The COVID pandemic can feel like ancient history now — after all, itap been a half-decade-plus since we all went into hiding — but it continues to reverberate in our culture, in ways that are good and bad.
That is particularly true in the art world, where projects that were facilitated by so much time spent in solitude, with nothing to do but think and create, are still coming to fruition. The pandemic might have been a collective tragedy, but it also was a great stimulator for individual creativity.
That was the case for artist Dmitri Obergfell. Like a lot of people, he took up chess, a game he had played in childhood but abandoned over time. Chess was convenient in that moment of quarantine because you could play online at a safe distance from others, he explained in an interview last week. He dove in.
Obergfell also used the time to explore ceramics as a way of expanding his practice, taking a class — along with his wife, curator Cortney Lane Stell — from local artist Bruce Price.
And those two hobbies, intermingled, became the instigator for the objects he started to make, and that he has now assembled for “The Idiotap Defense,” currently at David. B. Smith Gallery in Denver’s LoDo neighborhood. The exhibit is an homage to chess, and all of the possibilities and complications the game implies.
“The Idiotap Defense” is installed to look like a room in a residential house, a typical domestic setting with a table and chairs in the middle of the space, surrounded by vases on pedestals and various artworks hung on the walls — every detail in this case created or conceptualized by the artist himself.
The centerpiece is a grand, yet very contemporary, chess set, placed atop the table. The wooden board is fabricated from curly maple and the knights, pawns, bishops and queens — all positioned as if a game has begun — are made of ceramics.
Itap a playful chess set for sure, elegant in its way, but also fully operational in that the board opens up on a hinge so that it can also work as a case where the pieces are stored inside for portability. The set would serve as a showpiece for anyone who is serious about the game, and perhaps art, and travels around a bit for matches.
Obergfell worked within the guidelines necessary for keeping the work functional. “There are six individual pieces, and then the board is eight by eight squares,” he said. “Those are basically the rules of making a chess set.”
He appreciated that the parameters for his work were set; it gave him a framework for his mission of creating a unique version of the classic pastime. But he also took artistic license, expanding the idea of what a set could look like, and how chess itself, with its strict setup and clear rules, can serve as a metaphor for the real social structures we all live within today.
The object became “a meditation of how such structures shape agency — how one moves within them, resists them, or occupies them differently,” as the exhibitap explanatory materials put it.
On one hand, chess demands compliance with the limitations of the game. It is a science of sorts, using a system of processing simple data with a goal of achieving the best outcomes.
“With chess, it is like you are running all of these simulations,” he said. “It kind of turns someone’s mind into a computer.”
At the same time, it asks us to reach deep into our humanity to come up with clever strategies that outwit an opponent. That is not so far from how we all try to get ahead under the rules of the capitalist construct that surrounds us — and which does all it can to inspire creative scheming.
Playing chess can be like buying into a system of blind rule-following, coupled with manipulation. “Itap a weird paradox because I really enjoy playing chess, but it has this quality to it that can be super absorbing and addictive,” he said. “Itap a slippery slope.”
This thinking sounds serious, but there is a lot of joy built into Obergfell’s work. Chess is a game, after all; it is supposed to be enjoyable.
The artist gets at that idea by celebrating his own individuality when it comes to envisioning what the game could look like. As an object maker, he is known for incorporating pop culture ideas and artifacts into his work. One previous project explored our obsession with car culture. Another referenced Santa Muerte, the currently trendy Mexican saint of death often depicted as a skeleton wearing a hooded garment.
“As someone who likes to collect images and iconographies, chess just became a great container for stuff that I was already thinking about in my practice,” he said.
The set he created reflects that. The pawns take the form of little ghosts, covered in sheets, the kind of characters you might see in a comic or video game. The bishops look like human hands with their fingers pointed toward the sky. The voluptuous, big-bellied queen is inspired by the Venus of Willendorf, the small, iconic sculpture, dating back to the Paleolithic age, that served as a fertility object.
Obergfell also slips literary connections into the mix, starting with the title of show (which is also the title of the chessboard piece). “The Idiotap Defense” references works by Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Byung-Chul Han, all of whom had their own takes on the power of chess, or the power of idiocy, in its various forms.
The other objects in the exhibit, and there are about 10, pick up on the chess board’s essence of riding the line between being a work of art and a functional object. There are three bronze vases, which are lovely to admire but have too many openings to actually hold water. There is a bust that looks like something out of ancient Greece or Egypt but also could serve as an actual bong. The table and chairs, which the artist made from layered plywood cut using a CNC router, have a zig-zag shape to them; they’re fun.
In that way, this serious show also has a significant amount of humor to it. Itap a deep, sometimes dark look at chess and all of its implications. But it also recognizes the game’s role as a beloved distraction that has lasted for generations. Ultimately, chess is a worthy diversion, and so is “The Idiotap Defense.”
IF YOU GO
“The Idiotap Defense” continues through May 2 at David B. Smith Gallery, 1543 Wazee St. Itap free. Info: 303-893-4234 or davidbsmithgallery.com
