![]() I thus wrote my first book, The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style, which is a satirical social etiquette manual for the art world. In 2004, a year after Nacho tragically passed away, Luigi Amara - a Mexican writer and a mutual friend of ours- told me that he and his partner Vivian Abenshushan were starting an editorial imprint named Tumbona and wanted to know if I would write a small book about contemporary art. Participants playing an exhibition copy of Yoko Ono’s White Chess Set (1966/2015) in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden. Yoko Ono, for instance, created White Chess Set (1966) where all the pieces in the game are white, confusing the players but also making a larger point about the artificiality of national, ethnic and religious distinctions that generally produce confrontation and conflict. A few artists have made works that turn the idea of chess as warfare on its head. This was followed by Raumschach (space chess), developed again in Germany, this time by doctor Ferdinand Maack ). When chess is colloquially referenced in mainstream press, it is often done to describe complex situations in politics, diplomacy, and warfare, particularly using the phrase “three-dimensional chess” (the variation of three-dimensional chess, which consists in expanding the regular chess board into several in a multi-level game with much greater complexity, was developed in 1851 by Lionel Kieseritzky, a German grand master, also termed “Kubikschach” (cube chess). Kubikschach, a standard 8×8 chessboard featuring 8 layers, 1851 It was a small tortoise-and-hare moment for me. I was never a great player, although I did once win a children’s tournament and, on another occasion, as an 11 or 12 year-old, I defeated my uncle the poet Eduardo Lizalde at a family party- he thought he was going to win easily and was distracted in conversation, listening to opera and drinking while I was laser-focused on the game. I would also frequently accompany Nacho on Saturdays to see him teach chess at Casa del Lago in Chapultepec Park and learned quite a bit about the game. An early recollection of mine is going with him to the Club de Ajedrez El Alfil Negro (The Black Bishop), a chess club in Mexico City where he took classes with Enrique Palos Báez - a shy, smiling and soft-spoken man whose, and his traditional black attire, along with the small cell-like place (did he live at the club?) where he would receive us made him look like a monk -or perhaps a black-clad friar, evoking the name of the club. His naturally analytical mind made him a strong player- at some point he got close to rank as a national Master- and I imagine he could have pursued chess professionally had he not embraced literature and music instead. My older brother, the writer Luis Ignacio Helguera (1962-2003), was very fond of chess. Marcel Duchamp and John Cage playing musical chess in “Reunion”, 1968
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