16/12/2020
Wittgenstein Plays Chess With Duchamp:
Or How Not To Do Philosophy
An animated film by Amit Dutta
Based on an essay by Steven Gerrard
One of the strongest celebrity chess players of all time was Marcel Duchamp. The avant-garde Dadaist played on Marshall Chess Club teams, wrote a book about chess endgames, and was reputed to be of master strength. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, also a chess enthusiast, has 181 references to chess in his landmark books, including in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), the Philosophical Investigations (1953), and the Blue and Brown Books (1958).
Duchamp and Wittgenstein did not know each other, even though the film creates a fictional correspondence chess game between them. Acclaimed experimental filmmaker Amit Dutta features the two icons in his newest offering, an animated movie constructed around the ingenious scholarship of Williams College philosopher Steven Gerrard.
Wittgenstein Plays Chess With Duchamp: Or How Not To Do Philosophy merges concepts from philosophy, linguistics, the visual arts, mathematics, geometry, psychology, and of course chess. The mesmerizing narration of animator Ayswarya Sankaranarayanan imbues a steadying flow of Gerrard text to the 17-minute kaleidoscope of photos, animated clips, highlighted quotes, and intriguing juxtapositions.
The main ideas for the animated offering were indeed adapted from Gerrard’s insightful paper (Wittgenstein Plays Chess With Duchamp), which first appeared in Tout-Fait, an online journal devoted to Duchamp’s ouevre. Both the film and Professor Gerrard’s thesis highlight contrast of perspective. For example, some artists and thinkers focus on the surface, while others try to get past the surface into its depth. With either approach, the aim is to reveal hidden meaning.
Besides Duchamp, works of Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Man Ray, and Alfred Jarry appear throughout. There are plenty of formulations by Wittgenstein and Duchamp, along with metaphors and allusions to Aldous Huxley and Albert Camus (even Groucho Marx and Woody Allen, with their self-referential humor), as well as quotes from the likes of Sophocles, Eugene Znosko-Borovsky, Lewis Carroll, Ajeeb, Sigmund Freud, and Leo Tolstoy.
An early line in the animation comes from the first sentence of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Staying on the subject, we later see Wittgenstein’s take on happiness. It means “to be in agreement with the world.”
Duchamp and Ernst are especially viewed through a lens of contrasting paradigms. For Ernst’s work “The Hat Makes the Man,” we hear that “Ernst has taken a familiar side of a man, a hat, and gone beneath the surface to the unfamiliar.” For this, Ernst represents depth. Regarding Duchamp, the film tells us that he “has taken supposedly a familiar object and defamiliarized it by change of location and status.” Duchamp represents surface, or creativity by perspective and by rearranging the elements. So, both worldviews seek hidden meanings, but in different ways. Or as the narrator implies, surface and depth analysis are different, but they can lead to the same place.
Reinforcing the contrast is an actual chess position, the trebuchet. This mutual zugzwang was examined by Duchamp and Halberstadt in their chess book on coordinate squares, L'opposition et cases conjuguées sont réconciliées - in English, “Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled” (1932). The concept is explored by both Gerrard and Dutta, underscoring dichotomy of outlook, moving first or moving second, which touches upon the presentation’s leitmotif.
The film officially opens Thursday, December 17 and is available at MUBI.com.
Steven Gerrard’s brilliant paper can be found at
https://www.toutfait.com/.../articles/gerrard/gerrard.html.
For chess players, artists, philosophers, and sentient beings, it’s certainly worth a closer look.
I could say more, but for now will say less, closing with the mantic words of Ludwig Wittgenstein:
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
