The Knight’s Tour
A contemporary sculpture show,
De Hallen Haarlem
Xander Karskens (2009)
The Knight’s Tour is an old chess conundrum introduced by the 18th
century scientist Leonhard Euler which still exercises puzzlers,
chess players and mathematicians today. The puzzle is simple: on
an empty chess board with 64 squares and moving according to
the rules of chess, the knight must visit each square exactly once.
Some mathematicians argue that there are over
13 billion unique solutions for the Knight’s Tour. (1)
Georges Perec used the principle of the Knight’s
Tour as the basis for the narrative structure of his
novel La Vie mode d’emploi (1978), known as Life A
User’s Manual in the 1987 English translation: the sequence
of Perec’s chapters was generated by moving
an imaginary knight through the floor plan of
the apartment complex that was central to the book,
creating a fragmented multitude of separate, sometimes
interlinking, narrative threads.
The knight’s move is rather an anomaly in chess:
the other pieces on the board follow a more or less
‘logical’ path by moving forwards or backwards in
straight or diagonal lines while the knight makes a
more or less illogical l-shaped ‘leap’. Consequently,
the knight is by far the most unpredictable chess
piece which, thanks to its quirky behaviour, can execute
the most spectacular and wondrous tactical
combinations. This paradoxical tension between
the anomalous ‘illogic’ of the knight’s move and its
encapsulation in a rational environment, the game of chess, reminds
me of the prerequisites for a successful artwork in general
(which is difficult enough to explain) and one of
Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art in particular
in which he argues that, in conceptual art, which
is generally considered ‘rational’, ‘irrational thoughts
should be followed absolutely and logically’. (2) A statement
by Dutch chess grandmaster and publicist Jan
Hein Donner who once said that, in a match, after
great thought he sometimes moved a piece to a square because it
‘felt good’, ‘hard yet soft’ without being able to offer a rational explanation
of why this should be so or what it meant, is interesting
in this regard. It can hardly be coincidental that the computer has
not yet succeeded in figuring out the game of chess completely,
and that unquantifiable phenomenon ‘intuition’ (as it does in art
and science) continues to play a decisive role.
The artists in this group exhibition are all engaged in a Knight’s
Tour, each in their own way, whereby conceptual logic is infected
by less controllable factors such as coincidence and intuition. Their
artistic positions are typified by belief in a kind of spiritual materiality,
where the aura of the materials used is of vital importance to
the meaning of the work. The traditional boundaries of sculpture
are thus challenged and questioned: the idea that the sculptural
object, that classic three-dimensional end product that brings the
sculpting process to completion, is constantly under pressure in
the exhibition. In some cases it is even radically resolved in a phenomenological
limbo where suggestion predominantly nurtures
perceptions of the work – when the object no longer exists as such
but is manifest as an imperceptible presence.
In ‘The Knight’s Tour’ the process is fundamental: that which occurs
between the idea and the final result, and the ambiguous status
the artwork commands once it is ‘finished’. The presumption
that an artwork can be rationally delineated and known is systematically
eroded. Because is not art is the very domain in which an
intrinsic distance ought to exist between ‘making’
and ‘knowing’? (3) Now that the present juncture requires
artists to assert the autonomy of the artwork,
and to seek out new opportunities for aesthetic experiences
that resist a purely rational explanation,
does something like the ‘aura’ of specific materials
and processes still hold potential? An aura that,
as Walter Benjamin once proclaimed was stripped
away in the modern era of reproduction and that, in our superfast
digital image culture is increasingly
elucidated as an object of nostalgic longing and an entree to the
devouring fetish. But if art wishes to hone its analyzing, disruptive
and evocative properties it must continue to cherish uncertainty,
coincidence and irrationality as vital elements of its actualization.
If the contemporary conceptual artist is still a mystic
(4), the aura – the immeasurable faculty of the object
that makes it unique – is assuredly one of his or
her tools in creating a successful artwork.
At the start of this millennium, Jennifer Tee produced
a series of playful, semi-ritualistic performance
works that appealed to a revived need for intense,
shared experiences. The objects used here
(such as a tent, costumes, a potion) invariably had
both a symbolic and a functional component. Tee’s more recent
sculptures, such as those presented in ‘The Knight’s Tour’, occupy
a more autonomous position, however. Their thing-ness seems to
have become more prominent: in these works, the promise of performativity
is sublimated in a single object, so rendering her sculptures
more ambiguous; charged with the suggestion of spiritual
functionality. An arc-shaped mobile finished with brass and silicone
human teeth becomes a portal that may offer access to a parallel
reality; a knitted woollen floor sculpture with the geometric
structure of facetted crystal is transformed into a blanket with
magical potential.
(1) Each of the 64 squares
can serve as the first
square. In a closed tour
the knight ends on the
square from which it
began; in an open tour,
this is not the case. That,
after considerable practice,
I am still unable to
discover even one of the
13,267,364,410,532 solutions
is naturally due to the fact
that I do not possess the
talent required to such
mathematical exercises but
for all that, it is nonetheless
a number with great
imaginative appeal.
rationalists. They leap to
conclusions that logic cannot
reach’.
(2) Sol LeWitt, Sentences on Conceptual Art, 0-9 (New York), 1969. Sentence number five. The gist of the statements is summarised in the first Sentence:
'Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach'.
(3) A thought that is apparently
at odds with
Giambattista Vico’s notion
of verum factum:
a principle which asserts
that ‘the true’ can be
known through the things
we create.
(4) Now I am adding to
the enormous inflation to
which the term ‘conceptual
artist’ has been susceptible
since it was coined:
with this I am referring, as
is now more or less accepted,
to the artist who methodically
executes a preconceived
idea.