‘The liveliest factor that is played out on the chessboard of art…has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts.’
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics
After the 1980s advent of post-modernism, the Euro-American art market of the 1990s came to be defined by two keenly different forms or ‘movements’—the YBAs (or Young British Artists) and a disparate group of ‘installation’ artists who were pitched by the then co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Nicolas Bourriaud as dealing in new, fresh ‘relational practices’. Where the YBAs still kept one foot firmly in the post-modern tradition of referencing mass cultural forms, relational art took more from the conceptual and performative work produced during the 1960s. For Bourriaud, and the artists he admired, to be relational was to allow direct contact with the viewer—to create a connection between the art object and observer thereby doing away with the object’s autonomy and creating the opportunity to connect viewers with each other.
‘The Art of Chess’, a travelling exhibition from RS&A Ltd London, on show at the University of Queensland Art Museum (UAM) is peculiarly indebted to this period of 1990s art. The exhibition is an ongoing project from the Shoreditch-based art production firm and gallery, for which established contemporary artists are commissioned to design a chess set in editions of seven. The works on display at the UAM are predominantly by artists who first emerged as part of the YBA movement, including Tracey Emin, Gavin Turk, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst and Jake and Dinos Chapman. It is hard to shake the feeling of a collaborative project between a chessboard manufacturer and what is a group of very commercially focused artists. The majority of these