Sophie Calle

What I have been doing. Writing longish essays about vaguely crazy french artists. Despite writing it in a night, I'm quite proud. So for your reading pleasure

Sophie Calle is a French Artist, born in October of 1953. She received no formal art education, and fell into her specific brand of practice through an aversion to boredom, when she started following people on the street, documenting her process. She works with a combination of text and image, and deals with the key concepts of absence, exhibitionism and surveillance.(Bois pg 31) Her work frequently relies on the contribution of others, usually from the general public, sometimes in the form of community projects.

An early project of Calle’s was The Hotel (1981). In this work, Calle got a job as a chambermaid and recorded the contents of the rooms she cleaned over the period of the guests’ stay. This work engages with Calle’s key theme of surveillance, and in this case the unwitting participation of others. Calle examines the contents of the room in a categorical way, but her presence as the voyeur is very much active in the textual part of the documentation. She mentions things such as “I am already bored with these guests” in Room 47 (22 February). Calle and her work can be seen as a example of the importance of both the author and the subject in art and literature.(Macel pg. 28). While Calle is the ‘author’ of her work, her material is derived from the experience, actions and memorabilia put into the world by her subjects. Often she herself is the subject, such as in The Shadow (1981) a work in which Calle instructed her mother to hire a private detective to follow her for a day. This work is interesting in examining who is the author and who is the subject. Is Calle, the person being followed, the subject, and the private detective the author, or is it in fact the other way round, with Calle’s setting up of the scenario meaning the detective is actually the subject, and Calle the author. These paradoxes surrounding the author/subject relationship are a common feature of Calle’s work, present in series such as Psychological Assessment (2003), a collaboration with Damien Hirst, and Gotham Handbook (1994), a collaboration with author Paul Auster. An interesting feature of the development of Calle’s practice is the role that coincidence plays in the instigation of new projects. For example, The Hotel came about after she followed a subject to Venice, for the project suite venitienne (1980). For Calle, many artworks are established as a kind of ritual, often to function as a form of therapy for the artist. Either the ritual is inherent in the piece, such as The Sleepers (1979)  and Room with a View (2002) or otherwise are the discarded artifacts from rituals Calle used to have in place to counteract her own neuroses and painful events from her own life, such as The Birthday Ceremony (1980-1993) and Exquisite Pain (1984-2003). These last two works are examples of Calle’s key concept of Exhibitionism, her willingness to share her private experiences, fantasies and quirks with the world at large, which perhaps gives her a certain sense of fairness in her revelations concerning unwitting individuals, such as in The Address Book (1983). (Storr, pg 296) The revelations of her private rituals in artworks usually comes after Calle finds she no longer needs them, rather than when they still play a role in her life.(Merlino pg 24)

Calle commonly appropriates material from other people and artworks. The latter part of her career has moved away from following people in the street, and towards the relationship between what we see, what we think about it, and the actual image, the perceived reality as opposed to what is actually present. She combines fact with fiction to create a new actuality, (Macel pg. 21) as one of the forerunners of the fictionalist trend (Macel pg. 81) A work that deals with these ideas, as well as the key concept of absence  is Ghosts (1989-91) in which Calle gets guards, curators and other museum staff to talk about a work that is missing from the museum walls, Bonnard’s Nude in a Bath. Calle then transposed these recollections onto the gallery wall in the space where Bonnard’s work would normally hang. Another work of Calle’s that operates within the framework of imagined image, transposed to text which is then re-imagined by the audience, creating layers of reinterpretation in the work, is The Blind (1986) where Calle asked blind people to describe to her their idea of beauty. The question of authorship again comes into play in these works, albeit in a slightly different way. In Ghosts, Calle did not create the image that the people are describing for her, neither did she herself write the recollections that form the work on the museum wall. Yet the work is labelled “The Ghost (Bonnard, Nude in the Bath), Sophie Calle” (Macel pg 27) This titling can suggest many things to the viewer about the concept of authorship in a work, and where the artist comes into play in a work she essentially created no original material for, apart from the concept for the piece.

Sophie Calle has developed a fascinating and integrated practice over her years as an artist. Her unusual combination of interactive performance, combined with textual and photographic documentation has provided her with a base that has allowed her to develop and explore her overriding concepts of surveillance, exhibitionism, authorship and absence and other themes in within her practice. She is part of the fictionalist trend, and has collaborated with artists and authors such as Damien Hirst and Paul Auster.