“It was the nullification of expression,” Accardi later said of her works from that period. Her almost calligraphic scribbles—whether arranged in neat lines or garbled into a blob—look like language. And indeed, words were on her mind. Rivolta Femminile was founded on the principle that reading and writing were valuable tools for achieving self-awareness—and in turn, for helping women disentangle their own desires from internalized expectations.

When Accardi left Rivolta Femminile in 1973, she wrote a letter to a cofounder justifying her departure—a letter she never sent. Now, an excerpt appears in the catalog for her retrospective at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, on view through June 9. In that letter, Accardi explained why she needed to leave and devote herself more fully to making art again: “The most remarkable thing I found in feminism,” she wrote, “was the discovery that I am a human being, and as such, I have no desire to deprive myself of … imaginative, utopian passions.”

The early ’70s was not the first time Accardi interrogated the relationship between aesthetics and politics so intensely that she had to press pause. A vitrine in her retrospective displays a manifesto that the Italian-born artist signed in 1947, when she was in her 20s and had just joined both the Communist Youth Federation and Forma. The latter was an artist group aligning formalism and Marxism. They believed in making art as a way to improve one’s life in a material sense, through labor, and insisted that such a vital and deeply human act shouldn’t remain the purview of the bourgeoisie. Forma’s ideas galvanized the work she produced until around 1953, when she experienced a “deep crisis.” After a yearlong hiatus, she temporarily eliminated color from her work, as she would again decades later. In so doing, she hoped to avoid becoming “distracted towards pleasantness” and “to give her painting a moral certainty,” as an exhibition pamphlet from the time reads.

The best colorful paintings in the show in Rome are from the 1960s. Accardi, who died in 2014 and liked to call her practice “anti-painting,” explained her attraction to contrasting colors: “Only through the notion of night do I know the day.” With abstraction, she wanted to dispense with the patriarchal baggage that haunted representational imagery, and to capture life’s complexities. “I simply paint a symbolic portrait of life as I see it,” she said, “with its struggles, its joys, its miseries and its defeats.” So in the ’60s, as advertisements and packaging were newly altering the visual landscape, Accardi ingested it all and responded with paintings of squiggles in dizzying hues. In Violarosso (1963), she scribbled in bright orange all over a magenta surface, nearly dissolving all distinction between foreground and background.

By 1965, Accardi was on to something totally new. She swapped canvas for Sicofoil—a clear plastic—in an effort, as she said, to “reveal the mysteries behind the art.” That material, designed for packaging, is inclined to curl, so she would sometimes let it roll into cylinders or cones, or else stretch it like a canvas on wooden bars. A room in the retrospective is dedicated to immersive pavilions she built with plexiglass and then painted on. On these clear plastics—newly introduced material at the time—bold, opaque brushstrokes appear to hover in space. There is a quiet revolution in the way Accardi’s paintings foreground the background: whether a clear substrate disappears entirely or a vibrating magenta surface refuses to recede, this supporting role is really also the protagonist. I imagine most women can relate.

Accardi cared deeply about political thought and action, but she didn’t want to fall into the trap of, well, black-and-white thinking that might cleave aesthetics from politics too neatly. For her, life encompasses both in a complex, contradictory swirl. She insisted that a rich range of experiences was her right, and in fact part of the reason she cared about Marxism and feminism in the first place: that richness made life worth living and defending.

Drawings of Greco-Roman sculpture have the potential of ending up being somewhat kitsch. Hints of homoerotic content could well render them clichés. And whenever visual sources from the past are used, the blank parody of pastiche, as Fredric Jameson warned, could rear its ugly head. Tomaso De Luca’s ambitious debut show at Monitor avoided such pitfalls with surprising ease.

The Monument, conceived as one piece, consisted of 300 well-executed ink, graphite and mixed-medium drawings based on ancient sculptures found throughout Rome, plus some from the Baroque and Fascist eras. With breezy, ironic humor, the artist rendered the statues absurd, vulnerable and alive, while normally they are somber, impervious and inanimate. Here, he depicted a sculpture of Pluto abducting Persephone while wearing one ice skate; there, he covered a drawn marble figure with strips of colored tape. In one composition, he smudged the sculpture beyond recognition; in another, he drew an ancient colossal marble foot strapped onto a dolly. De Luca’s airy lines, fanciful imagination and deft use of materials bestowed upon the still, heavy historical artifacts a sense of movement. Covering three walls of the gallery (the fourth is a street window that the artist blocked with black adhesive paper), the drawings enveloped the viewer in a swirl of seemingly fleeting, fleeing statues.

De Luca imparted to his drawings the sense of physicality that, in his portrayals, he removed from the statues. He left all the works on paper unframed, and stood them on the floor leaning floppily against the wall, or hung them with only two nails each so that the bottoms lifted away from the wall. They were ethereal yet, paradoxically, substantial.

Interplays such as this one, between solid sculpture and ephemeral drawing, and juxtapositions of apparent opposites, pervade De Luca’s work. In an earlier, two-part action, he had two Fascist-era statues of virile men—located in the dark recesses of cruising parks in two different cities—”meet” by holding up to each one a life-size drawing of the other. And in his 2011 performance Movement/Monument, a group of teenagers, with pieces of marble attached to the bottoms of their feet, hobbled along the route that World War II refugees of the bombed-out, working-class neighborhood of San Lorenzo traveled on their way to occupying the lavish Villa Torlonia, which had formerly been Mussolini’s private residence.

De Luca revisits fertile critical themes, mapping the body as it pushes up against materials and as it moves through real and metaphoric space. With The Monument, which is fresher and more mature than his previous work, De Luca showed that he is coming into his own.

Photo: View of Tomaso De Luca’s installation The Monument, 2012, including 300 mixed-medium drawings; at Monitor.

This compelling exhibition of 11 oil paintings by Francesco Clemente featured two closely related series, “Summer Self” and “Winter Women” (both 2011), which carried on a dialogue. Displayed in separate rooms, they tackled with inventive freshness the artist’s long-standing exploration of dualities such as masculine and feminine, renewal and death, eroticism and spirituality, power and vulnerability.

Hung in the smaller of two rooms, the five medium-size self-portraits in “Summer Self” stole the show. Largely visible from the street through a big window, these paintings loomed amid the buzz of Roman life, adding a layer to their interplay between introspection and alertness to the world. Indoors, one felt enveloped in the works’ intimacy but soon detected in their apparent serenity a subtle inner restlessness. Both “innocent and experienced”—to adapt the famous title from William Blake, one of Clemente’s favorite poets—the artist is seen in half-length, by turns holding a pink balloon, wearing deer antlers, contemplating the stars with a third eye or haloed in a vaporous garland, always set against empty backgrounds of pastel hues.

In “Winter Women,” a dark, cold palette prevails, whereas “Summer Self” is washed in luminous light pinks and blues, or warm yellowish browns. In Summer Self III, perhaps the most evocative painting of the group, a multicolored beaded curtain half-covering the artist’s blue eyes only serves to emphasize them. A shadow falling over his face and right ear is made palpable with touches of acid green. Caught between disclosure and concealment, he seems suspended in a dimension of infinite creative possibilities.

“Winter Women” provides a counterpoint to “Summer Self” in scale (each painting is 55 by 86 inches), chromatic register and concept, and toys with the tradition of female portraiture in witty references to Caravaggio, Thomas Dewing and Picasso, among others. Winter Woman VI, depicting a nude with a mirror, combines male and female traits. Although clearly evoking Bellini’s Naked Young Woman in Front of a Mirror (1515), the figure has the face of a bearded man, recalling self-portraits by Caravaggio and Clemente himself. The union of binaries is also addressed in its two-panel structure, common to the whole “Winter Women” group: adjacent to each oil-on-linen portrait is a stretch of felt painted with erotically charged or symbolic images. Felt invokes warmth, both physical and spiritual, and one is reminded of Beuys’s oblique self-portraits as felt suits.

For Clemente, painting is an enigmatic language capturing the unstable nature of life itself. We see him similarly preoccupied in other recent solo exhibitions: “Palimpsest,” at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (June 8-Sept. 4), and the current “Tarots,” at the Uffizi, Florence, through Nov. 6.

Photo: Francesco Clemente: Summer Self III, 2011, oil on linen, 41 3/4 by 31 1/2 inches; at Lorcan O’Neill.

Truth and falsehood, fact and fiction shifted and overlapped in Elisabetta Benassi’s second solo show at Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, “All I Remember.” The first presentation of a work-in-progress conceived in late 2008 at the Microforms Reading Room of the New York Public Library, it drew on the 20th-century explosion in the use of photography to document and illustrate the news in daily papers and magazines. Searching public and private archives of press photographs in Italy and the U.S., Benassi has digitally gathered some 70,000 images dating from the 1920s to the early 1990s, when computers made archives of photographic prints obsolete. Her attention, however, has focused not on the pictures themselves, but on their backs, covered with typed and handwritten notes, newspaper clippings, rubber stamps and stickers from news agencies and libraries—layers of information that classify each image and record the history of its circulation.

The show started with a series of 12 works featuring slightly enlarged versions of these marked-up photo backs. Easily mistaken for mechanical reproductions, they are in fact watercolors painstakingly executed by an anonymous designer and engraver of paper currency hired by Benassi. Precluding any trace of the artist’s hand, these text-based images call to mind John Baldessari’s conceptual work What Is Painting (1966-68).

Usually more confusing than illuminating for the layperson, the inscriptions on the backs provide few clues as to what the photos actually depict. They refer to a mix of forgotten and well-known bits of history, such as Hitler’s acquiring one of the first Volkswagen Beetles, a Russian demonstration against the Ku Klux Klan and the murder of Italian politician Aldo Moro. Further complicating the status of the factual—already problematized by the handmade copies of photo backs—some works cite books and movies that either were never released or saw their titles changed. Noted on a 1944 photo back near the gallery entrance was Gertrude Stein’s “new book, dealing with the human race, entitled ‘All I Remember.’” Stein never published a book with this title, which Benassi uses as the exhibition’s name.

The show continued in a darkened room where an authentic Aldis lamp (used by the German Navy during World War II) signaled the exhibition title in Morse code to passersby outside the gallery. The code’s esotericism—similar to the archival photo notations—makes it decipherable only by specialists and therefore mysterious to the general audience.

Concluding the presentation was a worn-out microfilm reader standing atop a sleek 1960s Olivetti table in an otherwise empty room, dimly lit and painted entirely smoke-gray. Operated by a hidden computer, the reader erratically fast-forwarded, stopped, rewound and advanced a series of photo backs digitally transferred onto color film. This rendered the text nearly illegible—a maddening experience for the viewer.

“All I Remember” was a provocative show that prompted contrasting feelings of frustration, curiosity and wonder. In step with the lineage of Italian Conceptual art (from Alighiero Boetti to the up-and-coming Francesco Arena), Benassi addressed the ever-changing nature of history—and the distance between what actually happens and what is ultimately remembered.

Photo: Elisabetta Benassi: Bikini, 2010, watercolor on paper, 12 by 14 inches; at Magazzino d’Arte Moderna.

When the BBC commissioned British artist Nathaniel Mellors to create a work of art for its television series “The Seven Ages of Britain,” it was in for a surprise. Far from presenting recognizably vanguard video, Mellors hewed to the conventions of mainstream broadcast programming, mimicking perfectly many of the trademark features of the BBC itself.

In his short film, The Seven Ages of Britain Teaser (2010), Mellors spoofs documentary filmmaking, the august history of Britain, the Queen’s English, the bumbling nature of men in general and, in particular, the soothing tones of one of Britain’s best-known broadcasters, David Dimbleby. The film begins with a lopsided struggle between a medieval lout named Kadmos (referring to the Greek founder of the phonetic alphabet) and a golden-masked deity who intones from on high, a verbal sparring match that goes on to include a physical fight over a highly realistic mask of Dimbleby’s face.

Invoking cinema tricks from action films and comic style from Monty Python, and using first-rate special effects provided by professionals in the field, Mellors’s film tracks the fate of the mask, which is seen hurtling through the air in a Vertigo-like moment before landing in the river. Dimbleby himself fishes it out, and calmly narrates a short history of the role of television and media in contemporary art, with a few neat asides about Mellors. It’s not clear where the BBC ends and Mellors begins, but the deadpan humor and the weirdness of the lifelike mask are right out of the annals of the YBAs-and the theater of Samuel Beckett.

In the exhibition at Monitor, Mellors’s film was augmented by the extraordinary Dimbleby mask, which rested on the floor in its own room, wires and microphones protruding from it. Mellors, who plays Throbbing Gristle-style rock music as well as making films, has rigged the mask to make some movements and barely audible sounds. This heir to Damien Hirst and Ron Mueck doesn’t give a fig whether his work is seen as television, performance, theater or music-and freely hires technical consultants in the best tradition of the outsourced object.

Another room contained several large Pollock-like splatter drawings executed in fluorescent polymers over 1960s Dutch police posters used for marksmanship training. A bull’s-eye for Mellors.

Photo: Nathaniel Mellors: The Seven Ages Teaser Face, 2010, animatronic head and audio equipment; at Monitor.

The Italian solo debut of the 33-year-old South African artist Ruth Sacks resembled a group show. “Double-Sided Accumulated” presented eight highly diverse recent works that occupied the gallery from floor to ceiling. The exhibition included text-based pieces and sculptural installations made primarily of found and altered objects like handbags, postcards and bells. Despite their apparent formal differences, however, the works shared references to history, a parodic take on monumentality (so prevalent in the show’s host city, Rome) and a reliance on the Duchampian reuse and redefinition of everyday items.

Painted in mustard yellow block capitals high on the wall above the reception desk, the term “ALATOSEUM” greeted visitors before they entered the exhibition space, no doubt inducing puzzlement over the word’s possible meaning. On the other side of the wall, “MUSEALATO” made the nature of the wordplay clear: Sacks’s neologisms merge the Italian word alato (“winged”) with the English “museum” or Italian museo.

This language piece was one of five works from 2010 that allude to Rome, reflecting the chimeric nature of the Eternal City—a place where the ancient pagan past, Catholicism and secular modernity imaginatively coexist and overlap, as in the repurposing of buildings such as the Pantheon. Evoking this temple converted into a church that has now become a major tourist site, Sacks created Pooling Dust, an ephemeral floor piece consisting of an approximately 4-foot-long Pantheon floor plan done in white marble dust, on which viewers were invited to walk. In the antimonumental Triumphal Arch (After Dürer), the handles of Italian-made handbags sitting on a pedestal are fastened together to suggest a series of ceremonial arches. Sacks takes on touristic kitsch in At the Moment, a set of five pristine wooden boxes, all about 61⁄2 inches long, that contain postcards of well-known Roman monuments. On the exterior of each box is a metal plaque inscribed with a future date, ranging from 2014 to 2509, while inside, with the postcards, are absurd mailing instructions. Purchasers are urged, for example, to send a card to “the favorite artwork of the owner of the box.”

Untitled (bells), 2009, conveys a more serious, politically tinged message about rethinking history. Like multiple archeological remains, a number of small bells that Sacks gathered over a few years, mostly in South Africa and Belgium (the artist is currently based in Brussels), are neatly arranged on black velvet in two identical vitrines—with the bells’ bodies in one and their clappers in the other. Once used to summon servants, the bells have been muted. An association with the much larger bells that ring in Roman churches is unavoidable, suggesting a critique of Italian Catholic culture. In this context, a call for the dismantling of hierarchies—implicit in the dismantling of the bells and the satirizing of monumentality—seems to ring out loud and clear.

Photo: Ruth Sacks: Triumphal Arch (After Dürer), 2010, leather bags, 161⁄8 by 391⁄4 by 153⁄4 inches; at Extraspazio.

On Dec. 12, 1969, a bomb exploded at Milan’s Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura. Known as the Strage di Piazza Fontana (Fontana Square Massacre), the event signaled the beginning of a turbulent decade marked by domestic terrorism that came from both the extreme right and left. On the night of the bombing, the anarchist and railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli was arrested for suspected involvement in the crime; after three days of questioning, he died under suspicious circumstances, falling from the fourth-floor window of the police station. A court later ruled Pinelli innocent, as evidence pointed to neo-Fascists and members of the Italian secret service. However, the Piazza Fontana case was closed in 2005 without criminal charges ever having been brought against Pinelli’s interrogators or any of the likely suspects.

On Dec. 12, 2009, a commemorative installation by 31-year-old Francesco Arena, one of Italy’s most promising young artists, opened at Monitor gallery (which funded it). Titled 18.900 metri su ardesia—la strada di Pinelli (18,900 Meters on Slate—Pinelli’s Route), the room-size work comprises 322 square slate slabs, each carved with some 100 parallel lines that together add up to the total distance—about 62,000 feet—covered by Pinelli before he entered the police station on the day of the bombing. (The artist reconstructed the itinerary from court papers that document his movements from the end of his shift to his attendance at a meeting of the Ponte della Ghisolfa anarchist circle, where he was arrested.) Partly lining the gallery floor and partly piled in three columns, the gray slabs formed a sober, if not somber, landscape.

As a floor-bound sculpture composed of regular units, the work echoed Carl Andre’s late-1960s floor pieces; it also evoked Walter De Maria’s 1979 Broken Kilometer, although the political and personal references in Arena’s installation turned Minimalism’s neutral impersonality on its head. And while the slab-free corner to the left of the room’s entrance seemed an homage to Pino Pascali’s 32 metri quadrati di mare circa (About 32 Square Meters of Sea), 1967, with its corner squares detached from the overall composition, the gravity of this installation is far removed from the Arte Povera artist’s playfulness. The idea that the distance a man covered on his last day of freedom before an unjust arrest could be contained in a single room was terribly poignant.

Concerned with what he has called “memory’s lack of resistance,” Arena has realized some of his strongest works by drawing on controversial moments in history, mostly Italian. For example, 3,24 mq (3.24 sq. meters), 2004, is a life-size reproduction of the room in which, in 1978, the center-right political leader and former premier Aldo Moro was held captive for 55 days before being killed by the leftist terrorist group Brigate Rosse. Mature both formally and conceptually, 18.900 metri su ardesia bridges politics and esthetics by forgoing a simplistic political stance. Instead it presents a bare historical fact, engaging viewers both physically and emotionally while raising their awareness about space’s lack of neutrality.

Photo: Francesco Arena: 18,900 Meters on Slate—Pinelli’s Route, 2009, slate, 322 pieces, each 231⁄2 inches square; at Monitor.

This show by the 48-year-old Massimo Bartolini featured two sound installations—each containing a movement-sensitive photocell that activated a sound emission—and a series of three paintings. Two musical performances were staged on the opening night, one of which generated a new version of the 2006 installation Ouverture per Pietro. Starting with the explosion of a lightbulb, the experimental musician Pietro Riparbelli improvised for 20 minutes using a sampler, a computer and short-wave radio receivers as the death-metal singer Rosy Ninivaggi read verses from the sacred Hindu Avadhuta Gita. The result sounded like a mix of La Monte Young, Steve Reich and other American minimalist music. Remaining in the gallery afterward were the empty electrical socket in a transparent wall-mounted  box littered with fragments of the shattered lightbulb, the closely facing microphone (now unplugged) that had recorded the explosion, and a constantly reiterated soundtrack of the first 2 minutes and 38 seconds of the performance.

The second sound installation, Three Quarter-Tone Pieces (2009), was more complex and accomplished than the first. Its title—also the show’s title—is taken from a work that American composer Charles Ives wrote in 1923-24 for two pianos tuned one quarter tone apart. In Bartolini’s work, three common pieces of furniture (a wall-hung cabinet, a wardrobe and a chest) play a cluster of notes also one quarter tone apart. Hidden in each is a motion-activated device—a ventilator that blows air into wooden organ pipes—which generates the notes. The intense 30-second crescendo typically caught visitors by surprise and left them puzzling about the music’s source.

Also probing the relationship between the visible and the invisible, the painting series “Rugiada” (Dew), 2009, offered a sophisticated game of vedo-non vedo (peek-a-boo). While from a distance the works seem straightforward monochromes in custard yellow, ice white and milk white, upon closer examination they reveal iridescent colors that change according to the incidence of light and the viewer’s position—disclosing, for example, flashes of green and pink. These effects are due to Bartolini’s application of micalized varnish to metal, a technique used by auto-body painters. Even more striking were dense constellations of drops of the fluid used for black-and-white photography development. Dewlike in appearance, the beads disorient viewers by evoking a natural context extraneous to the gallery space. The strongest works in this heterogeneous show, the “Rugiada” paintings combine poetic, almost romantic sensitivity with ironic, car-culture glitz.

Photo: Massimo Bartolini: Three Quarter-tone Pieces, 2009, wood and electric fans; at Magazzino d’Arte Moderna

After walking through the Galleria Borghese—a gem of a museum in which masterpieces from classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance and Baroque are housed in a 17th-century villa amid inlaid marble pavements, floor mosaics, and elaborate furniture and wall decorations—one found Hans Op de Beeck’s six black-and-white watercolors installed on two charcoal gray panels in the villa’s unadorned former aviary. It was a strikingly ascetic, even humble display.

The 40-year-old Belgian artist painted the series of large watercolors in 2009 as a commission from the Italian banking group UniCredit. (Following this exhibition, the work went on long-term loan to MAXXI, Italy’s first national museum of contemporary art, which opens in Rome this spring.) The commission is the third in a 10-year program that brings together a contemporary artist with an old master in the Borghese collection, a pairing chosen by the museum’s curators. “In Silent Conversation with Correggio” matched Op de Beeck with the 16th-century northern Italian painter best known for his dramatic, illusionistic ceiling frescoes. However, it was Correggio’s lesser-known easel paintings depicting melancholic, intimate scenes that inspired Op de Beeck’s series.

The show was the artist’s first to feature only painted works. (Op de Beeck works in an eclectic range of mediums, including photography, drawing, video, digital animation and sculpture—from miniature models to room-size installations.) Executed in loose black brushstrokes, the paintings are titled according to the subjects depicted: Chandelier, Raven, Lounge, Mirror Ball, Smoke and Nocturnal Sea (the largest, at approximately 53 by 96 inches). Somewhat generic scenes empty of people, they are infused with a sense of moodiness and suspense. A coat appears to have been left hastily on a Chesterfield sofa, and a tote bag on the floor in front of it, in Lounge. The interior resembles an upscale hotel lounge, with damask wallpaper and a highly polished floor that makes the space float. A large mirror enclosed in an elaborately carved frame to the right of the sofa reflects the dark upper corner of an open doorway in the opposite wall. As in a thriller or film noir, such fragmentary views and human traces spur one to wonder what has just happened, or will happen. In Smoke, a curling wisp rises from a lit cigarette in an ashtray placed on a table whose reflective surface doubles the image in the mirror on the wall behind. The visual ambiguities of the mirrored images, shadows and reflections create a mise-en-abîme effect that heightens the works’ sense of mystery.

Raven presents a seemingly taxidermied bird in profile perched on a stump, its stark shadow looming on the back wall. Besides referencing the original function of the Uccelliera, Raven prompts a host of associations, from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds to your uncle’s hunting trophies. What prevails in each of these watercolors is a sense of déjà vu: you are comforted by a certain familiarity yet remain unsettled, unable to quite place what you are seeing.

Photo: Hans Op de Beeck: Lounge, 2009, watercolor on paper, 521⁄2 by 803⁄8 inches; at Villa Borghese.

Dutch artist Guido van der Werve has been slowly developing ways to combine his training in classical piano with his current interest in filmmaking. One film (2005) depicts him playing an upright piano on a floating dock in the middle of a river in Finland. In another (2006) he acquires a grand piano and squeezes it, an orchestra and a conductor into his incredibly small Amsterdam apartment, where he stages a recital before the costly instrument is repossessed.

For his second show at Monitor, van der Werve presented his most ambitious project to date: Nummer twaalf: variations on a theme: The king’s gambit accepted, the number of stars in the sky and why a piano can’t be tuned or waiting for an earthquake. An elaborate, 40-minute high-definition video that was two years in the making, it was shown as a large wall projection. Nummer twaalf combines music with chess—another of the artist’s pursuits—and an obsession with insoluble problems.

The video is divided into three “movements.” The first opens with van der Werve in a cabin, thinking aloud about the vast number of potential chess games and the time that would be required to play them all. The action then shifts to van der Werve and chess master Leonid Yudasin playing the “King’s Gambit,” a game Yudasin invented, on a chessboard-cum-piano designed by the artist, which plays a note each time a move is made. The game is scripted as a perfect match that ends in a draw. The artist had previously translated Yudasin’s chess diagram into a score for the chessboard-piano; he later added music for strings. That piece, and an actual nine-piece string orchestra, accompanies the two chess players at their game, a performance that takes place at New York’s Marshall Chess Club, where Marcel Duchamp used to play.

In the video’s second movement, van der Werve is back in the cabin, propounding a theory about how many stars there are in the sky and how long it might take to count them. The video moves on to scenes of him climbing the devastated Mount St. Helens to its smoldering peak to count the stars. In the final movement, we see the artist once again in the cabin, musing about why pianos are always off-key and discussing the intricate history of piano tuning. At one point, the camera pulls back to reveal that the cabin rests on the San Andreas Fault. By going to the volcano and the fault, the artist places himself in absurdist contradictions, courting danger while pondering problems that would take more than a lifetime to solve.

For the opening of the exhibition, which consisted of the video and framed stills whose mats are embellished with chess diagrams, van der Werve and a different chess master played the King’s Gambit again, accompanied by a live chamber orchestra. In his impressive video, which draws together passions for music, chess and filmmaking, van der Werve constructs a marvelous, poetic realm.

Photo: Guido van der Werve: Nummer twaalf, 2009, video, 40 minutes; at Monitor.