Dept. of Isms: War Games: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker

Description

The centerpiece of the recent “Form as Strategy” exhibit, at Columbia’s Buell Center, was a copper- and silver-plated board game called Le Jeu de la Guerre—a kind of modernist take on chess conceived in 1977 by the Marxist philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord, with inspiration from the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Toward the end of his life, Debord, who led the situationist movement, in the late nineteen-sixties, wrote of the game, “I fear that this may well be the only one of my works that anyone will dare acknowledge as having some value.” By that point, a cardboard edition, intended for mass distribution, had been produced, along with a book detailing the rules. But the game’s fate was to be more like a cult object—a Dungeons & Dragons for scholars of the Parisian avant-garde.

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http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/05/05/080505ta_talk_mcgrath

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/05/05/080505ta_talk_mcgrath