Posted by RAIN RIEN NEVERMIND on October 24, 19102 at 15:43:19:
In Reply to: Re: duchamp and chess posted by Bill Wilson on October 10, 19102 at 16:40:10:
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: This messageboard has shared thoughts about chess earlier; perhaps they are retrievable. Your abbreviations suggest that you are rushed, while this entry is designed to slow you down. In any event, research requires questions formulated in a way that the question is answerable. Examples: not “What is chess?,” but what are the relations between chess and X, Y or Z? Somewhere around here about June 2000 I suggested that to interpret a game of chess in the life-world of M.D. a person could look questioningly at games and sports, as for example, football in contrast with baseball can delineate the issues of time. Usually a game or a sport, definitions of which are taken under advisement, deprives time of its seriousness, yet some games and/or sports take clock-time quite seriously in their own way. Now while art is neither a game,play or a sport, it can have similar complex relations to measurements of time. The games and sports played by an artist can illuminate the works of art, or at least illuminate the life-world of the artist. We do not expect Duchamp to have played U.S. football or baseball---because of their different but equally non-Duchampian treatments of time. A game of football, hockey or basketball imposes mechanical units on the action. An abstract unit of time is divided into quarters, and those divisions mark the limits of play measurable in seconds. Occasional questions arise about whether an event occurs on the second within a quarter. Might one measure a tenth of a second? A thousandth? Mischievously, players can play with time as a factor, “…playing against the clock,” with the odd tone of such events, because the action becomes the suspension of action, as though time is passing yet is not productively consumed. Contrary to football, the game of baseball self-develops its units from within the actions that occur---self-constructingly. In terms of time, football used to be associated with gentlemen who did not labor by the time-clock, while baseball was associated with laborers paid hourly wages, so that an appetite for one sport or the other might overlap an appetite for a different experience of time. Outside sports and labor, artists are allowed to work out their own relations with time, like A. Calder who knew a work was finished when it was lunch-time. Anyway,while in baseball a pitcher can't delay forever, still an inning could be a few minutes or an hour---temporally self-organizing. The difference is between imposed temporal units and self-constructing temporal units, which is like a philosophic difference between transcendentals (abstract objects) and immanences (concrete objects). See, maybe a person uses a cookie-cutter to impose the identical form on different dough (an external form), or maybe the person lets the dough shape itself in response to its internal forces. Historically, chess has been at liberty to define its attitude toward the consumption of measurable units of time, sometimes played like baseball, sometimes like football. Anyone thinking about Duchamp and chess would be able to use descriptions of how his games were timed, that is, their relations with mechanical means of measurement. Chess has emerged from peoples who did not have mechanical clocks, so that clock-time is not inherent. Chess having no intrinsic temporal metric, some players must have been terribly slow for clocks to be imposed on play under some circumstances. So a point is that precise details would help to describe and to analyze Duchamp’s gamesmanship. Since Duchamp married a former beloved daughter-in-law of Henri Matisse, perhaps one should note that Matisse’s paintings with chess-boards do not depict a clock for chess, yet his picture of a music-lesson has a prominent metronome (so see Beethoven’s responses to metronomes, a mechanical reproduction of passing time that may be antithetical to expressive music). Imagine Matisse and Duchamp responding to a game of checkers and you can feel the aptness of chess-time, even if it is clocked, to their life-poems. The relevance of the metronome is the emergence of both a metronome for music and a clock imposed on chess-time at about the same period (so that the musical time in Duchamp’s compositions could become evidence of his choice of temporal qualities that would carry over in his preferences for chess-time). Both Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp were masters of delay, usually trying to slow down events that went by too fast for them. My essay on Matisse-time is "Henri Matisse: A Retrospective." Artspace 16 #6 (December 1992), supplemented by "Matisse: Immured in Light." Art Press 186 (December 1993). A student of Duchamp and chess could ask: Did he play with a clock? Did he pause and delay? Would he have used deceptive strategies? How would he respond to a blitz? If D. played in measured temporal units, chess-by-clock-time, did he develop a significant rhythm? The temporal mode in which Duchamp played chess cannot but be an elaboration of temporalities in his life and in his art, so that clues to chess might be heard in his music. I have not lost my thread: I am mentioning time in relation to chess because of the themes of time so evident in his delays, his aesthetic postponements, & even his underpainting that forever awaits a later coat of paint. He arrived on time for a performance in 1964 of “Relâche,” revived from an earlier time. In an anthropology, time becomes an issue in seductions, with C. Levi-Strauss the expert on differences between the seduction of a woman by a man, and the seduction of a man by a woman. Since D. played a game of chess with a naked woman, any details available from memories or documents might tell if the game went fast or slow. How would a nude opponent affect the velocities of the game? D.’s relations with Beatrice Wood suggest a very slow game of love or romance, with three people being moved about a board, and D. in no hurry. I also ask about relations between chess and language. Was D. thinking with the word “pion” when he was in Brazil, “peon” when in France, and “pawn” when in the U.S.? Did he respond to the possible transfiguration of a peon into a Dame, or a pawn into a Queen? The re-designation of a pawn as a queen animates his theme of designations, as in his verbal designation of an object like a bottle-rack as a sculptural work of art, albeit a work of art designated anesthetic rather than aesthetic. D. had, what the French might call “amusing,” his own odd angles on straightforward truth, which is to say that some lies and deceptions are on record, truth perhaps having been delayed. Could he have introduced his aesthetic deceptions into chess? Would he have slowed down the game to affect his opponent? His published letters record his plan for two simultaneous games with Walter Arensburg. The games were to be conducted through swift telegrams across a huge distance, bringing the two players into a kind of nearness with each other, yet such a slow way to play a game that non-chess meanings float toward the surface of such arrangements. Elsewhere D. proposes to play by postcard. Having noted here the Duchampian theme of establishing meaning by designating a meaning, I now will ask myself some fresh questions. Meanwhile, I have been asking questions and mentioning themes without stating conclusions, for a moment being true to D.’s unhurried art of postponement.
IS THIS
WHEN THE ROOFTOP GETS SPRAYED WITH WATER ?!
WE KNOW HE DIRECTED FROM A TREE WITH A KOAN
WAS HE BARKING OR WAS THAT A DOGWOOD ?
ANSWER THESE INQUIRIES IMMEDIATLY OR YOU WILL BE POST PHONED....OPERATOR IS BILL THERE ? HOW MANY OPERATIONS DOES IT TAKE TO OPERATE. HE RETORTS. IS IT REALLY OVER IF THE FAT LADY SINGS ?