean Marie Drot discussed in the previous chapter.
While playing a game of chess, Drot attempted to conduct an interview with
Duchamp, but found that the game created a world of "silence." Drot was unable
to enter the world of chess at the same time as attempting to interview Duchamp
in the 'real' world.25
The symbolism of chess continues to hold for theorists the most fundamental
meanings associated with the game and yet symbolism continues to disrupt many
investigations into Duchamp’s relationship with chess. Art theorists have used
Fine's Psycho-sexual reading of the game of chess to add to Duchamp's many
overtly sexualised art works. Arturo Schwarz presents a perspective on
Duchamp's chess that is totally dominated by this sexualised reading. Schwarz
claims that chess continually reminded Duchamp of his "close" relationship with
his sister Suzanne. The 1904 etching by Jacques Villon, Duchamp's brother, shows
the children Marcel and Suzanne playing chess together. This brother/sister
24 Ibid,p.6825 Drot
122
relationship is presented as intellectually and emotionally incestuous by Schwarz.
Schwarz's entire reading of chess as a theme in Duchamp's art is overtly sexually
referenced.26 Another theorist with this perspective, Patricia Simons, wrote an
article titled (Check)Mating the Grand Masters: The Gendered, Sexualized Politics of
Chess in Renaissance Italy.27 Simons quotes Duchamp and states many of his
actions to place a sexual reading over Duchamp's chess career. Duchamp's
"sensuous pleasure" in chess and his interest in "mating" placed alongside
quotations from Reuben Fine referring to the symbolism of "murderous campaigns
of patricide, matricide, fratricide, regicide, and mayhem."28 To Simons chess is
fundamentally a game of symbolism.
if chess is performed by a mixed-sex couple, the feminine presence turns the engagement into a sexual alliance and it becomes a destabilised game of chance and passion more than wits and reason.29
Simons cites Duchamp's 1963 performance (PLATE 17) of playing chess with a
naked model as giving authority to this reading;
Marcel Duchamp, for instance, followed tradition when he insisted on the intellectual and aesthetic calibre of chess, although he acknowledged ’the sensuous pleasure of the ideographic execution of that image on the chess boards'. His wonder about 'when will I administer checkmate - or will I be mated?' was a potentially sexual metaphor that found performative figuration in a chess game at his first major retrospective of 1963 between himself as a dressed, thoughtful man, and a young, naked woman.30
However, the symbolism of chess in the life and art of Marcel Duchamp is a very
minor aspect of a larger aesthetic agenda. Duchamp's well known enjoyment of
paradoxical positions must not mislead our inquiry here. Theorists who build
26 Schwarz 1997,p. 10727 Simons28 Ibid,p.5929 Ibid, p.5930 Ibid
123
their entire thesis upon a perceived importance of sexual symbolism ignore
Duchamp's fundamental interest in the game. In 1919 Duchamp designed and
carved a chess set (PLATE 18) which did not include a crown upon the King.
Although Duchamp was playing with a subversion of symbolic meaning his
intention is to direct our attention away from symbolism towards what lay below.
Art theorist Mark Kremer described Duchamp's chess set as "an iconoclastic
gesture."31 A gesture that directs our attention away from the importance of the
symbolism of chess only to be refocussed upon the movement of the pieces. The
King piece without a crown loses its one identifying symbol and becomes an
abstract sculpture shape with specific movements and powers upon the board.
Duchamp wrote to Walter Arensberg from Buenos Aires, during a time of deep
personal devotion to the game, concerning the effect that chess was having on
him.
"I am absolutely ready to become a chess maniac - everybody around me takes the form of the knight or the queen, and the exterior world has no other interest for me other than in its transformation to winning or losing positions."32
and again;"I play day and night and nothing interests me more than to find the right move." 33
Chess drew Duchamp into a singular and isolated world that disconnected him
from the greater world. As stated in the opening quotation, chess is a world with
its own rules, laws, logic and nature. When we look into the world of chess,
below the levels of symbolism and representation, we encounter "a realm of
strange shapes and forms which combine to create novel situations.'34 The world
of chess becomes an arena of abstract forms, patterns, combinations, and
31 Kremer, The Chess Career of Marcel Duchamp, New in Chess, Alkmarr, Holland, No. 2,1989, p.4832 MD to Walter Arensberg, June 15,1919, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Arensberg Archives33 MD to Stettheimer sisters, May 3,1919, Yale Collection of American Literature34 Schonberg, p.24
124
movements which take place upon a grid. It is the use of these elements of
abstraction which can be seen as the "raw materials" of the chess player. Likened
to the abstract world of mathematics, chess is said to have a "pure language . . . in
its ability to provide precise expression for every thought or concept that can be
formulated in its terms."35 When one enters the realm of chess, the player looks
upon a given chess position and focuses upon the visual formation of the
sculptural forms on the grid. The player's eyes move from one piece to the other,
imagining them in a state of abstract movement and transition. An actual
movement occurs when the abstract intellectual movements have satisfied the
player's future goal. Over the course of a game each player builds up not only a
series of possibilities for the future of each piece but also a certain memory or
history of each piece. The player engages with the process of discovering the
fundamental relationships between the various pieces upon the board and the
laws that govern their movement in relation to an overall objective - to checkmate.
This aspect of chess was a dominant attraction for Duchamp. The abstract motion
of the pieces within the intellectual realm dominated the way he spoke about chess
and created art works on the subject. Not an actual visual kinetic motion but an
intellectualised mechanised movement that takes place in the player's minds. This
realm of abstract movement and combination is far more fundamental to chess
than the layers of symbolism which only gild its surface. It is here that we meet
Marcel Duchamp within the abstract world of chess.
35 Adler, Mathematics and Creativity, The New Yorker Magazine, 1972
125
Duchamp as Chess Artist
And why . . . isn't my chess playing an art activity? A chess game is very plastic. You construct it. It's mechanical sculpture and with chess one creates beautiful problems and that beauty is made with the head and hands.36
"I play chess all the time/' he wrote to Walter Arensberg. "I have joined the club here where there are very strong players classed in categories. I still have not had the honour of being classified, and I play with various players of the second and third categories losing and winning from time to time.” He had a set of rubber stamps made up so that he could play correspondence chess with Walter Arensberg. He even designed a set of wooden chessmen that he carved himself, all except the knight, which he farmed out to a local craftsman. In May he wrote to the Stettheimers that painting interested him less and less: ”1 play [chess] day and night and nothing interests me more than to find the right move.. 37
The carving of chess pieces from wood or stone, or the choosing of found objects,
always carries an aesthetic element. Aesthetics hold a somewhat pragmatic
purpose, to distinguish one piece from the other, and to give a symbolic
identification as to the nature of the piece. Duchamp uses the traditional /
conventional symbolism of chess in the making of his chess designs (PLATE 19)
and sets: the horse, tower, bishops mitre, and the crown. Thus, Duchamp's pieces,
symbols and boards hold no more artistic value or insight into chess than other
makers of chess pieces. It may be understood that chess players have always been
artists in the same way as makers of iconic, or religious objects. What can be said
about Duchamp's activities in this area is that he was very thorough. Duchamp has
worked to create aesthetic objects for all aspects of chess: pieces, wall displays,
pocket sets, carved wooden sets, and chess stamp designs. He was truly an artist
of chess.
36 Joselit, p.162, Marcel Duchamp, interview by Truman Capote in Richard Avedon, Observation, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1959,p.5537 Tomkins 1998,p210-ll
126
It is deep below the layers of chess symbolism that Duchamp is encountered as a
chess player and an artist. Art theorist Hubert Damisch raised the question as to
why we encounter Duchamp in the world of chess at all? Damisch asks; How
could he have spent so much of his life involved in nothing but a game? He makes
a point of comparison, that Duchamp spent more of his life within this realm than
he spent painting, though Duchamp renounced "neither the notion of "artist" nor
that of "art."38 How has Duchamp slipped so easily into the realm of chess and
become so difficult to follow? I have suggested that it is the art world's scorn and
misunderstanding for the game. Yet it is not within the "game" that we encounter
Duchamp. The artist moved into the world of chess and it is here that the art
theorist and historian loses Duchamp. What is significant is that Duchamp was
able to enter the paradigm of chess only due to his entering as an artist. Duchamp
understood the paradigm of chess via the language, values, history, and culture of
art. Thus on entering the world of chess we need to find the artist Duchamp. He
was not found in the realm of symbolism, though he has left his footprints there, to
perhaps lead us astray. When Duchamp entered the chess world he entered as an
artist and he proclaimed that art was to be found here. Damisch summarises
Duchamp's interest for chess as an artistic activity, and that a game of chess is
considered "beautiful" in its own right and is as close as possible to becoming a
work of art.39
Damisch understands Duchamp's involvement in chess as deeply connected with
his agenda as an artist. Duchamp was not interested in the symbolism of the
chess pieces, the layers of historical meaning, or the psycho-sexual elements, but
the way that chess was able to evoke abstract and intellectual movement of objects
upon a new space or reality. This point Duchamp directly made when he
answered the specific question as to the importance of symbolism in chess.
38 Damisch 1979, p.839 Ibid, p.9
127
Duchamp said that it holds no importance in the game, although chess acts like a
drug of addiction.40 Duchamp later said that the "expression" of chess and the
"competitive" nature made it too incongruent with art, and thus is no art form at
all. However, for Duchamp, it was not important to understand chess as a fight, or
"sport" but through artistic qualities. This he explicitly stated during a BBC radio
interview, when saying that the "competitive aspect was of no importance." 41
Of course, one intriguing aspect of the game that does imply artistic connotations is the actual geometric patterns and variations of the actual set up of the pieces and in the combinative, tactical, strategical, and positional sense. It's a sad expression though - somewhat like religious art - it is not very gay.42
Here Duchamp is presenting three 'artistic' or aesthetic levels concerning the game.
First, the immediate visual impression of the chess pieces upon the board. This
includes the chequered board, the sculptural formation of the pieces, and the
variety of visual patterns that they form upon the board. Second, the abstract
movement of the pieces through the 'intellectual' space. Finally, the emotional
expression of chess.
The first level of aesthetics were explored by Duchamp in designing (but never
making) a chess set. Writing to his sister Suzanne Duchamp he explained,
I am about to launch on the market a new form of chess sets, the main features of which are as follow: The Queen is a combination of a Rook and of a Bishop - the Knight is the same as the one I had in South America. So is the Pawn. The King Too. 2nd they will be coloured like this. The white Queen will be light green. The black Queen will be dark green. The Rooks will be blue, light and dark. The bishops will be yellow, light and dark. The knights, red, light and dark. The white King and Black King. White and Black
40 Drot41 Kremer 198942 Duchamp quoted by Brandy, Schwarz 1975,p.70
128
Pawns. Please notice that the Queens' colour is a combination of the Bishop and of the Rook (just as she is in her movements).43
While the immediate visual impression of the chess set would be striking, its
purpose is to direct our attention to the second aesthetic level; the intellectual
movement of the pieces. This is directly indicated by the colouring of the Queen -
its movement being a combination of a Bishop and a Rook. His engagement in
chess is seen as profoundly relating to the intellectualised movement of the pieces,
to which he has brought the inventiveness of an artist to the aesthetics of the game.
It is the 'artistic' intellectual and abstract movement of pieces that Duchamp, the
artist, values within the paradigm of chess.
Duchamp spoke most openly and comprehensively to Pierre Cabanne concerning
this perspective on the game. This interview sheds light upon a vast array of
Duchamp's chess quotations and references commonly used by historians and
theorists when speaking on the subject.
Cabanne: I also noted that this passion [for chess] was especially great when you weren't painting. So, I wondered whether, during those periods, the gestures directing the movements of pawns in space didn't give rise to imaginary creations - yes, 1 know, you don't like that word - creations which, in your eyes, had as much value as the real creation of your pictures and, further, established a new plastic function in space.
Duchamp: In a certain sense, yes. A game o f chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn't geometric in the static sense o f the word, it is mechanical, since it moves; it's a drawing, it's a mechanical reality. The pieces aren't pretty in themselves, any more than is the form of the game, but what is pretty - if the word 'pretty' can be used - is the movement. Well, it is mechanical, the way, for example, a Calder is mechanical. In chess there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain. It's the imagining o f the movement or o f the gesture that makes the beauty, in this case. It's completely in one's grey inatter.
Cabanne: In short, there is in chess a gratuitous play of forms, as opposed to the play of functional forms on the canvas.
43 Duchamp quoted by Naumann, Affectueusement, Marcel: ten Letters from Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp and Jean Crotti. Archieves of American Art Journal, 22, No. 4 1982, p.14
129
Duchamp: Yes. Completely. Although chess play is not so gratuitous; there is choice..
C abanne: But no intended purpose?
Duchamp: No. There is no special purpose. That above all is important.
Cabanne: Chess is the ideal work of art?
Duchamp: That could be. Also, the milieu of chess players is far more sympathetic than that of artists. These people are completely cloudy, completely blind, wearing blinkers. Madmen of a certain quality, the way the artist is supposed to be, and isn't, in general. That's probably what interested me the most.44
Cabanne poses a range of questions directly concerning the relationship between
art and chess. Cabanne begins by establishing an opposition to, or a clear
distinction between, chess and art. The term Cabanne actually uses is "painting"
yet in its context the word "art" is clearly implicit. The question posed to Duchamp
points directly to the relationship Cabanne saw existing between chess and art.
Cabanne asked Duchamp when he was not in the paradigm of art whether the
movements of chess pieces gave rise to anything that he would value as art; and
whether Duchamp discovered a new realm or space for art within the paradigm of
chess. In affirmation of this, Duchamp continues to present an explanation of this
artistic encounter within the paradigm of chess. As in his chess set design,
Duchamp draws our attention to the multiple levels operating within the
aesthetics of chess, and directs us to the aspect which he holds in the highest
regard. Duchamp's interest in the movements of a machine, a mystical machine, as
directly and simply illustrated in his 1911 Coffee Grinder, operate also in the realm
of chess, where the movements of the grinding mechanism is visible and the
process or movement of the coffee through the machine is demonstrated. This is
shown most clearly in Duchamp's body of work that make up the King and Queen.
There is a clear focus upon the movement of pieces upon the board in intellectual
space.
44 Cabanne 1971,pl8-19
130
Developing this further, Duchamp reflects on the close relationship chess has to
geometry and mechanical movement. The example he presents is the movement
of Calder's mobiles. But a mobile is aesthetic in the realm of the visual and
Duchamp says that the aesthetics of chess are not in this domain. It is not even the
physical sculptural pieces that are aesthetic or "pretty" - it is the movement of the
pieces in intellectual space. The beauty of chess that Duchamp saw was the
movement of the pieces within his mind. This is testament to what Duchamp said
to Drot,
mechanics in the sense that the pieces move, interact, destroy each other, they're in constant motion and that's what attracts me. Chess figures placed in a passive position have no visual or aesthetic appeal. Its the possible movements that can be played from that position that makes it more or less beautiful.45
And further,
Actually when you play a game of chess it is like designing something or constructing a mechanism of some kind by which you win or lose. The competitive side of it has no importance, but the thing itself is very, very plastic and it is probably what attracted me to the game.46
Cabanne presents Duchamp with a summary of this understanding: The
distinction between the aesthetics of chess and art (painting) is that in chess there
is a free movement or "play of forms" whereas in art, forms are not considered to
be free for they serve a functionally aesthetic purpose. Cabanne has made the
battle ground for this debate the issue of values associated with aesthetic
functionality. Duchamp corrects Cabanne by saying that the aesthetics of chess are
concerned with the "play of forms" in intellectual space, however, the movement is
restricted by choice, and each choice brings its own consequences just as the artist
45 Drot46 Duchamp, Salt Seller: the Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York, Oxford University Press, 1973, p.136
131
also faces the consequences of their actions. Chess is not free or "gratuitous" as
crudely expressed by Cabanne.
Duchamp and David Antin wrote an article (in response to an interview they had
conducted) in which they illustrate the choice and consequences within the
intellectual realm of chess and the weight of meaning and significance placed upon
a small sculptural object, the chess piece.
but I don't want to talk about that now i would rather talk about chess since we're talking about Duchamp its only right that we should talk about chess chessboards define the action in chess the action is usually on the board similarly if youuse the word art you use a board as a perimeter and some where within the perimeter is the site of a action at least itwould appear so to someone who knew how to play chess which is an action of a different sort for someone know how to play chess for if two people two chess mastersare playing a game and somebody watches that game and he gasps ostensibly this is an act of little significance a man pushes a little piece of wood and moves it over here say and the other man gasps he watches the man next to himdoesn’t know why he's gasping the first man is gasping because the player whose move it was has just moved the bishop to a particular position on the board from which will ensure 15 alternative possibilities all of which are not very good.47
This interest in intellectual movement was also Duchamp's concern within
painting, 'intellectual expression' was the direction that painting should take.
Duchamp said;
I considered painting as . . . a means of expression, instead of a complete aim for life . . . the same as I considered that colour is only a means of expression in painting. It should not be the last aim of painting. In other words, painting should not be only retinal or visual; it should have to do with the gray matter of our understanding, not only the purely visual.48
47 Duchamp and Antin, original published format has been maintained, MOMA, Prestel, 1989 p.10048 Schwarz 1969,p.20
132
American Chess Master Edward Lasker saw that Duchamp's interest in the
aesthetics of chess had profound effects on Duchamp the chess player. Duchamp's
aesthetic concerns and insights influenced his style of play which had immediate
implications on many of his tournament results. Duchamp was ever the artist
within the paradigm of chess.
Schwarz goes on to say that Duchamp's aesthetic interest in chess, coupled with
his "unorthodox" style led to many defeats at chess master levels. 49 Duchamp's
interest in chess also revolves around the contradiction or paradox that exists
between freedom and restriction. Within a strict framework of rules, there is great
room for creative and imaginative thought. Duchamp’s Cartesian sentiments, also
presented insights into the aesthetic realm of chess.
Chess is a marvellous piece of Cartesianism, and so imaginative that it doesn't even look Cartesian at first. The beautiful combinations that chess players invent - you don't see them coming, but afterward there is no mystery - it's a pure logical conclusion.50
Duchamp's involvement with Hypermodernist chess praxis utilised a Cartesian
approach by rethinking and questioning all previously established styles and
theoretical principals whilst maintaining a rigorous mathematical and scientific
methodology like that of "classical" chess praxis. Duchamp as a chess player
closely associated himself with Hypermodernism not only for its Dadaist position
but also for its rigorous mathematical and logical approach. It was through a
Cartesian approach that Duchamp wrote Opposition and Sister Squares Are
Reconciled with chess theorist Halberstadt. This text has been observed to involve
49 Ibip, p.6650 Marcel Duchamp interview with Calvin Tomkins, undated, Tomkins, 1998, p.211
133
the "seemingly aimless manoeuvres of the kings," yet for Duchamp it clearly shows
an interest in the subtle and "fragile" logic of chess.51
His intellectual interest in both the acceptance and rejection of logical thought, or
of freedom and restriction, became an interest in the middle ground. A middle
ground of indifference, which he considered the 'beauty of indifference," and "an
acceptance of all doubts."52 This "indifference" reflects Duchamp's adoption of a
Hypermodern chess style which is an interplay of romantic and modern forms.
He explained his attitude of indifference to Andre Breton:
For me there is something else in addition to yes, no or indifferent - that is, for instance - the absence of investigations of that type.. . . I am against the word 'anti' because it's a bit like atheist, as compared to believer. And the atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is, and an anti-artist is just as much of an artist as the other artist. Anartist would be much better, if I could change it, instead of anti-artist. Anartist, meaning no artist at all. That would be my conception. I don't mind being an anartist . . . What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way as a bad emotion is still an emotion.53
Duchamp was reluctant to draw a distinction between the artist and the anti-artist,
which questions whether a theorist should make the distinction between art and
chess. An indifference to the division between art and chess creating a free flow of
ideas between the two paradigms. This free flow or traversal of paradigms existed
not only between chess and art. Duchamp's interest in this intellectual paradox
flowed into his involvement in mathematics. Henri Poincare is believed to have
presented Duchamp with a position that emphasised the resolution of the paradox.
Poincare's mathematical text Science et methode has a chapter concerning
mathematical invention, which suggests that by using the laws of mathematics one
51 Kremer, p.5052 Hamilton and Hamilton, BBC interview, London, BBC, 195953 Duchamp quoted by Schwarz 1969,p.33
134
is able to be as inventive, imaginative and creative as a chess player. Poincare says
that all mathematicians have "a very sure memory" or,
" a power . . . like that of the chess player who can visualise a great number of combinations and hold them in his memory, . . . every good mathematician ought to be a good chess player, and inversely."54
Poincare understood chess to be fundamentally associated with invention. An
invention of pure elements of "harmony of number, and forms, of geometrical
elegance."55 A paradigm of strict rules and laws exists within mathematics and
chess. Within this framework, the practitioner is able to move and act freely and
inventively. It has been suggested that chess operated for Duchamp as an arena of
invention that he occupied after completing his conceptual and mathematical
invention, the Large Glass. 56 Julien Levy said of Duchamp:
Marcel wanted to show that an artist's mind, if it wasn't' corrupted by money or success, could equal the best in any field. He thought that, with its sensitivity to images and sensations, the artist's mind could do as well as the scientific mind with its mathematical memory. He came damn close, too. But, of course, the memory boys were tougher, they had trained [for chess] from an early age. Marcel started too late in life.57
Duchamp was seen by many of his chess opponents to be highly creative, and his
use of inventive or "playful" mathematics within the Large Glass, demonstrates
Duchamp's freedom of movement between these paradigms. And perhaps it is
within this context that we are to understand Duchamp's statement that
54 Poincare, Science et methode, cited in Henderson, Duchamp in Context, Princeton, New Jersey, Princton University Press, 1998, p.18655 Ibid56 Ibid57 Schwarz 1969,p.70
135
"From my close contact with artists and chess players, I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists." 58
Duchamp came to conduct chess as an artist and to conduct his art making as the
chess player.
The theorist David Joselit also explores the way that chess and art relate in Marcel
Duchamp's life and art. Joselit sees chess as "living art" within Duchamp's life. In
which there is a traversal between art and chess as there is Duchamp's traversal
between art to life.
"He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object."59
The photograph of Duchamp's studio from 1917 presents the framework for this
theory. Hanging vertically upon a wall is chess as a physical object, as opposed to
the intellectual realms of chess, and upon the floor, chess as a conceptual reality via
the readymade sculpture the Trap. It is well known that Duchamp played
correspondence chess and these vertical boards were commonly used to illustrate
his games in progress. The depth of logical methodology saw Duchamp thrive in
correspondence chess and endgame studies. In these instances, the slow pace of
the game creates little scope for oversights and incorrect moves, thus a purer logic
is achieved. Joselit views this vertical chessboard via the paradigm of art stating
that it has entered the arena of the painting. The chess board has entered or
'colonised' the paradigm of art via painting.
The rotated chess board suggests that the relationship between chess and art was not necessarily one of displacement but rather of
58 Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. papers, August 30,195259 Duchamp, 1917
136
the transformation or transposition of painterly themes into a realm that obviates "the intervention of the hand." 60
The flat vertical image upon a wall, yet the physical transient reality of chess,
becomes an "erasable beauty" a painting that can be erased and begun over and
over again.61 Likewise Duchamp said to Cabanne:
"at the end of the game you can cancel the painting you are making."62
Duchamp wrote the following note that further expresses this;
Chess = a design on slate / that one erases, / the beauty of which / one can reproduce without the / intervention of the "hand." 63
Thus Duchamp saw the paradigm of chess enlightening the paradigm of art.
Chess is an "aesthetic idiom" to mathematically represent an "immobilised"
movement as is seen in the Large Glass (1923) and Coffee Mill (1911). The artist
chess player is able to "diagram it, to capture it within a grid of measurement."64
Joselit's hypothesis is that chess is a projection into Duchamp's world of the
readymade as clearly displayed in the studio photograph. The readymade
represents Duchamp's traversal between art and everyday life and chess. Trebuchet
or Trap draws directly from a theoretical movement within the paradigm of chess.
This readymade sculpture is created by Duchamp by nailing a coat rack down
upon his studio floor. Trebuchet is a tactical chess move that incites a player to
make a move that will ultimately cause them to lose a positional advantage, a piece
60 Joselit,p.157-861 Ibid, p.16062 Schwarz 1975, MD interview Cabanne63 Joselit ,p.l57, Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed Paul Matisse, Boston: G.K.Hall, 1983, note 273, unpaginated64 Joselit, 1998, p.163
137
or the game. The analogy of being tripped by the inverted coat rack is obvious,
one Duchamp actually encountered when he brought the object home and never
got around to mounting it to the wall. Duchamp becomes the chess piece tripped
by the Trebuchet that was set by himself. Joselit sees a direct connection between
the chess board tipped upon a wall and the coat rack that has been tipped down
upon the floor. Each work has entered a new realm via its displacement.
Duchamp the chess player in the realm of art and Duchamp the artist in the realm
of chess, both in the realm of the everyday. Joselit understands that within this
photograph chess operates as a pivot for understanding the movement from the
realm of painting to the realm of Duchamp's readymades. Joselit says that these
two works demonstrate the "discursive field that we might call "Duchampian
chess."
To understand what is occurring within Duchamp's art we need to understand the
way chess operates as a theoretical and practical model. Within the paradigm of
chess Duchamp enters the arena of the painting via the chess board hung upon a
wall The physical chess object can be aestheticised like that of a painting.
Duchamp also enters the realm of the readymade object in his studio and the
conceptual movement of correspondence chess through intellectual space via an
arena of readymade rules and intellectual visualisation. Through documentation
and notation Duchamp geometrically charted the movement of the readymade
upon the painterly plane. Then the entire chess object is placed within the context
of the everyday. It is this nature of the everyday that prompted Duchamp in
1917 to publish a game of chess between the artists (both poor chess players) Roche
and Picabia, in a regular chess column of a news paper. The readers were
outraged! Duchamp wrote in response to this Richard Mutt Case of the chess
world that;
138
"it had been a game from everyday life: lyrical, heroic, romantic; with blunders, sudden panic reactions, flights of imagination and here and there even a correct move." 65
Joselit believes that Duchamp aimed to invent an art form that was equally as
elegant and conceptually beautiful as chess and cites chess as being responsible for
Duchamp's low artistic production during the 1920's. Joselit writes,
The game was no mere idle pastime for the artist, a smoke screen that could block the scrutiny of the art world. Rather, . . . chess, like the machine before it, provided Duchamp with a productive conceptual and aesthetic model that was unquietly capable of synthesising the "spatial realism" or literalness of the readymade and the systemic complexity of the Large Glass. 66
The systemic complexity concerning the Large Glass operates in a similar way to the
game of chess. In this work, Duchamp established a conceptual mechanism which
is understood to operate via the rules and laws referenced in the Green Box. The
way to understand the workings of the Large Glass is via the Green Box. For
example Duchamp's use of colour must be understood via the associated notes.
Duchamp wrote, "As in geographical maps, as in architects' drawings; or diagrams
with colour wash, need a colour key: substantive meaning of each colour used."67
Likewise, for chess, the conceptual workings and movements of the pieces operate
via the established readymade rules of the game.68 This comparison between the
workings of the Large Glass and chess was also noted by Linda Dalrymple
Henderson in her 1983 text entitled The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean
Geometry in Modem Art.69 She claims we see in the works of Duchamp a similarity
of approach to chess and art, through the 'geometrical theorising' in chess and in
65 Kremer 1989, p.4766 Joselit,p.16467 Schwarz 1969,p.2768 Joselit, p.173-469 Henderson, 1983
139
the notes for the Large Glass. 70 Duchamp believed that language united his life
with the Large Glass and with chess. Yet he maintained the belief that language
was unable to communicate purely.
"I don't believe in language, which, instead of explaining subconscious thoughts, in reality creates thought by and after the word . . . " 71
Duchamp was able to maintain the purity of the Large Glass by adopting and
inventing a language of paradoxical referencing and operation, like the specialised
and distinct language of chess. For chess is not a language outside the paradigm of
chess.* * Likewise the world of the Large Glass does not operate beyond its shattered
glass.72
In summary Duchamp was able to create a theoretical union whilst acknowledging
the incommensurability of the paradigms of chess and art. A methodology that is
not associated with hierarchy or dominance or comparison of criteria, but an
approach that enters into the distinct paradigms of art and chess themselves.
Marcel Duchamp enters the paradigm of chess holding onto the values of art: Not
claiming that chess is art but valuing chess as he values art. This gives a new
insight into the game. An insight that cannot come from within the paradigm of
chess itself.
70 Ibid, p.12471 Jones, 1994, p.133* The language of chess must be understood to go beyond the cleche of chess that are used in everyday speak like "checkmate" to the abstract world of piece movement, engagement, exchange, and combination.72 M.D to Jehan Mayoux, March 8,1956, Archives of Alexina Duchamp, Tomkins, 1998, p.394
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Chapter 5.
A thematic study of chess in the art of Marcel Duchamp
. . .Duchamp has come to be considered a forerunner of Conceptual art, as well as Pop art . . .and virtually every postmodern tendency; the great anti-retinal thinker who supposedly abandoned art for chess has turned out, in fact, to have had a more lasting and far-reaching effect on the art of our time than either Picasso or Matisse.1
Duchamp told his biographer, Arturo Schwarz, that it was his two brothers
Jacques and Raymond to whom he owed his chess initiation at age thirteen: at the
same age that he was introduced to painting.
In the Duchamp household, chess seems to have been a family affair, inthe same way that art and painting was, .. .2
In Pierre Cabanne's series of interviews, Duchamp describes being a young
painter surrounded by the excitement of new ideas and styles. During these
interviews Duchamp spoke little about critical readings of his works, in this
period, referring mainly to the influence of other artists and styles. Duchamp
acknowledges the influence of Cezanne and Manet that led to the creation of The
Chess Game, his first work on chess, which he later considered to be "very
academic."3
Cabanne: Your Chess Players are highly influenced by Cezanne's Card Players.
Duchamp: Yes, but I already wanted to get out of that. And then, you know, it all happened very swiftly. Cubism interested me for
1 Tomkins, 1998, p.122 Damisch 1979, p.53 Cabanne 1971, p.26
141
only a few months. At the end of 1912 I was already thinking of something else. So it was a form of experiment more than a conviction. From 1902 to 1910,1 didn’t just float along! I had had eight years of swimming lessons.4
Similarly Tomkins remarks,
"The influence of Cezanne appeared - somewhat belatedly - in Duchamp's painting for the first time in 1910. The Cezanne retrospective at the Salon d' Automne in 1907, one year after the artist's death, had come as a revelation to many painters in Paris... Duchamp later made conflicting statements about Cezanne's influence on him. He told Pierre Cabanne that in the circle of humorist artists he frequented, "The conversation centred above all on Manet,' not Cezanne, and he went on to say that his own discovery of Matisse had been much more of an event in his life than his discovery of Cezanne. At other times, however, Duchamp spoke of himself as being under the influence of Cezanne for two years or more, and he cited his 1910 portrait of his father as "a typical example of my cult of Cezanne mixed up with filial love."5
His early stylistic adoption of Fauvism and Post Impressionism was later to be
met with much self disdain. The artistic position he held during these eight years
of "swimming lessons" he later discredited due to his continuing distrust of
systemisation and the adoption of ’styles’ by artists. This self deprecation by
Duchamp has led to a theoretical black hole as writers on this period follow. The
Chess Game and the works surrounding Portrait of Chess players are not considered
to be difficult Duchampian ground, and little more than Duchamp's own
observations have been offered by theorists. Duchamp was merely playing
around with styles, and his Duchampian stamp is not to be found here. Historian
Calvin Tomkins devotes a chapter to this stage titled "Swimming Lessons" after
Duchamp's dismissive comments.6 I argue, however, that this period offers many
clues to understanding the way Duchamp began his journey into the theoretical
4 Ibid, p.265 Tomkins, 1998 , p. 41-26 Ibid
142
paradigm of chess. Through these art works one can see the intellectual
perspective that he held for the game itself. This chapter will analyse the works of
Duchamp that contain thematic elements of chess. It is not surprising that many
misconceptions concerning Duchamp the chess player have dominated readings
into these works.
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The Chess Game (1910) (Plate 2)
There is no attempt at psychological portraiture here; the men are virtually featureless, the women locked away in their separate and isolated reveries. A memory of Cezanne's Card Players seems to hover over the scene, but the painting has none of Cezanne's monumental solidity. The figures inhabit the shallow space awkwardly; the composition is inert. . . . He was still in the phase of what he would later call his "swimming lessons," moving restlessly but tentatively from Post-Impressionist landscapes to Fauve nudes to Cezanne-influenced portraits and figure studies. (Tomkins 1998,p.45-6)
The Chess Game, painted in August 1910 when Duchamp was twenty three, is the
first work to contain the subject matter of chess and is considered the first major
work of the early part of Duchamp's career. This one work contains or suggests
many elements that will dominate his interest in the game and is a point of origin
in his understanding of chess as a thematic element in art.
Pierre Cabanne suggests that The Chess Game is not a 'psychological portrait/
implying a shallowness or lack of intellectual significance in Duchamp's first
depiction of chess when compared to later paintings. Nevertheless The Chess
Game marks the starting point of Duchamp's thematic journey into the intellectual
realms of chess and is an exploration into the intellectual experience of playing
chess.
The whole essence of the work is held in this shroud of silence and stillness. The
painting is set in Duchamp's garden in Puteaux and is an luminous green, fading
into a nominal, irrelevant, and undefined surrounding. The minimal depiction of
surroundings intensify with the external reality of silence and isolation felt by the
subjects in Duchamp's painting. The women are relaxedly poised in a chair and
lounging upon the ground. They sit to one side of the painting gazing into
nothingness with no communion or conversation, neither engaging the viewer
144
with their eye, each other, the men, nor even other objects in the work. The
women are lost, playing no part in the game. They have no relationship with the
pieces, like chess men taken in previous moves, they sit and wait. The brothers
gaze down upon the chess men with the intensity of scientists witnessing a proof
in a petrie dish. The structural positioning of the two brothers is in direct contrast
to the women further indicating their 'other worldness.' The brothers form a rigid
machine like structure, a theoretical machine, driven by abstract forces to produce
metaphysical solutions to problems displayed on the grid of the chess board
before them. Their elbows lock their heads and bodies into position like a tripod.
The heads of the brothers are focused upon the board. Chess pervades the entire
canvas. The game dominates the relationship between the two brothers, and has
created the isolating environments that the women find themselves in. The only
movements envisaged are the movement of arms, moving a chess piece, or taking
a sip of tea. The Game of Chess clearly tells of Duchamp's own experience of the
social workings of chess in the lives of his family.
the atmosphere is that of a social gathering where intellectual activities are dominant. The absorbed attitude of the two brothers intent on their game is echoed in the thoughtful looks of their wives, who seem to be lost in daydreaming.7
Like Cabanne, the art historian Arturo Schwarz looks to the role of the brothers
and the wives in the painting to show Duchamp's emphasis or meaning behind
the work. Both writers mention that each person depicted in the painting is
intellectually engaged or occupied to some degree. Schwarz claims that the
wives' 'thoughtful looks' emulate the intent or intellectual focus of the brothers.
Schwarz seems to be implying that the women are actively engaged in another
world just as Duchamp's brothers are. Even though the wives play no active role
7 Schwarz 1997
145
in the painting they are part of the physical world that the brothers have left
behind.
I propose that the emphasis that Duchamp has shown in the work indicates that
the women are not equals in intellectual activity. Being 'lost in daydreaming'
does not echo the brothers but acts as a contrast to their intense intellectual
activity. Chess is the focus of this work and, as the title further emphasises, the
central theme. Duchamp has cleverly crafted the painting so that the chess board
and pieces are almost invisible and the tea setting is in the most prominent
position. In contrast to the chess pieces the tea objects are easily distinguishable
by size and shape. The game of chess itself is not visible, rather it is an
intellectual or imagined element in the painting. In other words, the smallest
objects create the most dominant force which pervades all aspects of the canvas.
Chess has become a powerful and socially subversive activity that draws the
brothers away from the reality of the garden, leaving their wives in isolation.
Tomkins claims that Duchamp's The Chess Game of 1910, painted in the genre and
style of Cezanne's Card Players, lacks 'monumental solidity/ However by placing
The Chess Game beside The Card Players, and other works showing the bourgeoisie
at leisure, it shows something in fact 'psychologically' very powerful. Works
created by Seurat, Manet, or Renoir, showing the gaiety, movements, colours,
pleasure and companionship, are not qualities of Duchamp's work. Monumental
solidity is very much a quality of Duchamp's work. Duchamp has shown how
chess creates a timeless monumental solidity.
146
Six Studies for Portrait o f Chess Players (October 1911) (PLATE 20)
The Chess Players (November-December 1911) (PLATE 21)
& Portrait o f Chess Players (December 1911) (PLATE 3)
Completed during Duchamp's "swimming lessons," the above series shows his
adoption of a form of Cubism, and a clear development in the portrayal of chess.
This series of work was completed over a three month period from October to
December 1911 and is the second phase in Duchamp's development of chess as
subject matter in his art works. It indicates a shift in Duchamp's theories and
practices of painting and chess. Within this short period of time he experimented
with many themes and elements of chess that established his theoretical and
philosophical interest in the game. This series consists of six preparatory
drawings (Six Studies for Portrait o f Chess Players) one oil sketch (The Chess
Players), and one major oil painting ( Portrait of Chess Players).
The visual shift from The Chess Game (1910) to this cubist inspired series of 1911 is
remarkable. The post-impressionistic world of chess in the Duchamp family
garden in Puteaux has been replaced by the visual representation of the
intellectual realms of the game. Duchamp will never again return to a naturalistic
visual representation of chess players at their game. This series of work is a
distinct shift away from retinal art towards the conceptual. These works
demonstrate this shift through his repeated experimentation with, and a traversal
between, naturalist and cubist abstraction. Not only they show an artistic
development, but were produced at a stage when Duchamp's interest in avant
garde scientific theories had a significant impact on his thinking.
. . . October 1911, when he began the studies fo r his Portrait of Chess Players, completed in December 1911. As the artist later stated, "Using again the technique of démultiplication in my interpretation of the Cubist theory, I painted the heads of my two brothers playing chess, not in a garden this time, but in indefinite space.” I have argued elsewhere that
147
Duchamp's attempt to evoke the mental states of his brothers during a chess game was in part a response to the geometer E. Jouffret's assertion that conceptualising the fourth dimension is analogous to, but more difficult than, playing blindfold chess. Yet the invisible reality of Portrait of chess players suggests a connection to X-rays as well, in that seeing into the brain was a major theme of X-ray literature from the beginning.. . . Because Duchamp entitled the work Portrait of chess players and not simply The Chess Game - as in his 1910 version of the thane . . . .the painting is indeed a mental portrait of these devotees of the game, who, like Duchamp himself, have chess "on the brain." 8
Duchamp's development in imagining the intellectual nature of chess from The
Chess Game to Portrait of Chess Players is supported by six drawings and one small
sketch in oil, The Chess Players. The sketches in preparation for Portrait of Chess
Players are an insight into his aesthetic and compositional concerns.
In Duchamp’s studies and paintings of chess players dating from 1911 male figures are represented as stylised profiles - as though they themselves were pieces being placed, an impression confirmed by his frequent practice of extending the grid o f the game board behind and beside the central figures and placing chessmen not only before them where the board should be but all around them, as though they were the principal objects in a game that had escaped its grided precincts and colonised the entire world. (Joselit 1998, p.160)
In Duchamp's first drawing (Schwarz 165; Lebel 76) he loosely establishes many
of the elements that underpin Portrait of Chess Players. Two large abstract
outlines of Duchamp's brothers meet "head-to-head," touch at the nose. Inside
each outline an arm and smaller head is shown in a similarly linear way, which
acts compositionally and thematically as a focus on the players thoughts and
creates a visual tension. At this point a Rook is being held, or is in the process of
being moved by a player. The hand of the other player is positioned near his
head in a common chess playing pose which indicates thought. A pose similar to
that given to his brothers in The Chess Game (1910). Within this simple
multiplication of drawings Duchamp shows both the visual and intellectual
8 Henderson 1998, p .ll
148
realms of chess; the smaller heads and arms representing what would
naturalistically be seen of the players. The larger heads represent the more
symbolic or abstract contest between these two players. Through the central Rook
being held by a player, hand movements are also indicated. An interplay with the
lines of the drawings creates an illusionary play of perspective.
The six preparatory drawings, executed in October of 1911 contribute important clues to the iconography of the final Portrait of Chess Players. While the definitive version shows chessmen located only on a plane between the heads of the two players and grasped in one player's hand, the earlier drawings and the painted sketch are pervaded by a multitude of chessboards, chessmen, and even additional heads seemingly representing the "minds" of the players at various stages of the game. The subject of Portrait of Chess Players is, in fact, the mental processes involved in a chess game, the succession of psychological stages of the players. 9
Many subtle shifts are made in drawings one to six but all focus upon
highlighting and emphasising the intellectual realms of chess. In the second
drawing (Schwarz 166; Lebel 75) there is a move away from the centrality of one
chess piece, holding the tension of the game, to multiple pieces floating around
the players' heads. These pieces are located in the area between the two players'
heads which, this time are not touching. Duchamp has also placed a small sample
of the chequered board here. The image has been divided into two distinct
realms with a strong central dividing line that cuts the image vertically and
suggests the binary opposition of the game: black vs. white, player vs. player.
Each head has been placed within a linear frame of differing sizes enhancing the
distinction and division of the two players. This drawing contains no overlapping
of images and is the only study to introduce naturalistic elements like hair. The
tension of the image is held in the area before each player which is intensified by
the closeness of the players' heads and the complexity and number of the chess
pieces in this area.
9 Henderson, 1983,p.124
149
In the third drawing (Schwarz 167; Lebel 79) Duchamp further develops the
themes of the two previous drawings, but also plays with the possibilities of
literal symbolic representation. As argued in chapter 4, Duchamp's interest in
chess must be understood within the intellectual aesthetic realms and not in the
arena of symbolism in this drawing. The King has been given a robe, and the
Knight a horse. This is the only place where such literal symbolic representation
has been used by Duchamp in his work, and he abandons this tactic in the
ensuing drawings of the series. In the third drawing the small sample of
chequered board has been extended towards the viewer to form, in perspective, a
dominant geometric plane. Chess pieces move upon this chess board and into the
space around the players’ heads. Some pieces have been given exaggerated
symbolic elements of chess. The players' heads have been further abstracted with
overlapping images, covering the entire image, that move across their faces. Each
player, for the first time in this series, has been depicted with a body rising above
the chess board, instead of only a head. One player's head is held in his hand
resting upon his elbow upon the chess board. This study shows a naturalistic
visual representation of the chess player. This naturalistic element is continued
with the players dark and dramatic eyes, however all other aspects of the faces
have been abstracted. Duchamp has added dark dramatic directional lines of
perspective, focusing upon the area between the players' heads where the largest
chess piece is located. Duchamp continues his subtle manipulation of line,
composition and thematic elements.
It is not until drawing no. 4 that Duchamp includes a third person - the onlooker,
which is also present in the oil study and the final Portrait. Drawings no. 5 and 6
include the addition of two heads (onlookers?) outside the edges of the drawing,
one on either side. This aspect is not continued in any further works. Stylistically
150
and thematically there are only subtle differences that separate the two oil
paintings, The Chess Players and Portrait of Chess Players and the six preparatory
drawings.
The Chess Players and Portrait of Chess Players were both painted at night under gas
light in an attempt to create a lowering of tones.
It was a tempting experiment. You know, that gaslight from old Aver jet is green; I wanted to see what the changing of colours would do.10
The cubist colours with the added effect of the altered light from the gas lamp
emphasises the separation of the chess players from their physical surroundings,
absorbed as they are in the intellectual world of chess. This interest in the effects
of colour reflects Duchamp's achievement in his earlier painting The Chess Game
(1910), with the use of an illuminant green.
10 Cabanne, 1971, p. 26
151
Two Nudes: One Strong and One Swift(March 1912) (PLATE 4)
The King and Queen Traversed by Nudes at High Speed (April 1912) (PLATE
5)The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes (April 1912) (PLATE 6)
& The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (M ay 1912) (PLATE 7)
The above list makes up the next series by Duchamp that isspecifically concerned
chess. The difficulty with this series is that it has been commonly included in a
larger series which has disguised its significance and emphasis. When one
compares Duchamp's own commentary on this smaller chess series, the dates of
creation, and the subject matter of the works, a distinction is able to be made.
They were created shortly after the Nude Descending a Staircase and Sad Young
Man on a Train, (both in December 1911), and fall into a thematic and technical
grouping which he defined as a "Cubist interpretation of a Futurist formula."11
The above works commonly understood to belong to part of a larger thematic
progression towards the Large Glass. (1923)12 This theory was proposed by Arturo
Schwarz, who also claims that by 1912 Duchamp's work was leading towards the
themes and artistic processes of his major work Bride (August 1912) and
furthermore towards Bride Striped Bare By Her Bachelor, Even (1915-23). From this
perspective, all that Duchamp had created, from his Nudes to the Large Glass, is
coloured by thematic sexual overtones. Schwarz writes,
The first of the three sketches is entitled Two Nudes: One Strong and One Swift. We have no difficulty in recognising the Strong Nude on the right as the Nude of Nude Descending a Staircase: the formal theme is similar, and the androgynous nature of the figure (again, the bosom is not developed) is even slightly accentuated, as if to placate the anxiety of the Swift Nude on the left, in which
11 Cabanne, 1971, p.3612 Ibid,, p.35
152
the first draft on the formal theme of the Bride is clearly recognisable.13
It is important to note that our emphasis focused upon the thematic nature of
Duchamp's use of chess rather than style. This distinction needs to be made for
similarities in style do not imply similarities in theme. Schwarz presents a
convincing stylistic development of Duchamp's "Bride” that includes this series of
chess works.
We find [The Brides] first formulation in Standing Nude (spring 1911), a preliminary study for the Young Girl of Young Man and Girl in Spring, and we can follow its development in the characters on the left- hand side of Two Nudes: One Strong and One Swift, The King and Queen Traversed by Nudes at High Speed, The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes, The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes; in the characters at the centre at left of The Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors; in the two sketches for the Virgin: and in the character on the right side of The Passage from Virgin to Bride. A morphological analysis of the Bride of the Large Glass reveals that her features are derived from a reduction of an essential synthesis of the Bride's structure in the homonymous painting. 14
Duchamp's first drawing titled Two Nudes: One Strong and One Swift (March 1912)
Schwarz naturally places within this erotic thematic progression and in doing so
fails to acknowledge that this drawing is the first in the new series of work
concerning chess. Schwarz argues that Duchamp's technical rendering of the
drawing and the thematic elements directly flow out of his previous works, and to
further this position, there is no suggestion of chess in the title or in the work.
Schwarz links this drawing with two other works Virgin No. 1 and 2 completed in
July 1912, which result in the two major paintings; The Passage from Virgin to Bride,
(July 1912) and Bride, (August 1912). However Duchamp states in his interview
with Cabanne that the Two Nudes were "a first attempt at The King and the
13 Schwarz 1997, p.11314 Schwarz 1997, p.117
153
Queen."15 In the light of Duchamp's words, this drawing must not be seen from
the erotic perspective of Bride or the Large Glass, but as representative of the chess
King and Queen.
Schwarzes Freudian investigation of the drawing The King and Queen Traversed by
Nudes at High Speed (April 1912) relates the close relationship between Duchamp
and his sister Susan in a psycho-sexual reading of the game of chess. Schwarz
gives an ambiguous quotation by Duchamp from an interview with Kuenzli as
evidence for such an erotic/chess reading.
With this King and Queen . . . sex is established by the same method of suggestion . . . Motion, you will observe, is supplied by a procession of rapidly moving nudes." 16
What Schwarz fails to allow is that the theme of chess may be viewed as a distinct
progression in the development on his previous works concerning chess.
Schwarz states that the King and Queen are surrounded by an erotic atmosphere, or
sexual wave, in the nudes at high speed. As has been argued in previous chapters,
Duchamp's thematic progression of chess is an ever increasing journey into the
intellectual realms of the chess player. Given Duchamp's perspective on the game
since The Chess Game (1910) he never attached an erotic reading to his chess works
of art. Thus in the previous Portrait series Duchamp displays the figures of chess
players who are surrounded by the "motions" of chess pieces in the abstract
worlds that they occupy. Duchamp has continued to show two figures in the King
and Queen series, but this time not two players but two actual chess pieces.
Duchamp's King and Queen draws deeper into the intellectual-dimension of the
chess piece, and the intellectual movements that surround it. Duchamp
described this in a 1964 lecture on his work,
15 Cabanne 1971, p.3516 Ibid, p.114
154
The title King and Queen was once again taken from chess but the players of 1911 have been eliminated and replaced by the chess figures of the king and queen. The swift nudes are a flight of imagination introduced to satisfy my preoccupation of movement still present in this painting . . . it's a theme of motion in a frame of static entities.17
The chess players have been stripped of their naturalistic representation and of
their symbolic notation, becoming abstract entities in their own right. The King
and Queen are surrounded by the abstract thoughts of the chess players and the
actual movements of the pieces.
In the interview with Cabanne, Duchamp specifically speaks of the King and
Queen series and relates it to the similar technical rendered works of Sad Young
Man and Nude Descending a Staircase. Importantly Duchamp does not speak of
any thematic similarities between the King and Queen and the larger body of work
that surrounds it. Picking up on this Cabanne asks Duchamp directly what are
the similarity between the King and Queen and the Nude Descending a Staircase.
Again Duchamp expands on the technical rendering of the work rather than
introducing thematic similarities or imposing an erotic reading of the work,
Cabanne: In this "Nude Descending a Staircase," didn't the use of chronophotography give you the idea, perhaps unconscious at first, the mechanisation of man as apposed to perceptible beauty?
Duchamp: Yes, evidently, that went with it. There is no flesh, only a simplified anatomy, the up and down, the head, the arms and legs. It was a sort of distortion other than that of Cubism. On the tearing in previous canvases, thought was only a slight influence. Also, there was no Futurism, since I didn't know the Futurists - which didn't keep Apollinaire from qualifying a "Sad Young Man" as the Futurist "state of soul." Remember the "states of soul" of Carra and Boccioni. I had never seen them; let's just say that it was a Cubist interpretation of a Futurist formula...
The Futurists, for me, are urban Impressionists who make impressions of the city rather than of the countryside. Nevertheless I was influenced, as one always is, but these things, but I hoped to keep a note personal enough to do my own work.
17 quoted in Henderson, 1998, p.16
155
The parallelism formula I mentioned also played its role in the picture which followed, "The King and the Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes/' the execution of which excited me more than the "Nude Descending a Staircase," but it didn't have the same public repercussion. I don't know why.
Cabanne: Before, there had been "Two Nudes: One Strong and One Swift," a pencil drawing dating form March 1912.
Duchamp: I've just been looking for it at Mr. Bomsel's, because I'm going to show it in London. He is a lawyer who bought it from me in 1930. This drawing was a first attempt at "The King and the Queen." It was the same idea, and it was done around June 1912, the painting having been done in July or August. ..
Cabanne: Is there a tie between "Nude Descending a Staircase" and The King and Queen Crossed by Swift Nudes?"
Duchamp: Very little, but it was even so the same form of thought, if you like. Obviously the difference was in the introduction of the strong nude and the swift nude. Perhaps it was a bit Futurist, because by then I knew about the Futurist, and I changed it into a king and queen. There was the strong nude who was the king; as for the swift nudes, they were the trails which crisscross the painting, which have no anatomical detail, no more than before.18
Here Duchamp has taken us beyond the players to the pieces and the world that
they occupy. The chess pieces have been abstracted, simplified, and
intellectualised. Duchamp is bringing into the visual aesthetic realm of art the
intellectual aesthetic realm of chess.
Cabanne's interview with Duchamp moves into the related work The King and
Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes, (April 1912). A similar work to the King and Queen
in many respects, though there is a subtle reduction in tonal and linear elements.
These subtle changes in the rendering of the work are also noticeable in the title.
Duchamp has moved from using the term "At High Speed" to the single term
"Swift."
18 Cabanne 1971, p.35
156
Duchamp: It was literary play. The word "swift" had been used in sports: and if a man was "swift" he ran well This amused me. "Swift" is less involved with literature than "at high speed." 19
An intellectual 'play' with words and titles to shift meaning from the formal to a
common, popular speech. Once again Duchamp gives no suggestion of a sexual
reference in his work.
Schwarz places amongst this series one final drawing titled The Bride Stripped Bare
by the Bachelors, (July 1912), and directs his reading or perspective of the entire
series from Two Nudes: One Strong, One Swift to The Bride. Schwarz presents this
series of drawings as 'evolving' from Two Nudes into The Bride Stripped Bare by the
Bachelors. Thus for Schwarz, chess is not the focus of the work but only a part of
this evolution towards the Large Glass. For several reasons this 'evolution' is a
mis-association of the works. All drawings concerned with chess in this series
contain two figures, of which Duchamp directly acknowledges their chess titles or
later speaks of their identity. The three drawings were completed over a two
month period, at the end of which Duchamp's Major Work, a large oil painting,
The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes was created. Within this series there
are sublte changes in rendering and titles, but not what could be considered an
evolution beyond itself. Much of the qualities of the initial drawing are contained
in the final oil painting. The Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors (July 1912) is not
concerned with chess. The point that confirms the absence of this drawing from
the theme of chess is that it was completed two months after Duchamp's final oil
painting in July of 1912 and contains the inscription "First research for: the bride
stripped bare by her bachelors."
Personally, I find The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes just as interesting as the Nude Descending a Staircase, even though the public evidently doesn't. You know this was a
19 Ibid, p.35-6
157
chess king and queen - and the picture became a combination of many ironic implications connected with the words 'king and queen.' Here 'the swift nudes,' instead of descending, were included to suggest a different kind of speed, of movement - a kind of flowing around and between the two central figures. The use of nudes completely removed any chance of suggesting an actual scene or an actual king and queen." 20
Duchamp's oil painting The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes was
painted on the back of a canvas of another work. The two works have corrupted
each other physically and thematically. Physically, the two works have been
badly damaged through cracking as Duchamp was not aware of the consequences
of painting on an old pre-used canvas.
Cabanne: You voluntarily painted on the hack of that canvas?Duchamp: Yes, because I didn 't have any others, and I wasn 't enough of a technician to know that it would crack as it has.21
Thematically, as common readings of this chess painting turn the canvas over to
its back for reference. The work from 1910 titled "Adam and Eve in Paradise," is
said to be the lens through which the King and Queen is understood, implying
Duchamp's intentional use of this particular canvas. Historian and theorist, Lebel
writes,
Significantly the final composition was executed on a canvas on the back of which Duchamp in 1910 had painted an Adam and Eve in Paradise. For anyone at all familiar with his symbolism there is more in that than simple coincidence. To the realistic and somewhat grotesquely paradisiacal Adam and Eve of a period still tenderly ironical he opposed the sombre drama of the mechanised King and Queen surrounded or traversed by disquieting meteors." 22
20 Duchamp quoted by Kuh, "Marcel Duchamp:, The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, NY, Harper and Row, 1962, p.8321 Cabanne 1971, p.3622 Lebel, 1975, Marcel Duchamp as a chess player and one or two related matters, Studio International, Jan, p.13
158
Lebel may be familiar with the use of symbolism in Duchamp's art but has not
understood the place in which Duchamp holds symbolism as he regards chess.
When Cabanne asked Duchamp to comment on an entire year's work, from
Spring 1912 to Spring 1913, Duchamp carefully separated his work on chess and
his work for The Bride. There is no suggestion of a united evolution, nor does the
reading of one theme flow into the other. With works like Chocolate Grinder,
Virgin No. 1 and 2, Bride and the Bachelors Duchamp specifically relates the sexual
overtones but he does not do this with his work on chess. Chess must be seen as
thematically distinct in the art of Marcel Duchamp.
159
Trebuchet / Trap (1917) (PLATE 9)
A real coat hanger that I wanted sometime to put on the wall and hang my things on but I never did come to that - so it was on the floor and I would kick it every minute, every time I went out - I got crazy about it and I said the Hell with it, if it wants to stay there and bore me, I'll nail it down . . . and then the association with the Readymade came and it was that."23
To the question, "How do you choose a readymade?" Duchamp replied: It chooses you, so to speak. 24
Much has been said and written about the Readymade, which is arguably the
most enduring Duchampian legacy.25 The first readymade chosen by Duchamp
was Bicycle Wheel in 1914, three years previous to Trebuchet (Trap).
Trebuchet is at the centre of the commentary by art theorist Thierry de Duve
concerning the creation of a readymade art object, de Duve explains that a
readymade is a "kind of rendezvous"26 or an encounter of an object with an author.
Via this encounter the artist selects and removes the object from its original
context, gives it a new title, and has a new concept of the object: Art. The title
"Art" has been given to the object and it becomes the readymade. The artist’s
choice is critical in this process, but de Duve argues that the object plays a role
also. Duchamp said, "it chooses you" 27 de Duve uses Duchamp's encounter with
the coat rack and the process of it becoming a readymade as an example for this.
Yet, de Duve does not see that Trebuchet is unlike other readymades that
Duchamp made. Other readymades are passive objects and involve the artist
encountering them in the regular context of the everyday. Works like In Advance
of the Broken Arm, Comb, Fountain were all taken out of the everyday and were
23 McShine, La Vie en Rrose, in Marcel Duchamp, New York, Museum of Modem Art, 1973 p.28324 de Duve, 1996, p.39725 Joselit, p.16326 de Duve 1996, p.39627 Ibid
160
transformed into the Readymade by the artist. Where as Trebuchet was an
everyday object out of context when it encountered Duchamp. The encounter
with the artist was indeed singular when compared to the other readymades. The
out of context coat rack created a dangerous obstacle for Duchamp. In Trebuchet,
unlike any other readymade a thematic element was added by Duchamp, and
creating an intimate link, between the object, the encounter, and the title of the
work. With works like, Fountain, Bicycle Wheel, and Bottle Rack, there was an
encounter with the object and the artist, critical in the choosing of the work as art,
but not critical to understanding the work. These works also are not references,
visually or thematically, to anything beyond themselves. Trebuchet is a readymade
circa chess. The title Trebuchet draws directly from a theoretical position in chess.
Duchamp, through the title of the work, directs our attention toward the
paradigm of chess. Trebuchet is a tactical move that incites a player into a
position that will ultimately cause them to lose an advantage, a piece or the game.
The analogy of being tripped by the inverted coat rack is obvious.
Chess is the model of the readymade put into action, both within the painterly plane of the chessboard and in the world of everyday life.28
Thus far, chess has represented a shift away from the everyday space and
experience of the viewer. The art theorist Joselit (1998) argues that Trebuchet is an
instance where Duchamp takes a new direction, showing a projection of the world
of chess into the world of Duchamp's studio or into common space. Here
Duchamp becomes the chess piece tripped by the Trebuchet that was set by
himself. Importantly this object, which initially gave itself to Duchamp out of
context, remains untouched by the artist (except for the act of nailing it down,
which is only to maintain its initial out-of-context nature). As Duchamp has
continually presented chess as a separate realm from the everyday it seems
28 Joselit, 1998 p.163
161
appropriate that such a readymade will have a similar characteristic. Chess as a
theme in Duchamp's art remains in his work out of context from the everyday
space of his studio. When the viewer encounters Trebuchet, they are taken into the
realm of an object out of context, in the very same way as the artist. In the same
way Duchamp directs us to experience the tactical disappoint of the trap in a
game. An experience he theorised in his book L'opposition et les cases conjuguées
sont réconciliées (1932).
It is worth showing here Schwarz's perspective on the readymade Trebuchet.
Two sentences from James Joyce's Ulysses may give us an insight into the latent motivations for Duchamp's choice of his next Readymade, a common coatrack that he nailed to the floor and gave the title Trebuchet (Trap, 1917): "It would have served her just right if she had tripped up over something accidentally on purpose with her high crooked French heels on her to make her look tall and got a fine tumble. Tableau! That would have been a very charming expose fo r a gentleman like that to witness." . . . this object gratified Duchamp's voyeuristic proclivities; the same holds true fo r Trebuchet - all the more so because, as it was fixed to the floor of the studio, it was quite likely to provoke an incident such as that described by Joyce. 29
Here Schwarz is suggesting that the encounter with the object was not concerned
with the artist and the object, but was nothing more than a mischievous scheme
by a young artist to entrap a virgin. Such a clumsy theory applied with such a
broad brush by Schwarz sadly displaces much of the context and content of this
work and does not acknowledge the explicit chess reference that Duchamp has
made.
29 Schwarz 1997, p.200
162
Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy (1921) (PLATE 16)
Poster for the Third French Chess Championship (1925) (PLATE 15)
& Pocket Chess Set with Rubber Glove (1944) (PLATE 22)
The theme of chess in the art of Marcel Duchamp is drawing us deeper and
deeper into itself. Via the readymade, the paradigm of chess become part of the
physical world around us, to the point where the viewer and artist becomes the
actual chess pieces 'trapped' in a game, only to meet a disastrous end.
Shifts away from the dimensions of the everyday into another world was a
rallying point for many philosophers, mathematicians, artists, and scientists at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. Much thought was given to notions of the
fourth dimension, or dimension and non-Euclidean geometry, which entered
popular discussion and debate. This scientific, mathematical, and philosophical
musing by many of Duchamp's contemporaries had significant influence on
Duchamp's art, and also concerned him at a different level as it related to his
involvement in, and representation of, chess.
Popular literature connecting mirrors and the fourth dimension would have reinforced Duchamp's interest in the mirror as well. Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass dealt with the themes of Chess and mirrors, with definite overtones of higher dimensions. Although less likely to have been known to Duchamp, George Macdonald's 1895 fantasy Lilith made use of multiple mirrors in a way that parallels Duchamp's interest in A l'infinitif in a "3-sided mirror." 30
Through popular scientific and mathematical texts, Duchamp became fascinated
with the theorists Poincare and Jouffret, who used chess to explain the
visualisation and representation of the fourth dimension. Jouffret suggested that
30 Duchamp mentions such a mirror in two notes in A l'infinitif (Salt Seller, pp.88, 94, Henderson 1983, p.154
163
it was equivalent to a chess player, playing blindfolded, a number of different
games at the one time. Such a player needs to separate themselves from their
immediate surroundings and to enter a higher intellectual realm. It was possible
to enter this realm he concluded, but "one who devoted his life to it could perhaps
eventually be able to picture the fourth dimension."31 What was needed was to
stretch ones intelligence to the point of breaking, beyond the 'planes' that contain
us within three dimensions.
The work Why not sneeze Rose Selavy is Duchamp's visual exploration into the nth-
dimension via chess, inspired by Jouffret (and others theorists). In this work
Duchamp has attempted to represent a chess board that has been moved beyond
its usual two dimensions into the fourth dimension. The board is moved into
three dimensions, as each square becomes a cube of marble, and the board's
fragmentation and its random dispersal in spaces, as the cubes fill the small cage,
creates a further shift into the fourth. Importantly the object can only be seen to
have entered the fourth dimension if its original 'thought' is maintained. The
original thought being that the work is still a chess board.
Noting the similarity between the aleatory accumulation of marble units in this object and the jumble of cubes that forms the foreground of Duchamp's 1925 poster for the French Chess Championship in ice, Herbert Damisch has suggested that the contents of Why Not Sneeze? might be considered a collapsed or dimensionally transposed chessboard. He even stipulates that the number of cubes that would occur in a three dimensional chessboard space (8x8x8=512) is a numerical anagram of the 152 cubed marbles in the cage. 32
This visual theme of falling cubes in space was repeated by Duchamp in a design
for the Poster of the Third French Chess Championship, of 1925. He developed the
poster from a photograph of building blocks lumped together in a sack made of
31 Henderson 1983, p.7332 Joselit 1998, p.165
164
netting. The building blocks can be related to the architectural model that
Duchamp used in his note that refers to Jouffret.
Duchamps poster for the French Chess Championship of Nice done in 1925 is possibly a geometric illustration of the two- dimensional squares of a chessboard (cases) displacing themselves into the three-dimensional cubes involved in four-dimensional projective geometry (also cases). The cases in Duchamp's illustration are randomly clumped, suggesting that they are organised along the infinite number of axes of four-dimensional space that are each perpendicular to three-dimensional space. 33
His building blocks can be interpreted as three-dimensional 'sections' of a four
dimensional space, replicated like the mass-produced marble cubes in Why Not
Sneeze Rose Selavy T34 Schwarz picks up on a further element present in both Why
not sneeze Rose Selavy and the chess poster - chance - represented by the 'chance'
grouping of the cubes. Chess is now seen to contain an element not usually
associated with the game.35
The one possible formal influence of Bragdon on Duchamp occurred only later, in the 1920's, in Duchamp’s poster for the French Chess Championship held in Nice in 1925. It has been suggested that Duchamp's image is the three-dimensional analogue of a chessboard, with strong die-like overtones, but his tumbling cubes are also very reminiscent of Bragdon's falling cubes of A Primer of Higher Space. Now, however, Bragdon's two-dimensional black sections of the plane cling to the cubes themselves. In 1911 Duchamp had been stimulated by his reading of Jouffret to create a four-dimensional Portrait of Chess Players. Perhaps in his 1925 poster Duchamp was now relying on another author on the fourth dimension to create a private symbol for the game of chess.36
33 Adcock, 1983 Marcel Duchamp's Notes for the Large Glass: An n-dimensicmal analysis. Mich., Ann Arbor, p.61)34 Ibid, p.8235 Schwarz 1997, p.70836 Henderson 1983, p201
165
Furthermore, Pocket Chess Set with Rubber glove is also thematically concerned with
Duchamp's investigations into the fourth dimension. Duchamp has combined two
examples used to explain the fourth dimension; chess, seen as a kinematic
metaphor, and the glove, seen as a rotation metaphor within the fourth dimension,
are used by the scientist Jouffret.37
Pocket Chess Set with Rubber Glove was first exhibited in 1944 at an exhibition
Duchamp organised, The Imagery of Chess, at the Julian Levy's Gallery. During the
opening night, Duchamp invited the world champion of blindfold chess, George
Koltanowski to play five simultaneous blindfold games against Alfred Barr,
Jr.,Max Ernst, Fredrick Kiesler, Julien Levy, Dorotha Tanning, and Dr. Gegory
Zelboorg.38.
In the Traite, Jouffret uses examples of chess players who play blindfolded to illustrate the difficulty of conceptualising the fourdimensional continuum. Perhaps like chess, the beauty of the fourth dimension is "completely in one's gray matter."39
Through Pocket Chess Set with Rubber Glove Duchamp is making further reference or quotation about the fourth dimension via chess.
37 Adcock, p. 17438 Ibid, p.17539 Ibid, p. 174
166
Nude Seated at a Chess Board (1963) (PLATE 17)
In 1963 Duchamp attended the premiere of his own retrospective at the Pasadena
Art Museum, and was photographed playing chess with a nude model, Eve Babitz.
The concept for these photographs was not Duchamp's, but photographer Julian
Wasser's.40 Through Duchamps participation in this event, he has given his
endorsement. The photographs of this event have become notorious and given that
Duchamp was at that time secretly working on Étant donnés (an overtly sexual
work that deals with theories of perceptions) it is tempting to see this as
confirmation of the eros/chess link. Such an act by Duchamp would seem to
rubber stamp the position that Schwarz and other theorists have held. At the time
of this event Duchamp was well aware of the multiple theories that had been
developed. I suggest that this event was used by Duchamp to build a further layer
of mystery around chess. Further enabling him to become the enigma, to put those
who sought after him off the scent. A scent that led away from the paradigm of art
into the paradigm of chess and traversed the intellectual realms of science and
mathematics. It was here, that Duchamp ultimately confronted his Nude, Bride or
Virgin. She has been captured for Duchamp at the chess board. But, so has
Duchamp been captured by her. The artist becomes the object, the chess player, and
the nude becomes the artist, the chess player. It may be seen that neither nude nor
artist exist at the chess board, both become the chess player. Their eyes gaze down
at the board with that analytical machine like gaze. The nude is thinking the same
abstract language as the artist. They meet over common non-retinal ground with
equal power. White vs. Black. Artist vs. Subject. The retinal worlds dissolve
about them as they dance on black and white squares. Thus, in the retinal world,
the artist has become objectified by the photographer, for our gaze. The woman in
her nudity, the artist in his aging weakness, both become the chess player.
40 Esquire 1991, 1 was a naked pawn for art. 16 no. 3, p.164
167
PLATE 1
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)
Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels, each mounted between two glass panels. 227.5 x 175 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art
168
PLATE 5
The King and Queen Traversed by Nudes at High Speed
Watercolour and gouache on paper, 48.9 x 59.1 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art
172
PLATEÓ
The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes
Pencil on paper, 27.3 x 39cm Philadelphia Museum of Art
173
PLATE 7
The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes
Oil on Canvas, 114 x 128.5 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art
174
PLATE 9
Trebuchet (Trap)
Assisted Readymade: coat rack nailed to the floor Original lost, dimensions not recorded
176
PLATE 15
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niceIM P O f l 'F C U I* E U * OE N ic e
1925 French Chess Championships
Unsighned edition on lightweight paper 77 x 58 cm
182
PLATE 16
Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy?
152 marble cubes in the shape of sugar lumps, a thermometer, and a cuttlebonea small birdcage
Philadelphia Museum of Art
PLATE 19
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Arensberg chess score, Philadelphia Museum of Art
C/zess Designs
Philadephia Museum of Art
186
PLATE 20
Six Studies for Portrait of Chess Players
Pencil, ink, and watercolou on paper, various sizes Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Guggenheim Museum NY,Collection Georges Marci Bianchi, Gstaad, Switzerland,
Collection Alexina Duchmap, France Collection of Jacqueline Matisse Monnier, France
187
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