We all know that there’s a long history of chess in art, and the latest artist to be treading in the footsteps of Marcel Duchamp et al is Darren Bader. The New York based artist has been putting on his own daily versions of this most ancient of games to coincide with his current show (Such are Promises, until 20 February) at Sadie Coles HQ on Kingly Street. Bader’s idiosyncratic gaming fest ends at the weekend but there is still time to be a participant in the last few contests by signing up on the gallery’s website.
Chess Bader-style is played on a 15ft by 15ft board made up of uniform grey ceramic squares, each inscribed with “lighter” and “darker” in the artist’s own hand. The rules are the same but the chess pieces are unorthodox and vary each day. On Tuesdays and Fridays, each piece is identified by music played through speakers. While on Wednesdays, participants are invited to play with shoes provided by the artist: one set is made up of left-shoes and the other by right ones. In this footloose version Vans stand in for pawns, rooks are Timberland boots, Gucci sandals stand in for the kings while the queens are denoted by a pair of the tall lacquered footwear worn by Oiran (Japanese courtesans).
Thursday is gambling day: players bring in their own pieces to wager, with the winner taking all. At the private view, the photographer Juergen Teller played—and won—with his own art books against the collector Andrew Hale’s daughter Alice. While on Saturdays people are the pieces in “relative chess”, which is open to anyone who is “related to someone.” Players in this all-encompassing category have included artist Simon Periton and daughter; Frieze’s Matthew Slotover and his wife Emily King; and Sadie Coles herself, who took the role of rook.
All in all, a stimulating piece of audience participation and not as high maintenance for the gallery staff as Bader’s “lasagne on heroin” of 2012. This most demanding of works not only involved regular trips to the local Marks & Spencer—ensuring that the slice of the Italian pasta dish was always displayed in its freshest form—but also needed staffers to make sure that each new version of the piece was injected with enough heroin to permeate the dish. The various forms of Bader’s art-chess will be rather less onerous for potential buyers to re-install.