How Non-Retinal Art was Defeated by the Crystal
- Posted: 30.Jun.2008.
(In correspondence with Jeremy Millar, who has created a number of art pieces that deal with Duchamp and chess, I mentioned my theory of how chess went through a period of rationalization and that Duchamp was crushed under its feet. Now I have tried to write down what I mean. It is rather longish (if I had more time I would have written you a smaller letter) and there is lot more I could write and there is also a lot I could edit but I have been working on this for too long already. When I write about chess I want to play chess, when I play chess everything else suffers. Like any addict I have no control over my consumption. My choice is between total rejection and total commitment, between life and death. One day, if the time is right, I hope to return to this.)
[image: in chess a straight line is not the shortest route]
Here are two possible views on the life of Marcel Duchamp. 1) He was one of the most original and most influential artists of the 20th century who devoted too much of his energy and brilliance to chess. 2) He was a reasonably talented chess player who could have achieved better ranking had he not wasted so much of his games by insisting to play for beauty above all else. To art history the latter option will be heresy but to everyone who has felt the obsessive power of chess will not exclude it out of hand. Chess is a disease, a mind invader, a neurological parasite: when Duchamp said he was a victim of chess he was not being melodramatic.
Emanuel Lasker, World champion between 1894 and 1921, said about Duchamp's style that he always played the most beautiful move instead of the best move. Lasker, a philosopher, a gamer (he played go, cards and invented the connection game Lasca), a friend of Albert Einstein, was not a dull man; his chess writing has lost nothing of their liveliness. But for him there was no difference between the two, the best move was also the most beautiful move. It is the philosophy of a man who played to win. In chess one can play with a certain intuitive lightness of touch that aims at the creation of novel and interesting positions rather than safe and trusted ones. All chess players want to win, Duchamp's complication was that he wanted to win with grace, alas, in chess as everywhere else, the classics are classics for a reason and being different comes at a price.
Duchamp approached chess as another medium he could use to express his mind, but chess does not allow for artistic creativity in this sense. The only thing chess can express is chess. Chess is not played, chess plays it self by making zombies of everyone who comes near it for too long. Chess needs people to generate all possible positions it can legally assume and once this has been achieved the game (and quite possibly the universe with it) will implode into nothingness. The number of all possible games is bigger than the number of atoms in the known universe, but chess, unlike nature, does have meaning, and therefore purpose. The philosophical term for meaning in chess is VICTORY, spelled with The V of Vanity, the I of Idiocy, the C of Compulsive, the T of Terrified, the O of Obsessive, the R of Repugnancy and the Y of Mathematics Gone Bad. The cunning symmetrical argument developed in 'Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled', Duchamp's 1932 end-game study co-authored with Vitaly Halberstadt, might be a collectable aside in Duchamp's art legacy, it does not bring you victory. In chess this book has the same status as the Rice Gambit or the matches between Napoleon and the Turk: that of an amusing but insignificant curiosity. In fact, Duchamp the chess player is himself a leftover pawn, an anomaly, a relic of an earlier age. Duchamp may have changed the game of art for good, in chess he was just another woodpusher. To understand why this is so one has to look at the way chess has developed from a micro-world in chaos into an agent of order.
Like the laws of psychics can only partially explain the forms of biology, the laws of chess can't be explained by the rules. We take it for granted that chess is a rational game, that it has general principles, that each move, from the first move to the last move, is connected to all moves that follow in one long chain of events. The astonishing fact is how relatively late this was discovered to be the case. For most of its history chess was a a kind of alchemy, a free-for-all happy-go-lucky affair. Chess games were unpredictable and showy rather than solid and reliable, games progressed from one transmutation to the next without any sign of being connected. The generally accepted credo was to "get your pieces out". The first moves were used to bring all the major pieces into a position where they could freely attack and form alliances. In certain times and at certain places this disregard for the opening went so far that the first ten moves or so were done by both players at the same time. Once the pieces were out, those obstacles called pawns moved out of the way, the game could begin. Each player would look for opportunities to attack by creating combinations that would force your opponent in a position where he or she lost pieces or was made otherwise vulnerable. If possible a combination should have you sacrifice at least your Queen before resulting in an inescapable checkmate. Player were playing to outwit the opponent by small dashes that went from brainwave to brainwave. When a plan failed they would just come up with another one for as long as there were pieces to play with. From this period dates the idea of chess as an art, as an experiment in the sculpture of force fields and interlocking patterns. But this pristine and naive charm was to be forever discarded as inefficient by one man. Wilhelm Steinitz had already become world-champion by playing in the old style, at the Vienna tournament of 1873 he displayed his new principles that would push chess out of the domain of magic and into the orderly world of science.
To be fair, chess had theory, history and openings with pedigree before Steinitz came along, but his theory offered a power of explanation, a level of coherence, that was unthinkably before him. Steinitz was the first to assume that there should be a right move for every move. That from the first move onwards games should unravel by applying general principles, every move should have a function. This insistence on the fact that games are not individual incidents, or accidents, but are all connected by the collective effort of the chess community to find absolute perfection, turned chess into a game of strategy. Steinitz application of long term planning, of accumulating small benefits into decisive ones, turned the wizards of combinatorics into schoolboys. Emanual Lasker in his 1947 'Manual of Chess' describes the impact of Steinitz' method as a conceptual leap beyond the comprehension of his peers. To some, unable to explain what came over them, it seemed like a form of foul play:
The drama recalls the Highland story retold by Walter Scott that warns against playing chess against a ghost or a spirit because the being, with its superior understanding, will always win and take your favourite daughter in the process.
The philosophers stone of Steinitz, in the words of Lasker, had a very strong implication: chess has a solution, a secret formula, a sequence of moves that when playing white will always bring you at least a draw. Once Steinitz was shown to be correct the hunt for the perfect game was on. And as each game begins with the first move the importance of sound knowledge of openings sky-rocketed.
Openings are subject to constant scrutiny, new variations are tried, tested and eventually dismissed or accepted as 'true'. Truth in chess has the precise meaning of guaranteeing even balance. A good opening has an inbuilt immune system that will keep at bay an unknown number of attacks that would upset the balance against you. All creditable counter-moves have long been filtered out and 'black' will have to engineer more subtle beasts to infiltrate and weaken your forces. With the computer in hand these perfectly balanced sequences are moving into the middle game. Any deviation from the known line is dangerous in case your opponent knows how to exploit it. Current day chess talk in many ways resembles that of the hacker. This makes sense as an important skill of current day top chess is knowing how to use the available software to your advantage. And to know when not to trust it. The downside of all this knowledge is that trusted variations are recreated on the board from memory instead of created from scratch behind the board. One piece of recent folklore relates how Kramnik lost a resumed game he was about to win because his computer did not have the time to calculate all possible answers to the move he planned to made the next day. His opponent did think at the board, located the weak spot, and won the game.
The rationalizing of chess has changed the way chess is played and experienced. The crux is that you do not try to win, you try to play with such rigour that your opponent cannot but admit defeat. A chess player does not drift, he does not operate under influence of a bad moon, strategy will get him if he does. It is true that Lasker was believed to employ psychological play, that he would play a move not because it was the best move in absolute terms but the best move against a certain player (he always denied this). Romantic play is still possible, if you are good enough. Their have been chess players who were a force unto themselves apparently free from Steinitz' gravity. Bobby Fischer once won a game by playing a new variation which after long analysis, seemed secure to the chess community. When somebody tried this variation against Fischer he solved it. Chess moves forward by a process of elimination and deviations from the path cleared by Steinitz are always brought back into the fold eventually. Everybody loves the daring waste of energy and resources the ‘genius’ puts into it, but history shows that it is always the pennywise play of the accountant that pays off in the end.
It is in this process, even though at his time it was still in its early days, Duchamp was caught up. In art he could be a genius, but in chess the days that rewarded his special talent was already anticipated by the calculating mind to whose demands he had to live up but could not. There was still art in chess but the artful could be shown in lesser games, because in most games it would amount to suicide. And it was not art in the way Duchamp understood it but art in the way a computer programmer or a medical doctor would define art in his or her profession, as a display of great skill. Duchamp knew he was beaten. Julien Levy, Duchamps American dealer believed Duchamp had started too late to ever make it at the absolute top. The 'memory people', the chess drones, had made it impossible to rely on talent and creativity, no matter how excessive, alone. Chess has become a game of theoretical technicality, but the raw quality (and the rationality) of its players is still the same as it was 150 years ago. Steinitz and Lasker would be beaten by any of today's grandmasters, not because they are better players but because they know more. Bobby Fischer, for one, resented this situation and proposed 960Chess or Fischer Random Chess as one solution to free the game of its history. Even though 960Chess does what it is designed for, namely makes you enjoy pure chess, it at same time is not really chess.
Chess is not exhausted and psychological play is still with us, but the ultimate by-effect of the revolution of Steinitz will be it’s expulsion. A few decades ago a human player knew he could always beat a chess program by making a move whose only function was to confuse the computer's algorithms. Another useful suggestion was to go through the popular databases of recorded games and look for typo's that would derail the computer into mayhem if your would get it into recreating it. These days you can better admit defeat instead of relying on horse-medicines like these. Chess might not yet be perfected but no human can beat the computer. Instead we just start over and over again and are crushed in awe and humility. In the past every chess player overrated his or hers ability, of Steinitz himself it is said that at the end of his life he believed he could challenge God and win. Now we know that our ability lives in the shadow of a standard we can never again reach. This is a good thing.
- Posted: 30.Jun.2008.
(In correspondence with Jeremy Millar, who has created a number of art pieces that deal with Duchamp and chess, I mentioned my theory of how chess went through a period of rationalization and that Duchamp was crushed under its feet. Now I have tried to write down what I mean. It is rather longish (if I had more time I would have written you a smaller letter) and there is lot more I could write and there is also a lot I could edit but I have been working on this for too long already. When I write about chess I want to play chess, when I play chess everything else suffers. Like any addict I have no control over my consumption. My choice is between total rejection and total commitment, between life and death. One day, if the time is right, I hope to return to this.)
[image: in chess a straight line is not the shortest route]
Here are two possible views on the life of Marcel Duchamp. 1) He was one of the most original and most influential artists of the 20th century who devoted too much of his energy and brilliance to chess. 2) He was a reasonably talented chess player who could have achieved better ranking had he not wasted so much of his games by insisting to play for beauty above all else. To art history the latter option will be heresy but to everyone who has felt the obsessive power of chess will not exclude it out of hand. Chess is a disease, a mind invader, a neurological parasite: when Duchamp said he was a victim of chess he was not being melodramatic.
Emanuel Lasker, World champion between 1894 and 1921, said about Duchamp's style that he always played the most beautiful move instead of the best move. Lasker, a philosopher, a gamer (he played go, cards and invented the connection game Lasca), a friend of Albert Einstein, was not a dull man; his chess writing has lost nothing of their liveliness. But for him there was no difference between the two, the best move was also the most beautiful move. It is the philosophy of a man who played to win. In chess one can play with a certain intuitive lightness of touch that aims at the creation of novel and interesting positions rather than safe and trusted ones. All chess players want to win, Duchamp's complication was that he wanted to win with grace, alas, in chess as everywhere else, the classics are classics for a reason and being different comes at a price.
Duchamp approached chess as another medium he could use to express his mind, but chess does not allow for artistic creativity in this sense. The only thing chess can express is chess. Chess is not played, chess plays it self by making zombies of everyone who comes near it for too long. Chess needs people to generate all possible positions it can legally assume and once this has been achieved the game (and quite possibly the universe with it) will implode into nothingness. The number of all possible games is bigger than the number of atoms in the known universe, but chess, unlike nature, does have meaning, and therefore purpose. The philosophical term for meaning in chess is VICTORY, spelled with The V of Vanity, the I of Idiocy, the C of Compulsive, the T of Terrified, the O of Obsessive, the R of Repugnancy and the Y of Mathematics Gone Bad. The cunning symmetrical argument developed in 'Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled', Duchamp's 1932 end-game study co-authored with Vitaly Halberstadt, might be a collectable aside in Duchamp's art legacy, it does not bring you victory. In chess this book has the same status as the Rice Gambit or the matches between Napoleon and the Turk: that of an amusing but insignificant curiosity. In fact, Duchamp the chess player is himself a leftover pawn, an anomaly, a relic of an earlier age. Duchamp may have changed the game of art for good, in chess he was just another woodpusher. To understand why this is so one has to look at the way chess has developed from a micro-world in chaos into an agent of order.
Like the laws of psychics can only partially explain the forms of biology, the laws of chess can't be explained by the rules. We take it for granted that chess is a rational game, that it has general principles, that each move, from the first move to the last move, is connected to all moves that follow in one long chain of events. The astonishing fact is how relatively late this was discovered to be the case. For most of its history chess was a a kind of alchemy, a free-for-all happy-go-lucky affair. Chess games were unpredictable and showy rather than solid and reliable, games progressed from one transmutation to the next without any sign of being connected. The generally accepted credo was to "get your pieces out". The first moves were used to bring all the major pieces into a position where they could freely attack and form alliances. In certain times and at certain places this disregard for the opening went so far that the first ten moves or so were done by both players at the same time. Once the pieces were out, those obstacles called pawns moved out of the way, the game could begin. Each player would look for opportunities to attack by creating combinations that would force your opponent in a position where he or she lost pieces or was made otherwise vulnerable. If possible a combination should have you sacrifice at least your Queen before resulting in an inescapable checkmate. Player were playing to outwit the opponent by small dashes that went from brainwave to brainwave. When a plan failed they would just come up with another one for as long as there were pieces to play with. From this period dates the idea of chess as an art, as an experiment in the sculpture of force fields and interlocking patterns. But this pristine and naive charm was to be forever discarded as inefficient by one man. Wilhelm Steinitz had already become world-champion by playing in the old style, at the Vienna tournament of 1873 he displayed his new principles that would push chess out of the domain of magic and into the orderly world of science.
To be fair, chess had theory, history and openings with pedigree before Steinitz came along, but his theory offered a power of explanation, a level of coherence, that was unthinkably before him. Steinitz was the first to assume that there should be a right move for every move. That from the first move onwards games should unravel by applying general principles, every move should have a function. This insistence on the fact that games are not individual incidents, or accidents, but are all connected by the collective effort of the chess community to find absolute perfection, turned chess into a game of strategy. Steinitz application of long term planning, of accumulating small benefits into decisive ones, turned the wizards of combinatorics into schoolboys. Emanual Lasker in his 1947 'Manual of Chess' describes the impact of Steinitz' method as a conceptual leap beyond the comprehension of his peers. To some, unable to explain what came over them, it seemed like a form of foul play:
"How novel, how surprising, how opposed to every sentiment of his time the conceptions of Steinitz must have been becomes manifest when in play over the games of the greatest match won by him, the one against Zukertort. Zukertort relied on combinations, and in that field he was a discoverer, a creative genius. For all that, in the majority of the games of the match, though he had lost none of his faculty, he was unable to make use of it, the positions yielding no result to his passionate search for combinations. Steinitz seemed to have the mysterious capacity for divining combinations before they were realizable on the board, to encourage combinations favourable to himself and to forestall those which were unfavourable. Thus Zukertort, the great discoverer, searched in vain, whereas Steinitz, rather a poor hand at combinations, was able to foresee them. Zukertort could not understand how Steinitz was able to prevent combinations nor how he could win by such a method, since up to that time - this seemed to Zukertort indisputable - games, fairly won, had been won by fine combinations. Zukertort tried for four years to solve this riddle, but he never approached its solution by even one step, and he lost the mastery that he possessed in the bargain. He died a comparatively young man."
The drama recalls the Highland story retold by Walter Scott that warns against playing chess against a ghost or a spirit because the being, with its superior understanding, will always win and take your favourite daughter in the process.
The philosophers stone of Steinitz, in the words of Lasker, had a very strong implication: chess has a solution, a secret formula, a sequence of moves that when playing white will always bring you at least a draw. Once Steinitz was shown to be correct the hunt for the perfect game was on. And as each game begins with the first move the importance of sound knowledge of openings sky-rocketed.
Openings are subject to constant scrutiny, new variations are tried, tested and eventually dismissed or accepted as 'true'. Truth in chess has the precise meaning of guaranteeing even balance. A good opening has an inbuilt immune system that will keep at bay an unknown number of attacks that would upset the balance against you. All creditable counter-moves have long been filtered out and 'black' will have to engineer more subtle beasts to infiltrate and weaken your forces. With the computer in hand these perfectly balanced sequences are moving into the middle game. Any deviation from the known line is dangerous in case your opponent knows how to exploit it. Current day chess talk in many ways resembles that of the hacker. This makes sense as an important skill of current day top chess is knowing how to use the available software to your advantage. And to know when not to trust it. The downside of all this knowledge is that trusted variations are recreated on the board from memory instead of created from scratch behind the board. One piece of recent folklore relates how Kramnik lost a resumed game he was about to win because his computer did not have the time to calculate all possible answers to the move he planned to made the next day. His opponent did think at the board, located the weak spot, and won the game.
The rationalizing of chess has changed the way chess is played and experienced. The crux is that you do not try to win, you try to play with such rigour that your opponent cannot but admit defeat. A chess player does not drift, he does not operate under influence of a bad moon, strategy will get him if he does. It is true that Lasker was believed to employ psychological play, that he would play a move not because it was the best move in absolute terms but the best move against a certain player (he always denied this). Romantic play is still possible, if you are good enough. Their have been chess players who were a force unto themselves apparently free from Steinitz' gravity. Bobby Fischer once won a game by playing a new variation which after long analysis, seemed secure to the chess community. When somebody tried this variation against Fischer he solved it. Chess moves forward by a process of elimination and deviations from the path cleared by Steinitz are always brought back into the fold eventually. Everybody loves the daring waste of energy and resources the ‘genius’ puts into it, but history shows that it is always the pennywise play of the accountant that pays off in the end.
It is in this process, even though at his time it was still in its early days, Duchamp was caught up. In art he could be a genius, but in chess the days that rewarded his special talent was already anticipated by the calculating mind to whose demands he had to live up but could not. There was still art in chess but the artful could be shown in lesser games, because in most games it would amount to suicide. And it was not art in the way Duchamp understood it but art in the way a computer programmer or a medical doctor would define art in his or her profession, as a display of great skill. Duchamp knew he was beaten. Julien Levy, Duchamps American dealer believed Duchamp had started too late to ever make it at the absolute top. The 'memory people', the chess drones, had made it impossible to rely on talent and creativity, no matter how excessive, alone. Chess has become a game of theoretical technicality, but the raw quality (and the rationality) of its players is still the same as it was 150 years ago. Steinitz and Lasker would be beaten by any of today's grandmasters, not because they are better players but because they know more. Bobby Fischer, for one, resented this situation and proposed 960Chess or Fischer Random Chess as one solution to free the game of its history. Even though 960Chess does what it is designed for, namely makes you enjoy pure chess, it at same time is not really chess.
Chess is not exhausted and psychological play is still with us, but the ultimate by-effect of the revolution of Steinitz will be it’s expulsion. A few decades ago a human player knew he could always beat a chess program by making a move whose only function was to confuse the computer's algorithms. Another useful suggestion was to go through the popular databases of recorded games and look for typo's that would derail the computer into mayhem if your would get it into recreating it. These days you can better admit defeat instead of relying on horse-medicines like these. Chess might not yet be perfected but no human can beat the computer. Instead we just start over and over again and are crushed in awe and humility. In the past every chess player overrated his or hers ability, of Steinitz himself it is said that at the end of his life he believed he could challenge God and win. Now we know that our ability lives in the shadow of a standard we can never again reach. This is a good thing.
Duchamp vs Cage [In a game of Chess]
- Posted: 30.Aug.2007.
Mr DataisNature mailed in a fine addition to the Duchamp+Chess tag: pictures of Marcel Duchamp playing with a chess-board-intrument. Playing beautiful never did mean the same!
- Posted: 30.Aug.2007.
Mr DataisNature mailed in a fine addition to the Duchamp+Chess tag: pictures of Marcel Duchamp playing with a chess-board-intrument. Playing beautiful never did mean the same!
Chess Books from the Archives
- Posted: 19.Jan.2007.
This small gallery includes pictures of chess book by Marcel Duchamp.
- Posted: 19.Jan.2007.
This small gallery includes pictures of chess book by Marcel Duchamp.
Duchamp's Studio
- Posted: 18.Apr.2009.
Found amidst a collection of studios. Notice the Chess board, pic dates to 1916/1917.
- Posted: 18.Apr.2009.
Found amidst a collection of studios. Notice the Chess board, pic dates to 1916/1917.
Play Chess Olli
- Posted: 12.Dec.2009.
(Click for full size)
Komar and Melamid are a Russion duo who you have admire for their work on elephant conservation in Thailand. The elephant paintings are all great but their tongue-in-cheek art jokes are jaded. Take the above 'prank' for instance: if they would really know their stuff they would have taught the elephants chess, because painting is only minor art by comparison.
- Posted: 12.Dec.2009.
(Click for full size)
Komar and Melamid are a Russion duo who you have admire for their work on elephant conservation in Thailand. The elephant paintings are all great but their tongue-in-cheek art jokes are jaded. Take the above 'prank' for instance: if they would really know their stuff they would have taught the elephants chess, because painting is only minor art by comparison.
Chess and the Nude [6]
- Posted: 14.Mar.2007.
(Click for full size)
The Woman in the Duchamp picture is Eve Babitz. Mr Epram had dug up an interview with her as well a picture from a different angle.
- Posted: 14.Mar.2007.
(Click for full size)
The Woman in the Duchamp picture is Eve Babitz. Mr Epram had dug up an interview with her as well a picture from a different angle.
MS. BABITZ: He said he had this great idea that I should play chess naked with Marcel Duchamp and it seem to be such a great idea that it was just like the best idea I'd ever heard in my life. It was like a great idea. I mean, it was, not only was it vengeance, it was art, and it was like a great idea. And even if it didn't get any vengeance, it would still turn out okay with me because, you know, it would be sort of immortalized. I would be this, you know, here's this Nude Descending the Staircase guy and now he's going to be The Nude in the Pasadena Art Museum.
Chess and the Nude [1]
- Posted: 14.Mar.2007.
(Click for full size)
Marcel Duchamp and a naked friend playing chess for the sake of art and psychoanalysis. 1963.
- Posted: 14.Mar.2007.
(Click for full size)
Marcel Duchamp and a naked friend playing chess for the sake of art and psychoanalysis. 1963.
Non-Retinal Art is Conservative
- Posted: 12.Jun.2008.
What was Duchamp's position in chess? Ralph Rumney (yes the inventor of psychogeography) wants to know. Shown is Duchamp with a Max Ernst chess set.
- Posted: 12.Jun.2008.
What was Duchamp's position in chess? Ralph Rumney (yes the inventor of psychogeography) wants to know. Shown is Duchamp with a Max Ernst chess set.
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.
Consul Rumney
- Posted: 05.Jul.2009.
Ralph Rumney, if you like, is the dark horse of situationism, the secret factor kept close to the chest by the -so called, self styled- connoisseurs. The Consul, translated from the french even though Rumney was English, is a fine piece of oral history (in the form of an interview) that is best read to learn a little about the personalities of people like Jorn and Debord. The cover shows Rumney playing chess with a set of his own design, now lost. Earlier I posted a little snippet of Rumney discussing the chess of Duchamp, it now appears that Rumney played chess with Duchamp and that Duchamp let him win after making him feel to be far superior.
- Posted: 05.Jul.2009.
Ralph Rumney, if you like, is the dark horse of situationism, the secret factor kept close to the chest by the -so called, self styled- connoisseurs. The Consul, translated from the french even though Rumney was English, is a fine piece of oral history (in the form of an interview) that is best read to learn a little about the personalities of people like Jorn and Debord. The cover shows Rumney playing chess with a set of his own design, now lost. Earlier I posted a little snippet of Rumney discussing the chess of Duchamp, it now appears that Rumney played chess with Duchamp and that Duchamp let him win after making him feel to be far superior.
Duchamp asked if I knew how to play chess because then we could chat while we were playing. As we played, he began laying little traps for me. Then he let himself be beaten. I'm a very average chess player. Chess isn't a game of intelligence but of memory and calculation. It's like poker, like almost all games chance that man has invented. If you can remember all you have to, you win. If you have a shaky memory, you lose. As I was leaving at the end of the evening I thought, shit, I forgot to talk to him about Jackson Pollock.
Marcel Duchamp [The Human Chess Computer]
- Posted: 24.Jan.2007.
A letter with chess notations from Marcel Duchamp to his Gallerist Julien Levy. The board is Rubber-Stamped in the best mail-art tradition. The notational system resembles the search-trees you nowaday find in AI-text books.
Taken from “The Imagery of Chess Revisited” Edited by Larry List
- Posted: 24.Jan.2007.
A letter with chess notations from Marcel Duchamp to his Gallerist Julien Levy. The board is Rubber-Stamped in the best mail-art tradition. The notational system resembles the search-trees you nowaday find in AI-text books.
Taken from “The Imagery of Chess Revisited” Edited by Larry List
Profanation [Andre Breton on Chess]
- Posted: 24.Jan.2007.
- Posted: 24.Jan.2007.
Chess is hand-to-hand combat between two labyrinths.Andre Breton and Nicolas Calas quoted from “The Imagery of Chess Revisited”
An integral weakness of chess is that it does not lend itself to divination (there is no checkomancy).
The Christian Church has never banned the game of chess, though it did ban dice and cards.
In oder to be a good chess player, one should not b overtly intelligent – Jean Jacques Rousseau: Diderot did not play very well and readily acknowledge the superiority of Rousseau, who never failed to beat him.
Modern warfare is an advanced form of chess, but most of its pieces are obsolete.
The “queen” in chess is a suspicious character. (cf. Marcel Duchamp, Joueurs d'echecs, 1911.) The real Queen, which we still await – in chess as in elsewhere – is one foreseen by Barthelemy Prosper Enfantin, the head of the Saint-Simonian religion (1796-1864).
The only legitimate game is on that would never allow, for either player, only those combinations of moves that have never been played before.
Philosophical freedom is an illusion. In chess as in all other games, each move is loaded with the indefinite past of the universe.
So as to eschew any sense of greatness in competition, one would do well to acknowledge being a part of a pyramid of monkey heads.
One element of ancient wisdom me might hold in mind is that deprecatory voice that the triumphant general in his chariot kept hearing.
Only inspiration is in control, day and night: All in all, not every calculation is an analysis: a chess player, for instance, does the one very well without doing the other. - Baudelaire
The real Napoleon (the killer) was a mediocre chess player. In Lenin's tomb on the Red Square, you will find a chessboard (is it the beginning of a game or one left unfinished?) and fishing floats. On the other hand (it is only fair to mention it), two great artistic innovators – Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Roussel – brought new solutions to chess problems.
The game of chess is not enough of a game; it is too serious an entertainment – Montaigne.
What must be changed is the game itself, not the pieces.
Henry Miller on Chess
- Posted: 14.Jun.2007.
I can fully understand if people consider Henry Miller their favorite writer. He is not mine, not anywhere close, but there is always something of interest in anything that Miller wrote. The cover design of this book is how book covers should be designed. The following qoute in on chess and is one of the most fabulous of qoutations on the subject. It mentions Duchamp, it passes through Cathay, all to describe the way of life and the way of playing of some friend of Miller:
- Posted: 14.Jun.2007.
I can fully understand if people consider Henry Miller their favorite writer. He is not mine, not anywhere close, but there is always something of interest in anything that Miller wrote. The cover design of this book is how book covers should be designed. The following qoute in on chess and is one of the most fabulous of qoutations on the subject. It mentions Duchamp, it passes through Cathay, all to describe the way of life and the way of playing of some friend of Miller:
To be sure, I was not then, nor am I now, a good player. Probably not even as good as Napoleon. When, for instance, Marcel Duchamp once invited me to play a game with him, I forgot everything I knew about the game because of my unholy respect for his knowledge of it. With Lou Jacobs it was worse. I could never arrive at any conclusion about his knowledge of the game. What defeated me with him was his utter nonchalance. “Would you like me to give you a queen or two rooks or a knight and two bishops?” He never uttered these words but they were implied by his manner. He would open in any old fashion, as though out of contempt for my ability, though it was never that; he had contempt for no one. No, he did it merely to enjoy himself, to see what liberties he could take, to see how far he could stretch a point. It seemed to make no difference to him whether he was winning or losing a game; he played with the ease and the assurance of a wizard, enjoying the false moves as well as the brilliant ones. Besides, what could it possibly mean to a man like him to lose a game of chess, or ten, or a hundred? “I’ll be playing it in paradise,” He seemed to be saying. “Come on, let’s have fun! Make a bold move , a rash move!” Of course the more rashly he played the more cautious I grew. I suspected him of being a genius. And was he not a genius to thus bewilder and confuse me?
The way he played chess was the way he played the game of life. Only the “old dogs” can do it. Lao-tse was one of those gay old dogs. Sometimes, when the image of Lao-tse seated on the back of a water buffalo crossed my mind, when I think of that steady, patient, kindly, penetrating grin of his, that wisdom so fluid and benevolent, I think of Lou Jacobs sitting before me at the chessboard. Ready to play the game every way you liked. Ready to rejoice over his ignorance or to beam with pleasure at his own tomfoolery. Never malicious, never petty, never envious, never jealous. A great comforter, yet remote as the dog star. Always bowing himself out of the picture, yet the farther he retreated the closer he was to you.
Henry Miller in The Book in My Life, Village Press, 1952/1974.
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