CHESS - The Albino Problem

When I was little my mother taught me how to play chess. She was a good player herself in her youth and she used to play a lot with my father's young sister, my aunty. I had heard stories of them playing together when they were young, locked in hours of intense play that some times had to continue over two days, and hoped that I too would become a very good player and match them. But however hard I tried I was not able to become a good chess player. There were two main reasons for that; I did not have the discipline to predict and consider the opponent's future moves and I was unable to attack properly. To be fair to myself, I was able to predict the future possible moves of my opponent up to a point, but the further along I tried to imagine the moves the more I got intertwined with imaginary scenarios between different chess pieces and got lost in their possible actions. The fact that I had an old chess book where the illustrations depicted chessmen with anthropomorphic characteristics did not help. In the book the chess pieces that had been taken out looked devastated and were sitting outside the chess board wounded or crying. I started imagining each piece as an actual character so that I was unable to attack properly the opponent without a whole scenario taking place in my head between the opposing pieces. Both my mother and my aunty played properly, never talking during the game and sometimes taking ages between goes. That made things worse for me, making me bored and giving me even more time to indulge and get lost in my private imaginary game of chess.

The best that ever became of me as a chess player was in my teenage years when, kind of free from my imaginary chessmen, but still unable to attack properly, I managed to maintain really long games frustrating the opponent, with seemingly tireless defence. My defence was the only thing I could master and very occasionally it would tire and confuse the opponent into making a mistake that led to me winning. Otherwise I always lost after very long, dragged out and slightly predictable and depressing to me, games. Determined to set that right and once and for all learn how to attack properly without feeling sorry for the other player, I started looking at chess problems and old chess classic games of the masters. I was hoping to return from my last year in Newcastle University to Athens, the summer of 2001, with a degree and with the ability to beat both my mother and my aunty in short, attack based, ruthless and intimidating chess games.

I often think back to my last year at Newcastle University and particularly at my studio there. By studio all I mean is the space I had in a huge room we shared between five sculpture students. It was huge and my bit looked like a pile of garbage. There were all sorts of materials there, metal sheets, railway sleepers, wax melting equipment, a chainsaw, cement, plaster, clay and I don't know what else. But it all made sense to me and I was there more or less all the time. That last year I was working in a kind of frenzy. My study of chess problems soon got boring and turned into a study of chess pieces and chess history in general, throughout the world, from early Chinese, Indian and Russian chessmen to literature based on chess, including old plays like Middleton's A Game at Chess. I found out that Russian rooks used to look like boats and the Indian ones like elephants. That often the bag that held the chessmen after a game was a symbol of death or even hell in literature, when chess was used as a metaphor. All my research and images of chess pieces lay now in a file somewhere in a box in Athens (or at least I think so).

Amongst the chess problems I tried to master that year was a particular type of problem that really caught my eye. It is called an Albino problem and basically the solution to such problems, which often leads to a check mate, lays on the possible moves of one white pawn on its original starting square. This can also more rarely happen during an actual game, and the idea that one little pawn has the power to win a game had a lot of symbolic significance to me at the time. It sounds very strange to my own ears, me retelling my ideas of that time now. I would not go about making work this way any more. I think I saw a chess battle symbolically, very plainly as the battle between good and evil. Good being positive thoughts and feelings and evil being negative, destructive thoughts, so that a game of chess became a conflict of thoughts and feelings in one's own mind. Very stereotypically I chose the white for good and the black chessmen for evil. (Incidentally, chess problems with solutions based on the moves of one single black pawn on its original square also exist and such a problem is called a Pickaninny.)

Anyway, I went about to construct the whole chess set, each chessman being different and based each shape on a different emotion. Positive ones included hope, faith and love and negative ones included jealousy, hatred and oppression. I am so thankful even as I am writing this, that these ideas of mine are actually not visible in the work itself, but were only a starting point for me to build upon my designs and my sculptures. I soon forgot all about them, all about the chess problem, about beating my mother and aunty and instead I only existed for a whole academic year in the wood and metal workshops and in my studio and it was a truly amazing year for me.

                                 And after death like Chesmen having stood

                                 In play for Bishops, some for Knights, and Pawnes,
                                 We all together shall be tumbled up, into one bagge.                 
                                

                                 Jack Drum's Entertainment 1601, John Marston