just up my street!
working with the theme of expletives this is just my kind of thing!
The latest artist’s chess set unveiled this month by RS&A Ltd breaks yet another mould in this time-honoured game genre. The London-based company has already got Rachel Whiteread to replace knights, kings and bishops with dolls house furniture and the Chapmans to fashion chess pieces from mini-penis nosed mannequins. Whether Marcel Duchamp (the Big Daddy of conceptual art played in both the French chess championships and the 1928 and 1933 Olympiads) would have approved of the latest version by Barbara Kruger is debatable since, for the first time ever, she has produced a chess set that talks. Every time a move is made, tiny concealed speakers in each piece utter forth a phrase, sentence, or statement, ranging from “Give me a break!” or, “This is SO over!” to a series of expletives. Sharp-eared art lovers may recognise some of the voices emanating from the pieces as RS&A engaged in an intensive recruitment drive last autumn that resulted in a stream of art world volunteers—both British and US—lending their voices in the name of art. Those recorded include Jetsam herself, who was delighted that her allocated phrases included the forcefully delivered,“I must be obeyed!”
