Reconstruction 6.

1 (Winter 2006)
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Cold War Games and Postwar Art / Claudia Mesch

Abstract: During the Cold War both superpowers used games, particularly chess, in
order to construct an ideology of complete conflict and irreconcilable division between
East and West. This essay focuses on the broad cultural challenge to divisive Cold War
zero-sum mentality issued by a number of artistsAndr Breton, Marcel Duchamp and yvind
Fahlstrm, and Fluxus artists George Maciunas, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Takako Saito
and Yoko Ono. These artists, in a second wave of game-focused art, returned to the
concerns of surrealist art practice and to earlier cultural game theory. Even conceptual
art production was impacted by the predetermined structure of games. As the global
conflict dragged on into the 1980s, Deleuze and Guattari also touched upon chess in
developing nomad thought.
<1> A large contingent of postwar artists and intellectuals engaged with notions of play
and games during the Cold War era of the 1960s and '70s. The publications of the
surrealists and their French and Czech disciples, Marcel Duchamp's elaborately staged
"comeback" by means of his activities of the late '50s a nd 1960s, the artworks of
members of Fluxus, and the "variable paintings" of the Brazilian/Scandinavian artist
yvind Fahlstrm, all worked to contest what Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga had
earlier recognized as the barbarous and puerile censorship of play and games under
fascism. During the Cold War, both "superpowers" used games -- particularly chess -- in
order to construct the ideology of comp lete conflict and irreconcilable division between
East and West. By the 1960s, these artists contested this appropriation of the notion of
play as a realm for propaganda.
<2> A parallel intellectual development was elaborated in Huizinga's cultural theory of
games of 1938, which was in part a response to the rise of fascism. In a development
contemporaneous with Huizinga's study, mathematical game theo ry, a quantitative model of
conflict, had been introduced as a new field by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern
in Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944); it should be remembered that military
conflict, and specifically the arms race, was the context and major impetus behind this
mathematical achievement. In 1958 Roger Caillois, a cultural theorist who had been
involved with the French surreal ists, published his Man, Play and Games as a response
to, and further development of, aspects of Huizinga's analysis. The preoccupation of
postwar culture with the structure of games and with strategies of play can perhaps be
attributed, and oftentimes directly linked, to the direction of intellectual and
cultural history initiated by Huizinga. However, the thematic and structural
foregrounding of the "play instinct" and of games across the work of many artists and
artists groups after surrealism has not been adequately explored in art history.
<3> Art historians have traced the origin of the significance, indeed the centrality, of
play and games to Western art of the modern era to the eighteenth century and to the
period-style of the Rococo. It has further been argued that the "frivolous" Rococo
ar tistic exploration of play and games is soundly rejected in the Enlightenment in favor
of the "serious" delineation of aesthetics by philosophers such as Diderot, Kant, and
Schiller. Jennifer Milam has, however, claimed that the "ludic impulse," as creative
process and as "active engagement with the image," was central to Enlightenment thought
and to the formulation of modern visual experience [1]. Fu rther consideration of the
role of the game within visual modernism complicates the widely-held high-modernist view
of the interaction of the "autonomous" modern with the popular, and establishes new
points of contact and dispute between art and an increasingly game-based visual pop
culture. Where most art historical examinations of the dynamics between modernism and
popular culture have focused on the circulation of the imagery of advertising, late
twentieth-century artists consistently turned to the game as structure or subject for
their art.
Cultural Theory of Games
<4> The burst of cultural theory centered on games in the twentieth century can be said
to begin with Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga, and with his first lecture on the play
element in culture in an address at Leyden in 1933, followed by lectures in Zurich,
Vienna and London; his Homo Ludens, a Study of the Play-Element in Culture was published
in Leiden in 1938. Huizinga's resounding condemnation of the cultural and intellectual
perversions of Nazism is also a modern-day tale of cultural decline which both recalls
the pessimistic pronouncements of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918-22)
and precedes those of the Frankf urt School . Huizinga mourned the dissipation of play in
the twentieth century, and with it a code of ethics and a corresponding quality of human
decency. He identified the "play impulse" as an inherent characteristic of human society
and as an underlying structure of culture more generally, not only in the creative act
of poetry and art, but also in the waging of war in accordance with a "code of hon or"
and "the law of nations." Beginning with Plato's identification of human play activity
as a kind of holiness, Huizinga sees play as central to ritual and inseparable from it;
he discusses the use of masks in archaic cultures in marking the realm of "sacred play,"

a quality he claims has never wholly disappeared from social life and can still be
manifested as "sheer play" (26). He charts the epistemological function of play within
world history. He then identifies five core qualities of human play throughout world
history: 1). that it is voluntary in nature; 2). it is separate from "real life"; 3). it
has a beginning and end and must be repeatable; 4). it creat es order in shifting between
the states of tension and resolution of conflict; 5). all human play has rules. Huizinga
also traces the end of play activity in the sphere of the visual arts, where he
dismisses contemporary art as overly esoteric and too concerned with the proliferation
of "isms" -- the "game" of a specialized critical discourse around modern art as it
hurls itself toward the ever-more "n ew". In a passage that recalls the contemporaneous
analyses of Walter Benjamin but lacks both his political radicalism and familiarity with
the avant-garde, Huizinga notes how changes brought about in art by photographic
reproduction work against the development of a "play-element" in art: art becomes at
once too self-conscious and too connected to the market to retain its "eternal childlike innocenc e" (202).
<5> Huizinga concludes with a powerful critique of the "friend/foe principle" outlined
in the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt, which, Huizinga argues, destroys the
ethical workings or "fair play" aspect of international law [2]. Huizinga explains how
Schmitt's theory recasts the relation between states:
The theory refuses to regard the enemy even as a rival or adversary. He is
merely in y our way and thus is to be made away with. If ever anything in
history has corresponded to this gross over-simplification of the idea of
enmity, which reduces it to an almost mechanical relationship, it is precisely
that primitive antagonism between phratries, clans or tribes where...the playelement was hypertrophied and distorted. Civilization is supposed to have
carried us beyond this stage. I know of no sadder or deeper fall from human
reason than Schmitt's barbarous and pathetic delusion about the friend-foe
principle. His inhuman cerebrations do not even hold water as a piece of
formal logic. For it is not war that is serious, but peace....Schmitt's brand
of "seriousness" merely takes us back to the savage level. (209)
Thus, Huizinga writes, Schmitt provides the intellectual foundation for the adolescent
"puerilism" of fascism and its culture in 1938, a perverse "boy scoutism" without
playfulness and thinking itself beyond competitiveness, a world of yelled greetings, the
wearing of badges and "political haberdashery," of "collective voodoo," crude
sensationalism, pleasure in mass meetings and parades -- simply, the "bastardization of
culture" (205-6). However he finally trusts that moral c onsciousness (a "drop of pity")
will return with the awareness that human action may be "licit as play": "But if we have
to decide whether an action to which our will impels us is a serious duty or is licit as
play, our moral conscience will at once provide the touchstone."(213). Huizinga trusts
that the play-instinct will reject thinking such as Schmitt's and compel a reentry into
the sphere of ethics and civilization.
<6> Perhaps due to his aversion to the economic totalizations of Marxism, Huizinga did
not theorize the place of games within the capitalist economy. Caillois' Man, Play and
Games (1958) pointed critically to Huizinga's decontextualized and teleological
narrative of play-as-drive that established it as an enduring human quality throughout
all of world history. Caillois considers the significance of games within contemporary
capitalism and also the element of gambling. Well before Foucault, Caillois advances a
nuanced theory of power that is more optimistically based upon the rise of competition
and its dialectic with alea, or the chance advantages of a privileged birth; Caillois
raises the possibility that power in modernity flows not unidirectionally but is
circulated and contest ed in democratic society.
<7> To formulate a less abstracted study of play culture, Caillois developed a taxonomy
of existing games, which he delineated on two axes: 1). ludus, games that are
subordinated to the disciplining framework of rules, and 2). paidia, games that consist
of spontaneous and even tumultuous activity. On the other axis Caillois places the
categories of: 1). Agn, games of competit ion; 2). Alea, games of chance; and 3).
Mimicry, games of simulation and play behavior, such as the playing of a role in
theater, in children's games, or by means of the process of identification with another
within the act of spectatorship, as in, for example, the cult-like worship of film stars
or athletes; 4). Ilinx, or games that pursue vertigo, disorder and physical
disorientation, as is offered b y amusement park rides like the rollercoaster.
<8> Caillois's taxonomy claims a wider berth for games within human society, and in the
animal kingdom, than does Huizinga. He does not ascribe rules or an ordering function to
all games, as he understands that paidia- and ilinx-type games may not operate on rules
or may even strive toward disorder; in fact, he concludes that games either have to do
with r ules or they have to do with "make-believe", with "acting as if". Caillois tracks
the development of civilization, or democracy, in the shift from paidia to ludus, across
numerous world cultures, and in the "struggle against the prestige associated with
simulation and vertigo" in democratic societies (100). He understands the use of masks
in ancient society along these lines;he describes how the mask is used as a symbol of
superiority, furthering the inequity of power by instilling terror in political
inferiors in the "reign of mimicry and ilinx" (105-7). When, for example, the Greeks,
through the use of mathematics, began to understand the universe as ordered, agn and
alea also began to structure social life. Regulated competitions thus take on
significance, relating to the founding of numerous g ames -- Olympic, Pythian, the Aztec
game of pelota, and Chinese archery contests. Further, competitive examinations come to
determine a bureaucratic elite. According to Caillois, social power comes to be achieved
rather than ascribed; it becomes dominated by the shift between merit and inheritance,
or by competition and chance. Soon regulated competition becomes dominant, even between
social classes.
<9 > Caillois reads the return of alea in the vague promise of a miracle, the "sudden
success" of winning the lottery or the grand prize on a game show for those who

realistically realize that they cannot achieve due to personal merit. This statistically
miniscule possibility of a quick fortune proved to be a useful source of funds for the
capitalist state, and for other for-profit gambling corporations of the mass media that
mushroomed in the Cold War era. The rise of alea becomes an engine for the "disguised
lotteries" that sprout on TV game shows and appear to reward achievement, but are a
"compensation for the lack of opportunity for free competition" (118 ff) [3]. Caillois
claims that the game had always had the function of clearing a field or of establishing
conditions of pure equality. The game can therefore be deployed to create the illusion
of that condition as well; within advanced capitalism, rules can be appropriated to
offer up the "as if" of "make -believe".
Games and Modern Art
Surrealist Games and Game Theory
<10> It is ironic that Huizinga seems to have been completely ignorant of the activities
of the avant-garde and of the surrealists within the realm of visual art. Caillois'
expanded theory of games in modern society is possibly attributable to his involvement
with the surrealists and to their refusal and rethinking of hardened polarities s uch as
seriousness/nonseriousness, or work/leisure. In the 1950s, Andr Breton recognized that
the surrealists had, by means of the games they devised, reconfigured the process of
art-making in toto and even the workings of knowledge and language. Huizinga prompted
Andr Breton, in the interviews that make up his memoirs ( Entretiens, 1952) and in a
number of essays in Mdium (beginning in 1953), to re classify almost the entirety of
surrealist practice as the playing of games [4]. Breton claimed that while the group
(that is, he) first understood games merely as a kind of social glue and collective
entertainment, and in embarrassment concealed their games as "experimental" activities,
he only later realized the epistemological "discoveries " it could generate. In his
catalogued list of surrealist ga mes, Breton did not separate the automatist procedures
or games of dessin, or of the visual arts, from those involving language: the exquisite
corpse is described as "written or drawn"; the "recipes" of the visual arts, listed as
"collage, frottage, fumage, coulage, spontaneous decalcomania, candle-drawings, etc.,"
allowed, so Breton remarks, "greater satisfaction of the pleasure principle" in that
suc h games could put the possibility of art-making in anyone's hands.(Breton, cited and
trans. in Gooding, 137-8).
<11> In contrast Philippe Audouin, in his analysis of surrealist games, establishes
another category, games of objects, under which he groups the "Recherches
Exprimentales," (Experimental Research), the "Cadavers Exquis dessins" (Drawn
Exquisite Corpse), the "Jeu de Marseille" (Marseilles G ame) and the "Cartes d'Analogie"
(Analogy Cards). According to Breton, surrealist language games (as Audouin would later
classify them) such as "Dfinitions" (Definitions, first published 1928), the "Jeu des
Conditionnels (Si...Quand...)" (Game of Conditionals -- if...when..., 1929), "le Cadaver
Exquis" ("Exquisite corpse," 1927), and "l'Un dans l'Autre" ("One into another," 1954),
and the games of opt ions or opinions (Audouin), such as the "Notation Scolaire - 20 to +
20" (Scholarly notation, 1921), and "Ouvrez-vous?" (or the Visitor, 1953), yielded
similar pluralistic possibilities as predetermined game-frameworks within the
manipulation of language [5]. Breton's 1954 comments on Huizinga and surrealist games
appeared with his description of "l'Un dans l'Autre", developed with Benjamin Pret -- a
year earlier he had published "Ouvrez-vous?", a new collective game [6].
<12> Of the surrealist games which Audouin determined to be concerned with the visual,
the "Recherches Exprimentales", the "Cadavres exquis dessins", the "Jeu de Marseille"
(1940-41) and the "Cartes d'Analogie" (1959), often had to do with the construction or
circulation of cards, either playing cards of the "Jeu de Marseille"o r the fictional and
collectively fashioned "identification papers" of the "Cartes d'Analogie" (Game of
Analogy Cards). Both of these forms engaged with the immediate wartime experience of the
surrealist circle, with the state of physical transience of travel, with their forced
relocation and exile to New York and other locations, with the continued demand to
present identification papers while travelin g in occupied France, and perhaps also with
a sense of being pitched into the realm of pure alea. The "Cadavres exquis", a procedure
devised so that a collective could by means of automatism assemble or "compose" a
singular work and avoid the conscious control of any individual author, opened, as
Breton saw it, a "strange possibility of thought, which is that of its pooling" (Breton,
Second manifesto). However in including as its pool of players only practicing visual
artists, the game (or Breton) did presuppose the seriousness of artistic training as its
basis. Surrealist games can then be best understood as tools toward automatism, as
strategies that attempt to pool a process of collective thought unmediated by the
individual ego, or, to short-circuit the conscious workings of the individual mind as it
works its way through and applies the rules of the game to the actions at hand.
Sometimes, as in Robert Desnos' plunges into hypnotic states, games of ilinx (physical
and mental disorientation) are instead pursued. In surrealism the ends of agn, that is,
the regulated and antagonistic relation between powers and drive to win, are
repositioned such that the id, either individual or collective, m ight, with the proper
surrealist preparation, discipline and perseverance, be summoned up as a reluctant
opponent and finally be forced to reveal itself in language and in image.
<13> The "Jeu de Marseille " is most interesting in that it is the collective
project/game undertaken immediately before many of the contributing artists began their
exile from fascist-controlled France [7]. Incorporating a wo odcut by Alfred Jarry and
drawings by the above artists, this playing card deck included new court cards -- genius
(in lieu of king), siren (queen) and magus (jack) -- and new suits: flame (love), star
(dream), wheel (revolution) and lock (knowledge) (Gooding 124-5, 160; Audouin 485) [8].
Recognized in this project is the quality of card-playing as a means of passing the
time, and as a characteristic o f waiting, and the projection of skill and ability into
an uncertain, changing situation. Card-playing is a game that combines both alea and
agn; in certain card games agn, in terms of the experience and strategy of the card
player, can determine the winning hand.(Caillois 18). The surrealist card game,
undertaken in transit and a time of great uncertainty, works to foreground human will in

the situation where fate, chance, or the specter of totalitarianism, seems to have
overtaken it.
Duchamp and Chess
<14> Certainly the slippery interchange between chance on the one hand and merit or
human will and ability on the other was also well known to Marcel Duchamp. Perhaps more
so than any other artist of the twentieth century, Duchamp concerned himself with this
divide and with the structure an d process of agn, as it delimits human action and as it
is personified in the game of chess. He understood the ludic impulse and the agonistic
structure of the universe, within the Machine Age, to take place on the plane of eros,
and within the tensions, resolutions, and displacements of sexual play. In his art
Duchamp systematically introduced the element of gender and tied the confrontations and
neg otiations of eros to the field of agn. The surrealists -- Giacometti, Ernst, Man Ray
-- also made reference to chess, but the game did not buttress the entirety of their
artistic production the way it did Duchamp's.
<15> Chess, one of the oldest and most rigidly competitive of games of agn, is, as
Caillois understood it, an ultimate contest of agn, in requiring players to compete as
rigorously and i ntensely as they can with the goal of winning (15). Winning is required
of a player in order to achieve ranked status in chess, which Duchamp pursued
aggressively in France during the 1920s. "Wouldn't you rather win?" Duchamp is said to
have dryly queried Walter Hopps while they deliberated the roulette tables at the Golden
Nugget Casino in Las Vegas ; as chance would have it (at least according Hopps ),
Duchamp's instructions at the tables resulted in a considerable win [9]. Can Duchamp be
understood as the most competitive artist -- that is, one who was most concerned with
winning -- in the twentieth century? This reading goes against a prevalent postmodernist
understanding of the game or gaming as the possibility of endless play without result or
concern for an outcome, as it is advanced in the w riting of Jean-Franois Lyotard or by
Jacques Derrida, and as this has been applied to Duchamp [10]. According to Arturo
Schwarz, Duchamp himself insisted he was far more interested in investigating how the
language of chess could realize the beautiful than in outplaying an opponent; yet this
was surely not Duchamp's view as he played competitively in the 1920s [11]. But one can
also make the claim tha t the recasting of all human interaction, including heterosexual
sexuality, into the guise of agn, and thereby creating situations that could be
mastered and possibly won -- a process of conversion which one can read throughout his
entire oeuvre, even in his final epic work, the "Etant donns" -- seems to have
interested Duchamp most.
<16> Duchamp's love of chess, the game most removed from the workin gs of chance, is
apparent. One can trace one origin of Duchamp's concern with chess and agn in the
iconography he developed early in his oeuvre, while he worked within the medium of
painting: in his Czanne-esque paintings of his brothers at the chessboard of 1910 and
1911, and in the paintings of the following year that removed these figures and focused
exclusively on the movement of the chess piece in play: "Le Roi et la Reine Traverss
par des Nus Vites" and "Le Roi et la Reine Entours de Nus Vites." Duchamp famously
declared in 1923, a point in time which coincided with the "completion" of his earliest
epic work, the "Large Glass," that he had stopped being an artist and would in the
future only concern himself with chess [12].
<17> Indeed, in the late teens and 1920s he played competitively i n Argentina and then
as a ranked player in France, and produced chess pieces and other chess paraphernalia
[13]. For a time thereafter Duchamp worked directly on the problem of reconfiguring or
transforming alea (roulette) into pure agn (chess). While the intellectual challenge of
the task attracted Duchamp to the project -- it is quite impossible, which he later
recognized -- he was clearly also moti vated to "break the bank", that is, to garner a
huge profit by means of gambling, and, further, to reconfigure the functioning of the
capitalist economy, if his model were to be a success [14]. He coauthored a treatise,
"L'Opposition et les Cases Conjuges sont Rconcilies Par M. Duchamp & V. Halberstadt"
("Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled by M. Duchamp and V. Halberstadt," 1932)
on an obs cure chess end-game problem; and produced, for Julien Levy's "Imagery of Chess"
exhibition of December 1944, a "pocket chess" assemblage, manufactured as a multiple in
1966 [15].
<18> It was in the '60s, in and around his Pasadena retrospective exhibition of 1963,
that Duchamp presented himself as a chess player within the realm of art, a reversal of
his earlier insistence that his activities in these two domains were wholly separate or
mutually exclusive. One asks why Duchamp seized upon this radical reversal shortly
before his death [16]. In addition to the reissue of many of his readymades and the
above-mentioned assemblage as multiples, and the permission to produce duplicates or
"replicas" of many major works for the 1963 exhibition [17], Duchamp posed while playing
chess during a number of hig hly-publicized appearances both during and after the 1963
exhibition. Many of these appearances are captured in Julian Wasser's series of
photographs of Duchamp, as well as in the film "Jeu d'echecs avec Marcel Duchamp" by
Jean-Marie Drot, all of which were completed during and shortly after the Pasadena
exhibition.
<19> The most widely disseminated image by Wasser of the chess match between Duchamp an d
the nude Eve Babitz, a female friend of Hopp's (Fig. 1), was shot on October 18, 1963 in
the Pasadena gallery which featured the "Large Glass" surrounded by the readymade
replicas and related works in the Duchamp exhibition [18]. Wasser and Duchamp staged
this game before the "Large Glass"in order to emphasize its composition or even in a
sense to perform it; during the opening Wasser had photographe d Walter Hopps, the
curator of the exhibition, and Duchamp playing in the galleries. For the exhibition
Hopps had placed the early chess-related drawings and paintings in the second gallery,
which also featured chess paraphernalia (presumably the chess table, board and clocks).
Tashjian claims that the Babitz/Duchamp match was a chance event whose genesis cannot be
traced to any one person, neither to Wasser nor to Hopps, but was an idea that Duchamp
agreed to. It seems a highly deliberate, coordinated and meaningful decision to have

moved the playing table into the next gallery and to have staged there, for the camera
and before the "Large Glass," a chess game between Duchamp and a female nude named
"Eve," the biblical Ur-bride. Tashjian suggests that several aspects of this event are
purely "serendipitous." Duchamp had already related the biblical female nude to the
movement of chess pieces across the board: with a nude "Eve" de picted within his earlier
painting " Paradise " (1910-11), which featured a nude model posing as Eve, a painting
which further became the verso of "King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes." The Wasser
image also recalls Duchamp's theatrical appearance as the nude Adam to Brogna
Perlmutter's Eve in Picabia's "CinSketch" of 1924, which was recorded in a famous
photographic image; the image is also remi niscent of a 1936 photograph of Duchamp at the
chessboard in front of "Nude Descending a Staircase"; and the image interacts with the
complex iconography of the "Large Glass" itself, its segregation into female and male
domains and its direct references to chess in, for example, the "Nine Malic Moulds" of
the lower panel [19]. While Duchamp may not have arranged the event himself (as Babitz's
account s uggests), it is likely that given the resonances of the image there, he would
have suggested the game should be staged before the "Large Glass."

Fig. 1, Julian Wasser, Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz, 1963.

<20> However both Babitz's image and her own recollection of the event have effectively
been erased from art history. Tashjian notes that her account of the event was dismissed
by Wasser and that her essay, "Me and Marcel," remained unpublished. In Wasser's image,
Babitz's hair has fallen over her face in her absorption in the game, erasing h er as an
individual adversary or player from the scene; in contrast the camera captures Duchamp's
absorbed gaze and his gesture, as though he is explaining or gesticulating a recent
move. Are we really to understand that this erasure of a chess player and her
transformation into a faceless female body is also "serendipitous"? Duchamp after all
won the game (Schwarz 88) [20]. Wasser's arresting image of an urbane, elegant, even
youthful Duchamp engaged in chess with a voluptuous younger gaming partner reconnects to
Duchamp's investigation of the eros of agn (or the agn of eros) in the "Large Glass"
by displacing the onanism of the grinders of the "Glass" onto the movements of the
pieces in the game between himself and Eve. However, she is all but erased as a thinking
player, as an opponent and subj ect, in the process. This final image must not have been
selected from the proofs by Duchamp, since it conforms to a long lineage of female nudes
retinally transformed into objects by male artists -- Duchamp would never have been so
crude or conventional [21]. Yet the concept behind this staging of a chess match is a
sound, that is, that chess offers the realm of agn, where adversaries confront each
o ther under ideal conditions. In chess therefore a condition of equality is assumed
between players regardless of gender; equality must be taken as a point of departure.
The photograph negates this essential aspect of agn, which had previously always
concerned Duchamp.
<21> Duchamp was also photographed playing with Hopps in the museum's galleries with
people crowded around them; five years later, in a n auditorium at Ryerson Polytechnic in
Toronto with his wife Teeny at his side (fully clothed), Duchamp was again photographed
at play in a chess game in two parts against John Cage (he lost one, but Teeny won the
second). The game was also titled " Reunion " by Cage, a musical composition, and the
chessboard was connected to both light and sound sensors that issued sounds
corresponding to the moves of each player (Schwarz 88). In returning to the foundation
of his art in chess late in his career, Duchamp configured himself publicly as a
challenger or opponent to the younger avant-garde of the '60s such as Cage. Duchamp's
phrase "Tous les joueurs d'checs sont des artistes," further reminds of the realm of
precision and beauty that agn should and can occupy and of the importance of games as
art, wh ere the agonistic impulse of eros can be located as a creating force, and not one
appropriated by Cold War propagandistic apparatus in order to foreground,
metaphorically, the nationalistic militarism of "mutually assured destruction," as the
saying went [22].
Oyvind Fahlstrm: Painting and Cold War Metaphors
<22> The willful desire to "manipulate the world" through game-like structures -- no
less than the medium of painting -- is discernable in the remarkable "variable
paintings" produced by yvind Fahlstrm during the 1960s and '70s. As in Duchamp's work,
Fahlstrm used the game structure as a foundation for his art and as a filter for the
perception and rejection of Cold War ideology. Games were finally the cultural field
where Fahlstrm could assert the agency of the viewing subject. Fahlstrm u nderstood
that his paintings were "creating and relating models of the world; not symbols -anyone may put in whatever he finds -- only he sees (some of) the relations: what is
like, unlike, repeated, juxtaposed, etc., etc" (Fahlstrm "Notes" 32). Fahlstrm, who is
said to have studied surrealist art carefully, was clearly aware of the powerful
implications Breton had identified with the use of game e lements and structures. He was

also fascinated with the dualistic property of games that Caillois had noted, that is,
that both agn and alea are always to be found together, or that chance can never be
completely ruled out of even the strictest games: Caillois gives the famous example of
the question of whether the opening move in a chess match gives an advantage to that
player (Caillois 202 note 98). The board games of Monopoly a nd Risk, which remained
popular throughout this period, influenced Fahlstrm's reconfiguration of painting,
which he achieved by means of ferrite-magnets attached to individual elements which were
in turn placed on a wall or a larger flat surface where they could be manipulated. In
variable painting works such as "Sitting...Six months later" (1962), "Dr. Schweizer's
Last Mission" (realized in several p hases: "Phase I," 1964-66, Venice Biennale; "Phase
3,"1973, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; "Phase 7," 1981, Westkunst Cologne), "The Cold War"
and "World Politics Monopoly" (Fig. 2, 1970) the rules of advanced capitalism and of
Cold War division are presented to the viewer to be manipulated and played upon.
Therefore the variable paintings present diagrams or metaphors, albeit very simplified,
of the compl ex relations that contribute to the reality of Cold War culture.

Fig. 2, yvind Fahlstrm, World Politics Monopoly (1970).

<23> Fahlstrm's magnetized elements allowed for the free manipulation of forms by the
viewer, enabling the "bisociation" of elements, whereby their connections to each other
or to "factual images of erotic or political character" could be realized (Fahlstrm
"Take" 63). The ephemeral compositions of Fahlstrm's variable paintings explicitly
rej ected what he called the compositional strategy of "neodadaistic unrelationships,"
where compositional elements are "cut off and isolated" (Fahlstrm "Notes" 32). The
magnet became a building block for his "picture machines", the connective tissue that
would allow for variable movement and bisociation of elements. This would render
painting indefinitely transformable, and would further postpone finali ty or completion
of the painting itself: "the transformable paintings [which] never are one same
picture..." (Fahlstrm "Notes" 32-34). These works were game-like on several counts:
Fahlstrm states that the game is "a simple, fundamental outlook on life" (Fahlstrm
"Games" 58), a notion which he takes not from mathematical game theory but from John
Cage's notion of composition and from psychology. Gam es are, in Fahlstrm's view,
characterized by rules. Fahlstrm identified the rules of his own art as the immutable
aspect of the magnetic objects in terms of their "appearance, construction and
substance". However, the central tension of the "fundamental principle" of the gamepaintings was the paradox between the viewer/player's freedom to manipulate and arrange
the objects and the limits of their r esistance to this manipulation, their predetermined
inflexibility or immutability as flat, figurative images determined by the artist.
Freedom of choice opposes the rigidity of external appearance to "the other rules -like our conventions and agreements: the border between the Congo and Angola, the
numbers in the telephone book, the buttoning of jackets" (Fahlstrm "Games" 58). The
variable paintings realize a model of social and political reality where the
possibilities of play and manipulation oppose the unalterable mechanisms of ludus within
capitalist society. Fahlstrm's game paintings insist on a space for human agency within
complex and militaristic international relations. He insisted that his variable
paintings could only be successfully realized as mass-produced and distributed
multiples , "so that anyone interested can have a picture machine in his home and
'manipulate the world' according to either his or my choices" (Fahlstrm "Manipulating"
45).
Games in Conceptual Art and Fluxus
<24> The inherent qualities of games of agn (competition) and alea (chance) were also
taken up, but developed in another direction, by conceptual artists of the 1960s. It
could be argued that the game, wit h its characteristic quality of actions of infinite
repeatability based upon "precise, arbitrary unexceptionable rules that must be accepted
as such and that govern(s) [the] correct playing" (Caillois 5) [23], can constitute what
Sol Lewitt identified as a "plan". In Lewitt's description of the artistic process of
conceptual art, the plan mitigates subjective taste and fancy: "The plan would design
the work....the artist would select the basic form and rules that would govern the
solution of the problem. After that fewer decisions made in the course of completing the
work, the better. This eliminates the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective as
much as possible. That is the reason for using this method" (Lewitt 824). While Lewitt
clearly did not take up the game as such in his art, its qual ity as a predetermined
process similarly works against subjectivity. Indeed, this interest in the manipulation
of a predetermined structure -- or better, an interest in a predetermined structure that
can run its course with minimal "creative" interference -- is shared by the art

practices of both Fluxus and conceptual art [24].

<25> A second game-like aspect was also implicitly pursued by much conceptual art of the
'60s and '70s: the refusal of a process (of production) culminating in the manufacture
of new goods. Caillois writes that this quality was central to all games and play, even
in cases where games are played for profit: "A characteristic of play, in fact, is that
it creates no wealth or goods, thus differing from work or art. At the end of the game,
all can and must start over again at the same point....Play is an occasion of pure
waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill and often of money for the purchase of
gambling equipment or eventually to pay for the establishment" (Caillois 5-6). Games,
even as they are played within the established functioning of th e capitalist economy,
stand aside of economic exchange and its telos of the generation of durable goods and
surplus value. Games therefore establish a critical distance from that same economy,
which is also a goal of the best critical art of the postwar period. Though direct
evidence of Fluxus' and conceptual artists' engagement with cultural theories of games
as they were advanced in these years by Hu izinga, Breton, and Caillois, among others, is
still to be established [25], the common critical-theoretical postures and strategies of
games and of art developed in the Cold War era, along with the oftentimes explicit
appropriation of game forms and formats by artists, is clearly significant [26].
<26> Fluxus artists, particularly impresario George Maciunas and Robert Watts in their
unrealized commerc ial venture, The Greene Street Precinct, Inc., gave serious thought to
the place of games in art and to reconfiguring the conventional sites of art exhibition
[27]. Fluxus always cultivated the qualities of play, which Maciunas understood as being
connected to the mass-culture phenomena of amusement and entertainment within art. These
qualities were not permitted within high modernist aesthetic experi ence as it had been
codified in the writings of Clement Greenberg [28]. It is logical that games as a major
component of mass culture entertainment would have interested Fluxus as a kind of
readymade amusement that could be appropriated and redeployed as Flux-games. Already in
a number of manifestoes and manifesto-like letters he completed in the early 1960s,
Maciunas agitated for nonprofessionalism of the producers of art, and therefore for a
leveling of the roles of artist and audience. He condemned formalist art as "a useless
piece of merchandise whose only purpose is to be bought to provide the artist with an
income" (Maciunas "Letter" 82-4). Fluxus was instead to be "in the spirit of the
collective," anti-individualistic, aiming at the elimination of an institutionalized
market for bourgeois ar t, which Maciunas condemned as the "world of Europanism." Part of
the Fluxus idea of the evaporation of art was to be realized in an accompanying
expansion of the role of art in society, where art "must be unlimited, obtainable by all
and produced by all." According to Maciunas the content of this universally produced art
must also change and become "substitute art-amusement," which was to be simple a nd
"concerned with insignificances" like vaudeville (Maciunas "Fluxamusement" 14).
Therefore, no single producer of art can claim to be significant. Maciunas also insisted
that artists "demonstrate [their] own disposability" in dismantling of individual
subjective expression, a strategy which, as I explained above, greatly influenced
LeWitt's notion of conceptual art, though LeWitt would in contrast re main uninterested
in apparatus and mechanisms of mass culture such as games.
<27> Maciunas developed his notion of "Fluxamusement" in his "Fluxmanifesto on
Fluxamusement," of 1965, which perhaps drew from Henry Flynt's 1963 lecture, "From
Culture to Veramusement." In his manifesto, Maciunas outlines a plan for forms of
"fluxamusement" or "substitute art-amusement." This relates mass-culture amusement t o
art, a topic that had also concerned Bertolt Brecht in his theorization of his "epic
theater" in the 1920s and '30s. Brecht understood that his epic theater must also appeal
to the audience's pleasure, amusement, or "fun," an aspect so carefully provided for the
viewer in such mass entertainment forms as the circus, or, as Maciunas later realized,
in the playing of games. Brecht understood that this kind of entertainment appeal was
necessary to compete for the mass public's attention, and to provide a measure of
"irrationality" and "lack of seriousness" which might bring the public to the
realization of social and political injustice. For Brecht, amusement was key to the
political efficacy of epic theater, which could illuminate the material conditions of
the underclass [29]. While Brecht's explic it politicization of "amusement" is missing
from Maciunas' writing, he provides the beginnings of a theory of the critical potential
of games within mass culture society, which Maciunas perhaps strove for but could not
elaborate.
<28> Even the physicality of certain aspects of Fluxus performance was based on the
recovery of the "gag," the fleeting aspect of physical humor that was also invoked in
physic al acts of destruction, which Fluxus sometimes staged in its performances. It may
be the case that Fluxus pieces such as Higgins' "Danger Music No. 2" (1962) or Maciunas'
"Piano Piece No. 13 for Nam June Paik" (1964) recall American slapstick comedy in the
manner of the Marx Brothers, a tradition from vaudeville -- a kind of popular theater
that Maciunas particularly valued -- as much as it does the d irection of postwar
concrete art [30]. Fluxus incorporated blatant physical silliness or play as a unifying
element for their performance activities and for many of their manufactured multipleobjects and games. Not only were Fluxus events banal, for Maciunas, they also had to be
silly amusements, transient and lacking seriousness.
<29> Fluxus performance was generally not participatory as it was almo st exclusively
performed by Fluxus artists and not by audience members, for example, at its usual
venues of art galleries and concert halls. The participatory element, where it is to be
found at all in Fluxus, materializes in Maciunas' Fluxus multiples, the "Fluxkits" and
"Yearboxes," and particularly in Fluxus games and fluxchess. These objects directly
address and initiate the viewer's physical confr ontation and tactile participation in
the process of play and absurdity that Fluxus performance only staged before the
viewer's eyes; Maciunas' distribution of cheap objects in kits was central to the
development of the multiple as a participatory medium after 1960. The viewer's
participation in Fluxus, then, is rooted in a repetition of the diversionary pleasures
of the consumption of the products of mass culture.

<30> Fluxus did not enact an explicit Brechtian negation of the life conditions of the
underclass: Fluxus established no explicit connection either to radical politics or to
the student movement of the '60s, unlike other artists such as Joseph Beuys or Yoko Ono
[31]. Maciunas only communicated a vaguely populist aesthetics to be achieved through
the embrace of commercial art and amusement forms and in art's eventual disappearance
into the forms of cheap commercialism. But the cheap, low-brow pleasures of
fluxamusements and fluxgames function as negations of an elitist and anti-ludic visual
modernism, following Greenberg's postwar definition of the term.
Fluxgames and Fluxchess
<31> In Fluxus projects, Watts, George Brecht, Yoko Ono and Takako Saito reengaged with
chess or with the puzzle in various multiples: Fluxchess kits by Ono and Saito and a
manufactured series of puzzles and playing cards by Brecht and Watts could be purchased
by mail order from the Fluxshop. Playing cards were designed by both George Brecht and
Robert Watts. In 1959 Brecht had shown his work Solitare at the Reuben Gallery's Towards
Events exhibition in New York, which was, according to Brecht, a new card game he had
adapte d from the rules of Solitaire. Brecht's notion of the event, a central unit of his
performance practice, was then clearly connected, if not developed from, the rules or
instructions that comprise games. Everyday and banal, the single concrete event could
be, in Brecht's Fluxus performances, the simple act of exiting a room (Exit) or of
counting in unison in different ways. The Brecht event, as it was communicated in his
short written scores or instructions, then presents rules of a particular game that the
viewer subsequently agrees to engage in.
<32> Brecht's playing cards were to be manufactured and distributed by Maciunas under
the "Games & Puzzles" label as a Fluxus edition. Robert Watts had designed a program
cover for the June 1964 Fluxorchestra concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, which
feat ured face card-like designs so that the program could be held by audience members
like a hand of cards. Watts' "instruction drawing" to accompany the playing card deck
remains unexplained; the drawing features a recto and verso view of a gender-neutral
human body where various body parts are numbered from 1 to 56. Whether these body parts
were to be featured on various cards or whether Watts conceived of an elaborate strippoker scenario for card players is unclear. Watts completed a prototype deck of Playing
Cards for Fluxus, but these were never manufactured due to the cost involved [32].
<33> Contrary to the contemporaneous art-games of Duchamp and Fahlstrm, Fluxus artists
displayed an interest in fashioning the art-game as a complex intersubjective situation
or interaction that went beyond -- or rejected -- the zero-sum scenario of most games of
agn and alea and its conclusions, that is, where players have diametrically opposed
interests and either win or lose. Fluxus art-games often dismantle the notion of
competition altogether, a central aspect of agn, in making competition more difficult
or even impossible in its conventional sense, which usually has to do with a player's
skill in as sessing visual information. In rendering competition itself nonsensical,
Fluxus artists reintroduced the element of paidia, the category of spontaneous play and
fantasy Caillois usually associated with children, as a pleasure to be rediscovered
within art. It is perhaps for this reason that the puzzle form, which refuses the
serious competition of games of agn, became important to Fluxists Brecht and Watts .
Fluxus games also implicitly reject the instrumental logic of loss and gain which
characterizes the capitalist economy in the late twentieth century [33].
<34> Maciunas advertised Brecht's series of ball, bead, and bread puzzles, first
produced as a Fluxus edition in 1964, as "with rules...All games and puzzles invented
and made to order, no two alike" (Fig. 3; Hendricks 199). In these multipl es Brecht
therefore expanded the event into an interactive, participatory and even tactile
experience for participants who may not be Fluxus members or artists; the puzzles and
games fundamentally reconfigure the spectatorial relations of Fluxus performance. In the
series, one short, event-like score was sometimes placed in a puzzle box (made of
plastic or balsa wood) with the object in question, possi bly steel ball bearings or
plastic balls; Maciunas and Brecht sometimes produced the same box and object in
different versions, each with a different score included. For example, the three
different Bead Puzzles with the following scores: "Bead Puzzle/Your birthday"; "Bead
Puzzle/Arrange the beads so that they are the same./Arrange the beads so that they are
different"; "Bead Puzzle/Cut cards so that b eads do not separate./find another
solution./Repeat, beyond farthest solution./G. Brecht" (Hendricks 199) [34]. Brecht also
produced puzzles, which include several different scores ("Swim Puzzle/Ball
Puzzle/Inclined Plane Puzzle") placed in the same box, therefore allowing the
participant to choose between or vary the puzzles she or he can complete (Hendricks
197). "Swim Puzzle" was produced in boxes t hat included seashells, and, in one instance,
a snail shell: the score for one of these works reads, "Arrange the beads in such a way
that the word 'C-U-A-L' never occurs." As beads are not included in the box, the puzzle
is impossible (Hendricks 201) [35].

Fig. 3, George Brecht, Bead Puzzle (c. 1965). Photo by Brad Iverson; Gilbert and Lila
Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit, MI.
<35> Robert Watts' timekits and time puzzles presented a different challenge to the
participant, which involved a meditation on temporality. First produced as "Flux
timekits," and at one point included in the "Flux Cabinet" as "Time Fluxkit," and later
realized in 1977 as a " time puzzle," Watts presented various elements (up to 100 of
them) which were intended for the participant for "play" with, including a grided board
surface on which one was to categorize and order the elements according to one's
assessment of their relation to time. On the label for the "timekit" Watts printed the
title over Harold E. Edgerton's famous high-speed photographic image of the trajectory
o f a bullet (Fig. 4). The objects he included in the time puzzle included a stopwatch,
dice, a top, a rifle bullet, measuring tape, a match, and seeds which would grow at
different rates (Hendricks 547-48) [36]; each object can be used to gauge the passing of
time and can therefore transform the participant's sense of time -- creating a sense of
disorientation from our usual sense of clocked time -- in radically compressing or
slowing time down (as is the case in Edgerton's photograph, which inversely tracks a
very fast event), or in greatly elongating the duration of a unit of time (in the
longer-term needed for the germination of a seed and its growth into a plant). While
such manipulations of temporality are well known to viewers of motion pictures, some
cognitive effort is required to sort and r elate the temporal aspect of these banal
objects in relation to each other. Playing this game may lead to ilinx, the kind of
mental disorder or temporal disorientation Caillois identified as a primitive kind of
play, which can even have quasi-physical effects on the participant. Watts' "time
puzzle" invites the participant to reflect on her or his own sense of the passage of
time, and on their sense of mortality.

Fig.4 and 4A, Robert Watts, Flux Timekit and detail (1967).
Photo by

Brad Iverson; Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit, MI.

<36> Fluxus artists Yoko Ono and Takako Saito engaged with Duchamp's practice but also
with masculinist cold war metaphors by taking up chess as a subject of their art.
Saito's fluxchess works, which date back to 1964 but were produced as fluxus editions
into th e 1970s, question the primacy of vision to chess as a game of agn-ludus, along
with notions of perception and in aesthetic experience more generally. Saito's grinder,
or portable chess sets, were placed in lidded hardwood chests where the grinder chess
pieces, made of stone or metal, could rest in holes and remain stationary. Her "Jewel
Chess" and "Nut & Bolt Chess" sets introduced materials unusual to the game, often
suspended in plastic cubes, as playing pieces. But her "Smell Chess," "Sound Chess" and
"Weight Chess" reworked the game of chess so that players would be forced to hone nonvisual perception, such as the olfactory sense, tactility, and aurality, in order to
follow chess rules. "Spice Chess" (Fig. 5), a special subset of "Smell Chess," featured
different spices in test tubes as the various pieces; the players would have to learn to
identify the pieces by not only vision (color and texture) but also by smell. While
Saito did not dismantle the playing of the game of chess, she reminded the viewer that
other senses can also be drawn upon or made to figure in the most analytical and
competitive tasks or games.

Fig. 5, Takako Saito, Spice Chess (1965). Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection,
Detroit, MI.
<37> Yoko Ono's chess works are among the most beautiful objects produced in conjunction
with Fluxus; it should be noted that she contemporaneously produced her own works while
others were given over to be distributed as part of Fluxus editions by Maciunas. By the
late 1960s and early '70s, Ono's object s and performances were often explicitly
political and frequently critical of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and of American
militarism, particularly in works she realized with John Lennon. Similar to other fluxus
objects, Ono's chess games rendered the process of ludus and of agn in chess impossible
and even ludicrous. Her works "Pieces Hidden in Look-Alike Containers, Chess Set"(1970,
produced as a Fluxus piece) and the powerful "White Chess Set" (Fig. 6, 1971) both
annihilate the possibility of competitive zero-sum play. In Ono's fluxus chess set each
of the pieces is hidden in a look-alike container, making competitive play impossible.
In "White Chess Set" the pieces of both players are colored white, making it impossible
after a certain point to identify one player's pieces from the othe r. Here the
metaphorical and ethical associations of black and white to evil and good are rejected;
unity is underscored instead of competitive division between opponents. Ono restructures
the chess game toward ilinx in disengaging properties of the game's individual pieces as
determined within a game of agn. She disengages what has been called the "internal
nature" of chess, within which both an enun ciating subject, the chess player, is formed,
and a specific "closed" or predetermined space, one that is bordered, guarded and
defended, is created [37].

Fig. 6, Yoko Ono, White Chess Set (c. 1971).

Unidentified photographer; Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit, MI.
Art-Games and Cold War Space
<38> Postwar artists understood the moral and ethical importance Huizinga had earlier
claimed for human play and games, a significance which Huizinga himself only recognized
in studying the totalitarian state's perverse appropriation of play. Th e surrealists had
first understood that games could reconfigure not only the creative process but also the
dynamics of knowledge itself. The Cold War superpowers' politically-laden manipulation
of the game -- for example, the politicization of sports within the Olympic games, and
of competitive chess -- prompted a second wave of game-focused art and further
theorization of games that followed the surre alists' important findings on this terrain.
In their work A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari forward both an
extended spatial metaphor for the condition of epistemology itself and an exercise in
"nomad thought," which rejects the assumptions and the posture of political subservience
that philosophy had taken on since the Enlightenment. Within this vast project, they
comment on the p roperties of the game, specifically, on chess pieces "and the space
involved." They touch upon a postmodernist cultural theory of games.
<39> Marcel Duchamp's final years of art production led the way for this widespread
investigation and reclaiming of the game. Duchamp's final deployment of his own persona
as a chess player ran counter to the nearly hysterical international stagings of
competitive che ss realized since the 1950s, which connected in obvious ways to Cold War
tensions between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. The nationalism inscribed into chess reached
its zenith with the World Chess championship final match between Boris Spassky and Bobby
Fischer in 1972, though a hyper-competitive chess cult had been put in place since the
1950s around international chess matches. That chess became a short hand sign for
East/West conflict during the '60s might be proven by the fact that a chess tournament
is central to the plot of the most Cold-War-fixated cultural product, the Ian Fleming
007 franchise, and the film From Russia with Love (1963) [38]. Some Cold War chess
tournaments resulted in highly publicized defections to the West, as in the cases of
Soviet players Viktor Korchnoi, Anatoly Lein, Vlad imir Liberzon, Gannadi Sosonko and
Leonid Shamkovich (Parrish 59). The propagandistic value of chess appears to have
increased exponentially throughout the Cold War period. The series of photographic
images of Duchamp at the chessboard contest other, widely circulated images of the
playing of chess as an iconography of the balance of Cold War military power.
<40> Fahlstrm and Fluxus artists like Watts , Saito and Ono used the game for their
strategic refusal of ludus in favor of paidia; they wrenched the game of agn away from
its functioning within the Cold-War state apparatus. In 1980, as the Cold War seemed to
stretch on interminably, Deleuze and Guattari formulated a model of philosophy around
the notion of "nomad thought" which they contrasted with "state philosophy", or
representational thinki ng in service of the state. Both types of thought generate its
own space of movement: state space is "striated" and "closed" in that movement is
limited to predetermined and fixed lines and points. In contrast, they understood nomad
thought would generate a "smooth", open space where one can move from any one point and
move to any other. Not surprisingly, game theory offers up useful metaphors for the ir
system: they discuss chess as a closed system, a "semiology," a "game of the state," an
"institutionalized, related, coded war" that realizes a closed space ( Deleuze and
Guattari, 352) [39]. In a move parallel to the critiques of chess that Duchamp and
Fluxus had generated within visual art, Deleuze and Guattari use games to repudiate the
ideology that made the militaristic Manicheanism of Cold War culture possible.

Notes
[1] Jennifer Milam, "Rococo Games and the Origins of Visual Modernism," lecture
delivered at the Philadelphia CAA conference (February, 2002). Milam's book, Fragonard's
Playful Paintings: Visual Games in Rococo Art, is forthcoming. [^]
[2] Here again the early cultural theories of games trace the footsteps of Walter
Benjamin, who also addressed Schmitt, though far more positive ly than Huizinga, in his
early essay "Critique of Violence" (1921), reprinted in Reflections. [^]
[3] In the English edition Caillois's translator Meyer Barash points to the "payola"
investigations around Charles van Doren, a major scandal in the U.S. in the 1950s, as
another case in point: see note 55, p. 193-4. For an expanded examination of Callois
cultural game theory and his relation to Bataille see my essay, Serious Play: Games and
Early Twentieth-Century Modernism, in The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-

1945 (Fall, 2005), 9-30. [^]

[4] Andr Breton in Mdium, II, 2 (1954), excerpted and reprinted in Gooding, 137-138;
154. Philippe Audouin, who seems to be the sole exegete of the surrealist game, followed
suit in his entry of 1964 for the Dictionnaire des Jeux. [^]
[5] This list of games follows the titles attributed by Audouin and Breton. The dates
given correspond to the first publication of the resu lts of the game in question, or,
the first published description of the game, as listed in Gooding 143-155. The games
were mostly published in La Rvolution Surraliste and Mdium, through some also
appeared in Documents and Littrature. In his essay Breton does not mention the jeu de
la vrit, the results of which were only first published in 1990 (French) and 1992
(English), perhaps due to their exp licit nature. See Pierre. [^]
[6] This latter game, whose format is akin to that of a survey, proceeded as follows: if
one were told that a particular individual had returned from the dead, would you receive
her or him in your home? Breton published the statistical results, and his own
elaborated responses, in order of approval. Breton's comments are noted in parentheses:
Baudelaire, yes 100%; Gustave Moreau, yes, 100% ("Oui grand serrurier"); Charles Fourier
yes 94%; Freud yes, 94%; Gauguin yes, 88% ("Oui avec grands honneurs"); Lenin yes 88%;
Goya yes 87%; Juliette Droucet yes 87%; Hegel yes 82%; Huysmans yes 82%; van Gogh yes
76% ("Oui par gards mais avec mais, le souci d'abrger"); Seurat yes 71% ("Oui
calmement en harmonie"); Marx yes 65%; Nietzsche yes 60%; Mallarm yes 59%; Balzac yes
56%; G oethe yes 50%, no 50%; Poe no 56%; Chateaubriand no 59%; Verlaine no 87%; and
finally Czanne, no, 88% ("Non rien se dire"). See Gooding 154, Audouin 481-2, and
Breton in Mdium, nouvelle srie communication surraliste No. 1, as cited in Andr
Breton La Beaut Convulsive 411. [^]
[7] Surrealists Breton, Victor Brauner, Oscar Dominguez, Max Ernst, Jacques Herold,
Wifredo Lam, Jacqueline Lamba, and An dr Masson began their exile from occupied France
together. [^]
[8] The jeu de Marseille featured the following personages: as Genius: Baudelaire,
Lautramont, Sade and Hegel; as Siren: the Portuguese Nun (Mariana Alcoforado, 17 thcentury nun whose series of love letters are now understood as forgeries), Lewis
Carroll's Alice, Stendhal's Lamiel, Hlne Smith (19 th-century clairvoyant); Magus:
Novalis , Freud, Pancho Villa and Paracelsus. [^]
[9] As cited by Tashjian, note 30, p. 82. In this essay Tashjian describes the events
surrounding the 1963 Pasadena Duchamp retrospective staged by Hopps. Hopps' heroicizing
Las Vegas story can be found in "Duchamp in Vegas," in Arman, 43-44. His statement is
dated 1983, twenty years after the event took place. [^]
[10] In for example Lyotard, and Derrida's dis cussion of play in "Structure, Sign and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Derrida. See also Kchler. [^]
[11] Schwarz cites several sources including Truman Capote who recalls Duchamp
discussing chess as an "art activity", and, via Calvin Tomkins, Edward Lasker, who
reminisced about Duchamp's chess-playing style: "He would always take risks in order to
play a beautiful game, rather than be cautious and brutal to win." Schwarz also quotes
at length (without any citation to a source) Duchamp's comments on chess and beauty at
the New York State Chess Association banquet of 1952. The entire installation behind the
wood door of the Etant donns (1946-1966) is built upon a black-and-white-tiled floor,
which recalls the horizontal playing field of the chessboard. Agn therefore remained
cent ral to Duchamp's art. [^]
[12] For a basic introduction to the Large Glass, see and Chapters 4 and 5 in Ades. [^]
[13] For a detailed summary of Duchamp's chess activity see Schwarz 57ff. [^]
[14] Bradley Bailey traces Duchamp's engagement with French mathematics in his chessand roulette-related artworks and activities in his paper, "The Dukes of Hasard: Marcel
Duchamp and the French Probabilists," d elivered at the Philadelphia CAA conference,
2002, and in his dissertation, Duchamp's Chess Identity (Case Western Reserve
University, 2004). [^]
[15] The multiple can be considered a medium of art which Duchamp originated in a 1917
edition of three photographs in a box. The multiple as a medium of art enjoyed a
renaissance in the art of Fluxus and by the Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri during the
1960s. Wh ere multiples or series of an artwork within an edition had been in production
since the Renaissance in the form of bronzes which could be cast multiple times, or in
the graphic arts with its possibility of series pulled from the same plate, object
multiples following Duchamp were conceived to be manufactured by sources other than the
artist. For an early consideration of the multiple see Tancock. [^]
[16] It should be noted that as early as 1936 Duchamp posed for publicity photographs
playing chess; the Los Angeles Times of August 16, 1936 published a photo of Duchamp at
the Arensberg's, absorbed at the chessboard, with his Nude Descending a Staircase
forming a backdrop. Ironically the caption read "Artist Views Masterpiece." [^]
[17] For example, the Large Glass, Three Standard Stoppages (1914) a nd the Nine Malic
Moulds (1914-15) were all replicas of originals produced or acquired for the Pasadena
exhibition. A thoroughgoing critique of the notion of originality, and of the singular
and original artwork, is certainly advanced by these works as well. The important
subject of the Duchampian multiple is addressed in "Marcel Duchamp and the Multiple," in
Arman 31-36; Tashjian 68-69; and by Jones 9 4-99. [^]
[18] Wasser in fact photographed the entire match between the two. The proof sheet has
also been published in the West Coast Duchamp exhibition catalogue. See Tashjian 71-74.
[^]

[19] On the relation of Duchamp's art to the history of chess see Bailey. [^]
[20] Schwarz curiously gives no other details about the Babitz/Duchamp game. [^]
[21] Babitz, who became a Southern California journalist, did finally break her silence
on the match with Duchamp in a 1991 essay in Esquire. She maintains that Wasser set up
the game and photo session without Hopps' knowledge, and that Duchamp made a special
appearance at the Pasadena Museum to play the staged match with herself. This photograph
and Duchamp's complicity in its staging is a blind spot in Jones' feminist-izing reading
of Duchamp in Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp. Jones calls the
Babitz/Duchamp photo "notorious" and claims that Duchamp passively acquiesced to
participation. She therefore refuses to acknowl edge Duchamp's role in the construction
of this image; she is also uninterested in the centrality of chess to his art. [^]
[22] Arman's contribution to the Philadephia Duchamp retrospective catalogue of 1973, in
which he cleverly inserted notation of a fictional game between Duchamp and Rrose Slavy
into the actual notation of a Spassky/Fischer match of 1972, underscores this final
point. See Marcel Du champ 182-184. Arman's fictional notation is also a shorthand
catalogue raisonn of Duchamp's major works. [^]
[23] This definition of the game follows those of Huizinga and Caillois. [^]
[24] Robert Morris explicitly took up the game form and structure -- though defined
within the realm of semiotics -- in a series of conceptual artworks that he began in
1973 entitled Blind Time Drawings. In the series and in his writings, Morris applied
Ludwig Wittgenstein's notion of the language-game to the codes and sign systems set out
in the art of Jasper Johns and Marcel Duchamp. Brian Winkenweder has noted that these
Wittgenstenian-game-like drawings by Morris therefore systematically expand upon the
language that Morris identifies as comprising "modern art." Brian Winkenweder, "Robert
Morris's Blind Man's B luff," manuscript of lecture delivered at the Philadelphia CAA
conference (February, 2002) and Winkenweders dissertation, Reading Wittgenstein: Robert
Morris Art-as-Philosophy (SUNY Stony Brook, 2004). [^]
[25] Caillois cites a study of the psychology of the champion by Merleau-Ponty, La
Structure du Comportement, published in 1942 and almost simultaneous with Huizinga's
work. The sustained engagemen t of philosophy, cultural theory and mathematics with the
game in the twentieth century is a remarkable chapter of intellectual history. [^]
[26] Language games developed within twentieth-century modernist art, those of early
surrealism, for example, lie outside the scope of this essay.Throughout the '20s and
'30s the surrealists also used games as a tool of automatism and in quasi-structuralist
fashio n, in their explorations of representation by means of the expansion of the
workings of language itself. The structuralist aspects of the word-games of earlier
surrealist art have been studied, but its game-aspect has not been developed. [^]
[27] Jon Hendricks reprints the prospectus Maciunas and Watts drafted around 1967 when
Maciunas purchased a number of buildings in Soho . The Greene Street Precin ct, Inc. was
to be a commercial and profit-generating venture, a kind of amusement arcade which was
to feature shops, a discotheque, automated food establishments, and a "drink and game
lounge." Many flux-games described in this essay were to be featured in the lounge. The
plan apparently did not attract investors, but Maciunas continued to propose a " Flux
Amusement Center " as part of fluxus exhibiti ons and performances. Versions of this
fluxus arcade were realized in A Flux Amusement Center at Douglas College, New Jersey,
in 1970, and as part of other exhibitions through 1977 (in New York City and Syracuse,
in Cologne and West Berlin, Germany, and in Seattle, Washington). A consideration of how
Maciunas' arcade returns to some of the spectatorial practices of primitive cinema
(i.e., the "cinema o f attractions" Nickelodeon connected to, for example, the late
nineteenth-century Coney Island amusement park), and how it anticipates conceptual art's
mode of institutional critique, would be of further interest. [^]
[28] Greenberg's influential postwar art criticism had strictly segregated play,
amusement and entertainment from classical modern art. In order to champion the Kantian
aesthetic traditio n, Greenberg categorizes the play of amusement as part of the
corrupting affect of mass culture or kitsch, which must be contested and negated within
the serious realm of art. See Greenberg. [^]
[29] See Brecht. Brecht's recognition of the radicalized potential of pleasure afforded
in mass culture was later violently rejected by not only Greenberg but also Horkheimer
and Adorno, who maintain in the Dia lectic of Enlightenment that the industry of
amusment represses the masses and nothing else. [^]
[30] I discuss the connection of Fluxus to John Cage and to concrete art in West Germany
in the 1950s and '60s in the first chapter of my dissertation. See Claudia Mesch,
Problems of Remembrance in Postwar German Performance Art, unpublished doctoral
dissertation, University of Chicago and UMI Publications , 1997. [^]
[31] See Huyssen. [^]
[32] See entries for Robert Watts in Hendricks 562-3. [^]
[33] On the rejection of instrumental reason in the work of Watts see Buchloh. [^]
[34] These works correspond to Silverman Numbers 48, 53, and 60, respectively. [^]
[35] The works correspond to Silverman Numbers 58, 58a and 59. [^]
[36] Silverman Numbers 511 ff. [^]
[37] See the comments of Gilles Deleuze and Fl ix Guattari in "1227: Treatise on
Nomadology." [^]

[38] The demonstration board featured in the film apparently diagrams a Spassky game,
lifted from a Soviet championship of 1960. See The Oxford Companion to Chess 87. [^]
[39] They contrast this "closed" aspect of chess to the Chinese game of Go and imply
that Go opens onto "open" and "smooth" space. They rather force the metaphor here, as Go
is, like chess, based upon and concerned with the grid as a "striated" space.
Nonetheless, this metaphor is very interesting, even it they overestimate the radical
difference between chess and Go. [^]

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Fluxus Codex . Jon Hendricks, Ed. New York: Abrams, 1988.
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List of Figures
Fig. 1, Julian Wasser, Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz, 1963.
Fig. 2, yvind Fahlstrm, World Politics Monopoly (1970).
Fig. 3, George Brecht, Bead Puzzle (c. 1965). Photo by
Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit, MI.

Brad Iverson; Gilbert and Lila

Fig.4 and 4A, Robert Watts, Flux Timekit and detail (1967). Photo by
Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit, MI.

Brad Iverson;

Fig. 5, Takako Saito, Spice Chess (1965). Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection,
Detroit, MI.
Fig. 6, Yoko Ono, White Chess Set (c. 1971). Unidentified photographer; Gilbert and Lila
Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit, MI.

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