January 13, 2008
Art
The Ritual of Chess, a Decoder of Life
By DOROTHY SPEARS
NATHANIEL LAGEMANN had just clinched a tournament victory at a chess club in Santa Monica, Calif., when the artist Diana Thater found him discussing the match with his final opponent.
Ms. Thater was looking for a teenage chess player for her new video project, she told Mr. Lagemann, 19. She asked if she could inspect his hands.
“I guess she wanted younger-looking hands,” Mr. Lagemann said in a telephone interview, “not scruffy-looking, hairy older hands.” He was skeptical, but eventually he drove to Ms. Thater’s home studio in nearby Highland Park for a day of videotaping, accompanied by his mother.
Ultimately Mr. Lagemann — or, rather, just his hands — played against the more seasoned hands of Mick Bighamian, 51, the owner of the Los Angeles Chess Club, and the elegantly manicured hands of Jennifer Acon, another club habitué. The videos are on view in a show — “Here is a text about the world.” — of Ms. Thater’s new work that opened on Thursday at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea.
Displayed on large flat monitors mounted onto the walls, the players’ hands inhabit the screen as actors would, engaging in historic matches. There is a re-enactment of the so-called Immortal Game, played between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky in London in 1851, and Garry Kasparov’s famous 2003 face-off with the computer Deep Junior. The table is swathed in black velvet, and the chessboard appears to float.
Here is the full article.
Go Nathaniel!