Document Type
Article
Abstract
During the Cold War both “superpowers” used games, particularly chess, in order to construct an ideology of complete conflict and irreconcilable division between East and West. This essay focuses on the broad cultural challenge to divisive Cold War zero-sum mentality issued by a number of artists—André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Öyvind Fahlström, and Fluxus artists George Maciunas, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Takako Saito and Yoko Ono. These artists, in a second wave of game-focused art, returned to the concerns of surrealist art practice and to earlier cultural game theory. Even conceptual art production was impacted by the predetermined structure of games. As the global conflict dragged on into the 1980s, Deleuze and Guattari also touched upon chess in developing “nomad thought.”
Repository Citation
Mesch, Claudia. "Cold War Games and Postwar Art." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 6, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1–30. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol6/iss1/4
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Art Practice Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons, Political History Commons, Political Theory Commons