"Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess" at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art [Photographs] [Updated]

Salvador Dali, chess set designed in honor of Marcel Duchamp, 1971. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Holland Cotter was on top of Francis M. Naumann's current show about Duchamp, chess, and contemporary art this weekend, but it's worth another note. This is one of the most fun shows in New York right now. It takes a ton of Duchamp ephemera (chess notations, a few letters, a few editions and pieces of art), adds a ton of chess sets (by Dali, Man Ray, Ono, and others), and includes other chess-related pieces of contemporary art. Here are a few of the chess sets. The show closes after Friday.

The pieces of the Dali chess set above were molded from his own fingers. (The rook is the pepper shaker from the St. Regis Hotel.) In a 1971 letter to Sidney Wallach of the American Chess Association, Dali explained the design he had completed in honor of his late friend Duchamp: "In chess, as in other expressions of the human alchemy, there is always the creator, above all, the Artist as Creator. It is this that I wanted to be represented: the hand of the Artist, the Eternal Creator. How better to express this vision than by sculpting my own hand, my own fingers?"

One wonders if Maurizio Cattelan knew about the piece. The edition he created donors to the X-Initiative (below) — which plays so nicely with some of Bruce Nauman's sculptures — is a perfect complement to Dali's set.

Updated: Writer Brian Sholis has written in to mention that Maurizio Cattelan has developed a choice chess set himself. The opposing kings take the form of Hitler and Martin Luther King, Jr. View an image and learn more.


Maurizio Cattelan's hand, edition of 80, available to X-Initiative donors, on display at X.


Yoko Ono, Play It By Trust, 2002


Charles Juhasz-Alvarado, Readymade Chess Set, 1995


Arman


Arman


Man Ray, Bronze Chess Set, 1966


Man Ray, Silver Chess Set, 1926/2008

"Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess"
Through October 31, 2009
Francis M. Naumann Fine Art
24 West 57th Street, Suite 305
New York, New York
[more photographs]

Art Trend - Cars [Updated]

Jonathan Schipper, The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle, 2007-2009. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

Two cars crashing slowly together over the course of forty-five days in Jonathan Schipper's show at Boiler at Pierogi came to a halt yesterday evening. Windows were broken, chassis deformed, and the cars lifted into the air by the pressure of the powerful motors, pushing them forward at a glacial pace. Given the current status of America's auto industry, it's hard not to read it allegorically.

For our last Art Trend post, we discussed fire. This time, the topic is the car, which, as a subject and a material, has been enjoying a resurgence in popularity in contemporary art.

Update: Anaba brought up the completely fascinating work of Salvatore Scarpitta, which I had never seen. Joan Boykoff Baron and Reuben M. Baron also highlight John Chamberlain, Chakaia Booker, and Dirk Skreber this month in Art Critical.


Richard Prince, Untitled, 2007. Photo: Richard Prince

Richard Prince played a major role starting all of this. After decades of photography using the imagery of the motorcycle and muscle car subcultures - and, more recently, brandishing car hoods as paintings and tires as sculptures - Prince decided to start fabricating his own muscle cars. Here's one of the non-pornographically-painted works, which showed at Freize.


DZINE, Pimp Juice, 2007. Photo: 16 Miles

Like Prince, Chicago artist DZINE is working with real, operating cars. Pimp Juice appeared at Miami Basel in 2007 and is part of The Pig show out at Deitch Long Island City (which we covered in a previous post). According to the Times: "Complete with 14 speakers, a custom video mix playing on five screens and special chrome and 24-carat gold hydraulics that make it buck and hop." Also, there's a great paint job that you need to see in person.


Nate Lowman and Dan Colen, Wet Pain [Exhibiton view], at Maccarone, 2008. Photo: Maccarone

Lowman and Colen reworked a 1971 Jaguar, while Jonathan Monk did a little mash-up of Prince form and Ruscha content.


Jonathan Monk, Rew-Shay Hood Project XVI, 2008. Photo: Casey Kaplan Gallery


Andrew Bush, Vector Portraits [Exhibition view], at Yossi Milo, 2009. Photo: 16 Miles

Meanwhile, Andrew Bush's show at Yossi Milo, which also just closed, featured portraits of people while driving. Super elegant but also a little scary: everyone looks vulnerable and trapped, like frames from Texas Highway Murderer film in Underworld.

Then there's the sub-genre of partnerships between car companies and artists. BMW has been doing it for a while with artists like Warhol (which makes sense), Rauschenberg (a little stranger), Holzer (awkward). This year, Robin Rhode was in charge. See them all. Fiat also got involved, commissioning Tracey Emin to produce four decorated cars.

Tracey Emin, Dark Dark Dark, 2007. Photo: Fiat

Finally, we get to the classics. Charles Ray's fiberglass replica of a destroyed car, easily one of my favorite pieces at the Walker, and Ant Farm's monument out in the desert.

Charles Ray, Unpainted Sculpture, 1997. Photo: Walker Art Center

Ant Farm, Cadillac Ranch [Installation view], 1974 [1997 Version] Photo: Brian L. Romig


Chris Burden, Trans-fixed [Performance view], 1974.

Finally, we end with the extreme ancestors of today's works. Burden's inclusion is a bit of a stretch, but he had plenty of options for sites, and he chose to nail himself to a Volkswagen. Arman's example, the earliest on our list (though please do send us examples of the works we missed), in which he takes the simplest and most direct approach, blowing up advertising executive Charles Wilp's MG convertible.


Arman, White Orchird, 1963. Photo: Archives Denyse Durand-Ruel

The Epic Art History in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Artists at Mr. Chow's, 1986. Photo: Smithsonian Archives of American Art; Carol Saft, photographer

Dear Lucy,

The enemies of women's liberation in the arts will be crushed.

Love,

Nancy

- Letter from painter Nancy Spero to art critic Lucy Lippard, October 29, 1971

Get ready to burn a lot of time. The Smithsonian Archives of American Art (AAA) have been expanding their online holdings, and the results are massive. These are our favorite picks from what we've sorted through so far:

• A 1949 letter from Andy Warhol to Harper's Magazine managing editor Russell Lynes with biographical information. "My life couldn't fill a penny postcard," he writes in wavy script. "Now I'm in NY City moving from one roach infested apartment to another."
• This 1986 photograph of Katz, Warhol, Arman, Hockney, Clemente, Basquiat, Chamberlain, Schnabel, Scharf, Heizer, Mapplethorpe, Shafrazi, and many others (including two women) hanging out at - no joke - Mr. Chow's. I can not believe this is real.
• A face collage constructed on a letter for Lucy Lippard from Ray Johnson in 1969. The whole Lucy Lippard section is pretty great.
• The Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, which were just added. Goodness knows what is buried in them.

Destroying Cars in the Work of Superflex and Arman

Superflex, Burning Car, 2008

Arman, White Orchid, 1963. Photo courtesy of Archives Denyse Durand-Ruel.

Superflex is out with a new video (thank you, Rhizome), Flooded McDonald's (an excerpt), which very literally enacts its title.  The empty architecture recalls Thomas Demand, though this set is meticulously produced.  It's an amazingly tranquil piece.  In its odd production of calm, it recalls their previous video Burning Car (2008) (first fire, now water), which is similarly serene, a slow-motion version of Arman's White Orchid, in which he took advertising executive Charles Wilp's MG and blew it up with dynamite.  

In a recent interview, the collective makes the case for the subversive content of the videos: "If you don't challenge the system, then the machine just keeps on running and being happy."  At first, the incredible elegance of their videos seems to belie that stance.  On the contrary, after watching both a few times, the visual pleasure engendered by slow, violent destruction seems to prove that the opposite is true.