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DUCHAMPS CHESS GAME

In 1923, Marcel Duchamp abandoned art to dedicate himself entirely to chess. For him, chess wasn’t so different from what art could be: a creative, purely conceptual act. Chess moves are determined by thought, not by the beauty of the pieces’ arrangement. His shift to chess can be interpreted as yet another rejection of retinal, traditional art.

But the game also challenged another modern art paradigm: single authorship. Unlike conventional artworks, a chess game is created by two players. Duchamp’s move to chess can also be seen as a desire for a more collaborative form of making, one that subtly anticipated what would later be called socially engaged, participatory, or relational art.

But how do you actually create an artwork together? Do you both hold the same paintbrush at once? Maybe Duchamp’s chess game allready offered some clues. 

Anthropologist Tim Ingold, in his book ‘Making’, describes a child flying a kite in the wind, or rather, the child and the wind playing together through the kite. The kite mediates this exchange. It is what Ingold calls a transducer: an interface that enables co-creation by allowing two radically different forms of energy to interact.

Duchamp’s chessboard functions as such a transducer. A set of pieces, a board, and a few rules establish a structure through which players co-create. An essential answer to the mayor challenge of co-creation was already embedded in this game: to create together, you need something in between.

Yet a second challenge remains: when the chess game ends, nothing material is left. Like a river’s current, the beauty of the game is ephemeral. No stone remains carved to tell the story of the river that passed. Only the process endures. 

To address this, imagine attaching  paintbrushes beneath the chess pieces—light blue for one king, dark blue for the other, ... The board is paper. As the game unfolds, the pencils trace lines. The invisible interplay becomes visible. Each game produces a unique drawing: a residue of shared creation. 

Duchamp’s chess offers a clue for socially engaged and relational art: collaboration needs a transducer—a shared medium with rules. And by reintroducing, beneath the pieces, the paintbrushes Duchamp abandoned when he ceased making art, we find a clue to the second challenge: how to transform process into product.