Pan Game and Marionette I Ching

Installation.

Location: The Museum of Modern Art (New York, the USA).

One of Xul Solar’s many hobbies was intellectual games, especially chess, which he perfected at his discretion. Taking the chessboard as a basis, the artist filled it with various figures, the complex meaning of which was based on astrological charts, numbers, words and musical notes, which, placed in a certain order, created special kabbalistic ciphers. At the same time, Solari was fond of puppetry, especially of the puppets of the Ching Dynasty. The artist combined elements of a pan-game, a puppet theater and a hexagram “i-jin”, which is used in Eastern philosophy, in a mysterious and beautiful ensemble of objects. This work influenced the development of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, whose members sought to create art using the most unusual methods.