Multi-dimensional Chess Imagery

This is one of those Flickr Friday photos that has little to do with its related story. I could have picked almost any photo from the album, Marcel Duchamp in the Village, 50 Years Later, but I liked this one because of the chess memorabilia on the wall.

Artist Serkan Ozkaya in conversation with poet Robert Fitterman © Flickr user Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation under Creative Commons.

The album's description matches the content of another page, Marcel Duchamp in the Village - 50 Years Later (thoughtgallery.org). It says,

For twenty years, Marcel Duchamp secretly worked on his final art piece, Étant donnés, in his New York City studio. After his death on October 2nd, 1968, his close friends and the world were stunned to find, hidden in his studio on East 11th Street in the former St. Denis Hotel, the completed Étant donnés, an elaborately detailed and beautifully disturbing room-encompassing tableau, which could be peered at through two peepholes upon entering the room.

Four years ago, Serkan Ozkaya imagined Étant donnés as a camera obscura. What if the peepholes weren't only peepholes? (When has Duchamp's work only ever been one thing?) What if the peepholes were also meant to project an image? Ozkaya built a scale model to see; to his surprise, the projected image resembled a face. He further secured the studio in which the piece was originally completed. [...]

That's all very nice, but what does that have to with chess?

Join artist Serkan Ozkaya and poet Robert Fitterman for a conversation about Duchamp's enigmatic final work and contemporary artists' response to it. [...] Chess Forum is the perfect venue as chess featured throughout Duchamp's career, from his early painting Portrait of Chess Players to Reunion, the performance/chess game he staged with John Cage in 1968, and Duchamp frequently played the game in Greenwich Village.

For more about the artwork, see Wikipedia's Étant donnés. Google translates the French phrase as 'Since', but I'm sure there is more to it than a single word. For more about New York City's Chess Forum, see chessforum.com ('Your Gateway to the World of Chess').

As for the memorabilia on the wall, it's not all about chess. Partly visible to the left of the chalk board ('Prices per person/hour: Chess___$5 ...'), is a small poster for the documentary 'Game Over - Kasparov and the Machine'. To the right is a sketch of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose connection to chess is tenuous.

The large frame under the horseshoe is an an excerpt from T.S.Eliot's poem 'East Coker' (1940), that starts 'You say I am repeating / Something I have said before'. Beneath that poem is American poet Walt Whitman, and to the left of Whitman is a scene from 1886 Steinitz - Zukertort, 'the first match for the title of World Chess Champion accepted by all chess historians'. Other photos from the Flickr album also show walls filled with both chess and non-chess imagery. Who said chess players are two-dimensional only?