Packaging: Modified kitchen equipment

Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy (born 1945) is known for his shocking, sexually charged films and installations of the 1970s that often featured the artist dressed as cartoon and pop-culture characters – Olive Oyl and Santa Claus, among others – covered in ketchup and mayonnaise. In recent years McCarthy has developed a dysfunctional aesthetic, based in part on a fascination with the aesthetic excesses of Hollywood and theme parks, that has lead to his creation of giant inflatable Pinocchio sculptures and rubber pirates’ heads. In 1999 McCarthy decided to bolt the entire contents of his Pasadena studio to their exact position before installing them in a container that he turned on its side, a work of art he titled simply The Box. Himself an occasional chess player, McCarthy decided to create a similarly Readymade chess set for his RS&A chess commission. Constructed entirely from random objects chosen from the contents of his kitchen, among them a ketchup bottle and rubber duck, the artist has either recast each piece to look identical to the original found object or located identical items to construct seven identical chess sets. The board has been fabricated from the artists’ kitchen floor by cutting up sixty-four identical squared segments that are then arranged into a chequered chessboard at the start of each game. By coincidence, this design bares a striking resemblance to Marcel Duchamp’s own wooden chessboard, designed to play games of “mental chess” in 1937.