Eye for an eye: the chess of boxes, poetry and ideas from Tunga with Marcel Duchamp

Abstract

What would happen if Tunga and Marcel Duchamp played chess? Both on their mature stages, each one with their respective chessboard? The impossibility of answers for those questions faces the mute dialog established by two photographic registers that communicate through time and space. One of the registers is found in the book “Olho por Olho”, published by the Brazilian artist together with other six volumes in the “Caixa Tunga” (2007). The source of the other register is lost, but could be part of some Duchamp’s ready-made series or his “Box in a valise”, created in 1941. From this imaginary chess match is possible to think about both the poetics and the meticulous way that both artists elaborated their publications. This is the present article proposal: to think about the complexity of Tunga’s thought under the common thread of the artwork “Olho por olho” that adopts a completely new configuration from its publication on the homonymous book, having as its interlocutor part of Marcel Duchamp’s poetics.