Thursday, August 20, 2009

Field Trip: Marcel Duchamp:The Art of Chess



Will Shutes in Frieze Magazine:
To use Naumann’s terms, Duchamp’s opening move was to develop – as with chess – an intellectual system of symbols and imagined mechanical movements between figures in his practice. This ambition was most fully realized in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23), which Bailey takes as a focus in order to illustrate the thematic and iconographic correlation between the aesthetics and concepts of Duchamp’s artistic production and his identity as a chess player. Proposing that chess is a critical and largely unrecognized thematic element in The Large Glass, Bailey finds within the work a disguised self-portrait.

. . . As Duchamp said, ‘The transformation of the visual aspect to the grey matter is what always happens in chess and what should happen in art.’

Read more (link)

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (link)

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