Introduction
In my study of Marcel Duchamp’s chess games and career, I am often struck by his statement that “Beauty in chess is closer to beauty in poetry; the chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.”11 Duchamp’s understanding that visualization is at the centre of chess explains to me how he reached chess mastery at nearly 40 years old, a relatively advanced age to become fluent in chess patterns. In teaching adult students chess, this visual aspect is often the hardest—because they are so anxious for verbal cues and shortcuts.
In moments where visualization leads one in circles, words are the evacuation valve. Chess and poetry also share some of the same language; Grandmasters use the term lines to refer to plans or series of exchanges that didn’t happen in the game but were visualized and anticipated.
One of my favourite Marcel Duchamp games, though not one of his most celebrated, is a loss against the Romanian Master George Davidescu at the Paris Olympiad in 1924. Most of the beautiful and paradoxical moments in chess occur not in the actual game, but in the variations around the game, recalling Heidegger’s assertion that “the possible ranks higher than the actual.” This quote is a favorite of conceptual artist Glenn Kaino, whose Duchamp-infuenced “Burning Boards” exhibition, created for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2007, sees 32 chess players playing with burning candles as pieces, with the goal being to checkmate one’s opponent before the candles burn out.
[Credit: Dancer Gabrielle Revlock, photo by Daniel Meirom]
That Duchamp game against Davidescu was the centrepiece of Hula Chess, which I created with Daniel Meirom. In the video installation, I simultaneously hula-hooped and played chess against dancer and artist Gabrielle Revlock. Though Duchamp lost the actual game, the video installation ends with a circular variation that Duchamp could have chosen, leading to a draw by perpetual check (each side scores one half of the full point up for grabs). In perpetual check, one side repeatedly checks the opponent’s king, but is unable to finish the job with a checkmate. Any deviation from the repetition in this case (and many other cases of perpetual check) actually results in a loss for the checking side, so the game is agreed drawn. I see perpetual check as an infinite game.
When Aaron Tucker’s ChessBard translates the Duchamp-Davidescu, it ends with: “carves this sandy spoon.” This line, like Hula Chess reminds me of the tension which draws me to chess, between the linear brute force analysis within a specific game and the feminine cyclical nature of the game in its history. We still repeat openings that were popularized in the 1500s.
After 1. Kg1, Black continues with 1. ... Rd1+ 2. Kg2 Rd2+ and so on
[Credit: Chess diagram generated using chessbase]
One of Duchamp’s most famous games is also about circles versus lines. Duchamp played a totally naked Eve Babitz in 1963 during his retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Babitz said, “... that was the one time in my life I was on birth-control pills. My breasts blew up. They wouldn’t fit into any of my dresses. And they, you know, they hurt. But they were—well, I thought they should be photographed, really.” There is no surviving gamescore for the ChessBard to translate, but Duchamp did win.
I reversed this image for a piece called Naked Chess in which I played against a naked man, an amateur player.
[Credit: Naked Chess Still by Daniel Meirom, director of photography Blake Eichenseer]
For the shoot, we used one of Marcel Duchamp’s true gems of a game—his win over E.H. Smith—except we extended the game out to its most natural checkmate. This game is one of my favourites from Duchamp because it features a crushing exchange sacrifice. This type of exchange is translated more beautifully from the French as a “sacrifice of quality,” and entails giving up a rook (usually worth about five pawns) for a knight or bishop, both usually worth about three pawns. In this case, Duchamp’s bishop is more valuable than a rook anyway, cutting through the board like a knife through moist cake. This allows a final checkmate on h8 from the queen in our rendition.
Position after 19. … g6 vs. Final Position
[Credit: Diagrams were originally printed in Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess (2009) by Francis M. Naumann and Bradley Bailey, published by Readymade Press.]
Although the Smith game is not featured in this volume, I used the online ChessBard translator at chesspoetry.com to find this line from the game: “central diagonal, estimated instant mimes.” One of the things that attracts me to the ChessBard project is that anyone can turn their favourite games into poems.
Though I never had a chance to play Duchamp myself, I lived vicariously through the twists and turns of his 1929 Paris game against Vera Menchik, seven-time Women’s World Champion. Menchik was the first woman to compete at the highest levels of professional chess, and she held her own. It was then so unusual for a woman to perform at that level that a “Vera Menchik Club” was formed of her victims. Menchik died in the London Blitz in 1944, toward the end of World War II. She was only 38, leaving us to wonder about how large her club would eventually have become.
As a proponent of getting more women into the game, I find this score an important counterpoint to Duchamp’s easy win against Eve Babitz. It begins tepidly, and then after one rote move by Menchik, Duchamp earns a huge advantage with a sharp sacrifice, in which he gives up a queen temporarily.
[Credit: Chess diagrams generated using chessbase]
When he wins back the queen, he is two pawns to the good in a totally winning position. Yet Menchik fights back and eventually earns a draw. The ChessBard translation appropriately, even if coincidentally, includes the terms “resistance” and “reassembled weather.” As the defender punches forward, the tension transfers back to the player with the initial advantage. Sometimes a draw can feel like a win, but in this case, Duchamp was the disappointed one.
One of Marcel Duchamp’s most noted wins came from the same tournament, over Belgian-American George Koltanowski. Koltanowski was particularly renowned for his blindfold skills, setting the record in 1937 for playing 34 blindfold chess games simultaneously. ChessBard’s translation of this game is short because the game is a miniature (any chess game under 20 moves), a 17-move victory in which Koltanowski fatally missed an “in-between” check with Duchamp’s bishop. This type of tactic is usually referred to in chess analysis by its German translation, zwischenzug. Ironically, the tricky maneuver is best described (or presaged) by the ChessBard in an earlier game by the same players, which Duchamp lost: “blazing diagonal beyond bound instant.”
In the fall of 2015, I went to Toronto to play my first-ever public blindfold game with Aaron Tucker, as an experiment for this project. The blindfold game also generated a poem. I’d given hundreds of simultaneous chess exhibitions called and talks, but had firmly resisted one of the most crowd-pleasing of chess spectacles, the “blindfold.” I never enjoyed the mental exertion, which literally induces headaches. It never seemed like an efficient way to improve general chess strength. I finally gave in because the difficulty for difficulty’s sake appealed to me as an opportunity for an ideal mental tune-up.
[Credit: Photo by Tony Yueh]
I was in Toronto also for a series of poker tournaments, and one particular line from the ChessBard blindfold game thus resonated: “grinder apologetically exits.” The term grinder is a moniker for hard-working poker player. It also recalls Duchamp’s paintings of coffee and chocolate grinders (c. 1911–13), which in some ways presaged the readymade. “Duchamp regards the Coffee-grinder as the key picture to his complete work . . . In this world the human mechanism operates like a machine and resembles the machine.”2
This idea anticipates a modern threat to organized chess competitions—a machine disguised as a human. Computer engines are too powerful for even the top players in the world to defeat consistently. Strict measures are in place to ensure no player can bring a pocket computer into a tournament hall, or access data from the super precise calculations of the top “engines.”
Two centuries ago, it was just the opposite, when the Turk, the infamous chess automaton, was toured around the world as a marvel of science and ingenuity. The supposed automaton/machine had various owners from 1770 to 1854, and would play chess all on its own, even facing Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. But the trick of this elaborately constructed machine was as mundane as could be: in fact there was a hidden human operator, tucked in and underneath the chessboard. Today we worry about small machines in human hands, while then, cheating was more like a regular sized human tucked into a secret shelf. Aptly, one of the strongest chess engines in the world is called Houdini.
Humans still compose better sonnets than robots. For how long, the ChessBard project forces us to ask. Ever since the IBM computer Deep Blue vanquished Garry Kasparov in a 1997 match, the odds of the strongest Grandmasters beating the strongest computer programs at chess continue to diminish. Even as the popularity of chess soars in many areas, artificial chess intelligence is now assumed dominant. We no longer bother with highly publicized Man-vs-Machine matches, because the computers would win too easily. By placing poetry side by side with chess, the ChessBard reminds us of a not too distant past when we thought a chess-playing robot was far-fetched, and must and may have a human brain underneath it all.
— Jennifer Shahade
1 Marcel Duchamp, quoted in Anne d’Harnoncourt, introduction to Marcel Duchamp, eds. Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (Munich: Presetel, 1989), 39.
2 Harriet Janis and Sidney Janis, “Marcel Duchamp: Anti-Artist,” View 5, no. 1 (1945). Reprinted in The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York: Wittenborn, 1951), 306–15.