Marcel Duchamp and performing art of Chess

In his 1995 book "The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp", historian Jerrold E. Seigel wrote that for the French sculptor and painter, “the absence of habit was an important condition of freedom.” Indeed, Duchamp He had no routine and lived an irregular lifestyle, in which no two days were the same. He abandoned his artistic production on several occasions, throwing his coat hanger suspended from the ceiling in 1923, with no plans to return.

The only consistency in his life came from his longtime hobby: chess. Duchamp He was introduced to the game by his brothers Raymond and Jacques in 1900, when he was 13. As a professional entertainer, he held weekly chess nights at the home of his patrons, Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg, and was apparently so obsessed with the game that during their honeymoon, his first wife Lydie glued the pieces to the board. They divorced months later.

The love of Duchamp His love for chess was as multifaceted as his art. First, the quiet game offered a respite from the noisy, chaotic streets of Upper Manhattan, where he lived. On a more cerebral level, he saw chess as a form of creative expression. “The chess pieces are the basic alphabet that shapes thoughts,” he once said, “and these thoughts, while creating a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty in an abstract form, like a poem.”

According to a New York Times review of the exhibition "Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess", in Francis M. Naumann Fine Arts, written by Holland Cotter, Duchamp saw his profession and his hobby as “complementary, an ideal intersection of brain power and beauty. Chess was art; art was chess. It was all about making the right moves.”

Duchamp had a penchant for transforming ordinary chess sets into performance pieces, as provocative as his ready-mades, signed urinals and assembled bicycle wheels. He often held live chess games in the garden of artist Katherine Dreier’s home, where his friends would dress up in costumes to take on the roles of queens and bishops.

In 1963, Duchamp played chess against a naked Eve Babitz. The budding writer and socialite came up with the idea after a fight with her lover, gallery owner Walter Hopps, who refused to invite her to the opening night of one of his Duchamp because his wife would be present.

Five years later, in 1968, Duchamp played against composer John Cage, a fellow connoisseur of silence, whose controversial 1952 composition “4'33,” consisted of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of absolute silence. Cage brought a custom chessboard where each move produced a different sound and image, turning the match into a musical performance. Unfortunately for the audience, Duchamp was vastly superior to Cage, checkmating the musician in a matter of minutes.

In 1918, Duchamp produced a hand-carved chess set while on sabbatical in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This set, as the woodcarver and chess aficionado Duchamp Dan Weber rightly observed on his blog, “All this play,” Weber wrote, “disappears with its beautifully carved wooden chess set, free of any obfuscation, humor, or oppositional criticism. It’s just…a chess set.”

Perhaps because of this lack of plays, it is one of the least known works of Duchamp. It briefly made headlines in 2014 when two artists named Scott Kildall and Bryan Cera made digital copies of chess pieces available online for 3D printing as part of a project called “Readymake: Duchamp Chess Pieces,” which was quickly shut down by the estate of Duchamp for reasons of copyright infringement.

Although Duchamp Although he began his gradual withdrawal from the art world as early as 1918, taking further steps in 1923, he never stopped playing chess. In his old age, he founded the Chess Support Fund Marcel Duchamp in support of American chess, and in 1967 — a year before his death — he participated in a tournament in Monte Carlo.

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