ARTLAND

A game of chess has been used as a metaphor for life in our cultural history many times. In the video work “Nummer twaalf” by the Dutch artist Guido van der Werve we follow the sound of piano keys, which each follows a move on a chessboard – a chess-piano! The chess Grandmaster Leonid Yudasin constructed this match and used the challenge of the King’s Gambit as a known opening. The opponent accepts and in the end – a stalemate. It does not mean that one player is in check, but there are simply no more moves to be made.

We zoom and slide slowly from one game of chess, to several in the same room, where also a chamber orchestra is playing. We continue slowly to zoom out to a hermits cottage and see a man sitting or standing in vast deserted nature.

The volcano Eyjafjallajökull  on Iceland is wild and active since some weeks, but the volcano Mount St. Helen in this video keeps still. The threat of eruption is present in the video, although the silence. The other nature scene is the enormous 1300 kilometer long and rough San Andreas Fault, which is close to an earthquake of large magnitude according to studies.  A deceptive calm.

Each move on the chessboard is spelled out on the film, in the nature,  as a coordinate. As  if it were longitudes and latitudes or some other secret code message.

A lonely man keeps counting the stars. Never comes to a summary.

The sun finally sets and a day is over.

The installation sends references to romantic ideas and the idea of artists as hermit. Still it has a tickling nerve. I just had to stay to see it all, forty minutes in the video room at Luhring Augustine gallery in Chelsea, New York, earlier this year.

Chance, moments, calculations.

Infinity and the sublime, who can resist?

Guido van der Werve is trained as a classical musician. Came to think about artists’ book “Chords 1-17” (and the exhibition seven years ago). The Swedish artist Anders Krisár has also trained as a classical pianist. Sharp photographs from heavenly and deserted shores and each photograph accompanied by a composed piano chord. There is an ominous and dark undertone in both photo and chord. Despite the beautiful scenery, an awareness of something else comes creeping upon us.

Didn’t I start up with writing about chess…and blogs should be short…this is probably not a blog. Too long and not updated enough times during a week.

Have you seen any of the amazing Medieval paintings by Albertus Pictor in churches around Stockholm? Stories for people who could not read Latin, stories for the priest to recall what to say? Death plays chess with a knight in the most famous painting by Albertus Pictor in the church of Täby. The walls were whitewashed during the 1700th Century, and we can be glad that someone couldn’t reach up to cover the ceiling and this story.

Death says on a text-ribbon by the painting: I play you checkmate.  Ingmar Bergman was inspired by this painting when creating the film scene in “The Seventh Seal” (Det sjunde Inseglet) where Death approaches the knight Antonius Block on the seashore and Block asks: You have come for me?

Death: I have been for a long time at your side.

Block: I know.

Death: Are you prepared?

Block: My body is afraid, but I am not.

(Death approaches Block)

Block: Wait a moment.

Death: You all say that. But I give no respite.

Block: You play chess, do you not? … As long as I resist you, I live. If I win, you set me free.

For the Swedish reader you can continue to read an article by the chess-player and author Kristian Fredén, April 20^th in Svenska Dagbladet on chess as a game of art.

http://www.svd.se/kulturnoje/understrecket/ett-spel-med-manga-drag-av-konstnarlighet_4587201.svd

He writes about Marcel Duchamps who once expressed that his existence appeared like a game of chess to him.  And about Kasparov whose book is called “How Life imitates Chess” , where he states that chess is mostly a struggle, but it contains a creative process that is related to the artists.

To be creative - within a set of frames - and break out from.

Why do people carry on playing analogue chess? Fredén writes that the answer might be in the mixture of absolute clarity and mysticism, in the way one have to use both calculations and intuition?

I remember the feeling of holding a heavy wooden chessman, moving it on a board designed by the Russian chess master Gary Kasparov. In our store “Remi”, with the characteristic black-and white squares in the logotype, we had parlor games and home computers like Amiga, Atari and Commodore. Many years ago. But this particular board had a special charisma. It was during the time when humans still could win against the chess-machines, human minds were brilliant in comparison.

Still, intuition is for humans.

And yes, it was during the time of little Super Mario-Bros and his friends, when computer games were babies in comparison to the teenager-games of today.