CHARACTER STUDY: SOPHIE CALLE
LONG A CULT FIGURE IN FRANCE, Sophie Calle is admired in several disparate circles, each of which has a partial grasp of some aspect of her work —one thinks perhaps of Laurie Anderson by way of comparison. For her earliest projects, she sidestepped the rarified precincts of the art world in favor of the mass media —how many Conceptual artists can claim that their first book was a bestseller? Or can compete with her invasion, over the course of an entire month, of half a page in a widely read French daily? Calle has always felt more confident outside the museum and gallery ghetto. Though she has since become part of the international art scene proper, exhibiting in respected venues —including the Boijmans in Rotterdam and Leo Castelli in New York —she continues to move at a rapid clip, attracting new audiences along the way. Her 1992 feature-length film Double Blind (which documents a cross-country odyssey that climaxes with Calle’s drive-thru wedding in Las Vegas) was distributed under the title No Sex Last Night in commercial movie houses through channels usually reserved for big-budget productions. She has worked in so many genres and fields that it’s not always easy to realize that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
The near coincidence of “The True Stories of Sophie Calle,” the artist’s retrospective opening this month at the Fridericianum in Kassel, and the publication of Double Game (Violette Editions, London), a hefty, luxurious compendium that contains among other things the translations of her previous books, provides a good occasion to pause and attempt to fit the various pieces of her career together. With few exceptions, the works selected for the show correspond to those in Double Game. Calle’s favorite mode of display being the gridlike mural intertwining text and photo, her transition from the book format to the gallery space (and the other way around) is seamless.
“At the end of January 1981, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him.” This opening paragraph from Calle’s first book, Suite vénitienne, published in 1983, is paired with a photograph of a man’s rear bust, shot from below and at close range. (The text is fully translated in Double Game, although the choice and presentation of images vary a bit from the original.) We notice the brim of his hat, a white highlight on the nape of his neck. This double spread is a good place to enter Calle’s vast and diversified production, for regardless of media, her work has always revolved around issues of distance and absence, of voyeurism and exhibitionism; it has largely adopted the structure of the forensic archive; it has often deliberately confused levels of reality—or, more precisely, it has successfully transformed reality (the archive) into fiction (narration), and vice versa.
Suite vénitienne is a scrapbook of Calle’s quest for, and later obsessive surveillance of, a man she identifies as Henri B. during a thirteen-day stretch in the Italian city. We are spared none of the details —a list of all the hotels she called in order to find him; a photo of the door of the pensione where he stayed with his companion; snapshots of the streets he walked; maps charting his wanderings; a precise countdown of Calle’s frustrating schedule as a shadow; and interviews with “witnesses” (the owner of an antique shop that Henri B. patronized, for example). The few glimpses of the city that are provided utterly depend on Henri B.’s stereotypical tourist’s appetite (Calle shot them while waiting for him to exit this monument or that); one of my favorites shows a kid chasing pigeons on the Piazza San Marco (he’s seen from behind, of course, clasping a knife in his hand: “I would like to see him kill one,” notes Calle). Nothing is spared—that is, except the face of the man she pursues; he’s always viewed from the back, from a safe distance, since the whole enterprise was predicated on Henri B.’s ignorance of his being followed. At some point, though, the wig and disguise fail Calle, and Henri B. recognizes her eyes—she is disappointed at his cool reaction. She tries to take a portrait of him but he blocks the camera with his hand: “No,” he says, “that’s against the rules.”
Early on in Suite vénitienne Calle offers us four technically mediocre shots, arranged in a grid, that show several men conversing around a dinner table. The edges of the visual field are blurred: These images were her first attempt at using a Squintar, a lens attachment that allows one to take photos without aiming at the subject. The quality of the images says it all: Calle’s not interested in photography per se, she’s an apprentice sleuth. More precisely, she’s only interested in the predatory and voyeuristic aspects of photography, in its sadistic nature. Even before the publication of Suite vénitienne, she had been fascinated by the act of shadowing: Commissioned to do a piece as part of a Centre Georges Pompidou show dealing with self-portraiture, she hired a private eye to document her comings and goings and exhibited the proceedings of his investigation, his bureaucratic report (“At 10:20 the subject leaves home. She is dressed,” etc.), and the sustaining evidence provided in the form of his photographs. What the detective did not know was that he was her employee; nor did he notice that she had him tailed as well —a friend of hers shot him entering a porno cinema. (Displayed as The Shadow in the retrospective, this 1981 work appears in Double Game under the title The Detective.) For further evidence of Calle’s incipient interest in this aspect of photography, consider The Sleepers, 1979, the earliest work in the retrospective (it is absent from Double Game). Calle invited others to sleep in her bed; she photographed them every hour, the only rule being that the bed remain constantly occupied. The experiment lasted eight days. The resulting grid-mural documents the sleep (calm or agitated) of the thirty or so people who lent themselves to her archival impulse.
The most moving series Calle has executed in this mode is The Blind, 1986, sadly omitted from Double Game, although it is included in the retrospective. For this work, the artist asked a number of people born without sight “what their image of beauty was”: Each answer was translated into a multipart presentation comprising an enlarged passport shot of the respondent, his or her statement typeset in italics and brown ink, and one or multiple photographs of what he or she had invoked, each of these items independently framed in mahogany-toned wood. Nothing could more poignantly betray the cruelty of the photographic act than these pathetic collections—all the more so since the “images” dreamed up by the blind subjects are almost entirely of visual things (goldfish in a tank, green meadow, French movie star Alain Delon): Surprisingly few call for anything tactile.
Abuse of power and indiscretion: These are the marks of all photographs, according to Calle, and they are among the topics she consistently explores. Dotting her “i”s has involved some risk-taking. In Suite vénitienne, she dutifully reported her growing fear of being spotted, but her anxiety never quite becomes contagious, as the reader is constantly reminded of the element of childlike role-playing in what she was doing. Her next project, The Hotel, realized in the immediate wake of her shadowing Henri B. and published in book form in 1984, flirted much more openly with criminal activity (and the artist could have found herself in real trouble). Calle took a job as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel, where she photographed the rooms she cleaned, the beds she made, and the personal effects of the guests, down to their dirty laundry. (The project appears in its entirety in Double Game, the only difference from the original French being that the photos of the made beds are sometimes in color.) Ever wary of the occupants’ possible return, she opened suitcases, read mail and diaries, and went through all kinds of private documents—even a will—all the while inventing fanciful scenarios. She was assigned twelve bedrooms: To each is devoted a similar textual and photographic entry in which she details her findings, quoting at length from the documents she perused. Calle’s absolute dismissal of privacy is hair-raising. The book abruptly concludes with this sentence: “On Friday, March 6, 1981, at 1 a.m., my duties at the Hotel C come to an end.” We learn no more, and it’s our turn to conjure up the screenplay of a messy denouement.
Calle obviously likes to play with fire. For a 1980 exhibition in the Bronx, she approached total strangers and asked them to take her to their favorite spot in the borough to be photographed; for another project she worked as a stripper in a Place Pigalle club, the whole performance, including her being knocked out by a jealous co-worker, photographed by a friend. But the most telling drama occurred with The Address Book, 1983, the piece that appeared in the French newspaper Libération (which at the time was putting a serious dent in the circulation of Le Monde) between the publication of Suite vénitienne and of The Hotel. Having found an address book on the street, Calle photocopied its contents before anonymously returning it to the owner, whom she called Pierre D. She proceeded to interview all the people whose addresses he had recorded, constructing a kind of imaginary portrait of him that, through the sheer accumulation of little touches, would in principle gradually approach reality. Each morning the newspaper published an interview along with a related photograph, not necessarily taken by Calle (that of an artwork Pierre D. was said to like, for example). The fact that the piece kept building for a whole month, day after day, added to the mystery. That summer Calle was a latter-day Dickens.
Three weeks after the final entry appeared, Libération published, in the same half-page format, the furious response of Pierre D. (who signed his real name, Pierre Baudry). He had been filming a documentary in northern Norway the whole time, and only on returning did he discover that he had been “exposed,” that so many facts of his life and traits of his character—including his repugnance toward any form of publicity—had been revealed to a wide audience. (How extraordinary that he was in the same trade as Calle!) His outrage was an informed one, and his retaliation thus all the more to the point: He published a photo of Calle in the nude (without naming her, however). Even though the editors had cropped out Calle’s face, her punisher underscored that he was performing a violent act, one he wouldn’t usually condone: He wrote that when he filmed he always worked with his subjects so that “they are not the objects, the victims, the prey of an inquiry” whose “model is that of police surveillance and of spying.”
Perhaps the most spectacular of Calle’s projects, The Address Book is also the only one she can’t fully document, at least in book form. (I wonder how this piece will be displayed in the retrospective.) Quoting her contract with Violette Editions disclaiming all responsibility on the part of the publisher in case of a lawsuit, she offers her regrets: In Double Game only the first and last entries of the feuilleton series are presented, along with a photograph showing the stack of Libérations in which her daily installments appeared. Of the address-book owner, she writes, “He is still resentful, he has let me know.”
The pieces discussed to this point are all examples of Calle’s early work. Curiously, the retrospective follows the book (Double Game) in skimming rapidly over her activities during the latter part of the ’80s and the beginning of the ’90s (it fails even to mention her series of works executed in museums, in which Calle asked guards and curators to describe from memory an absent painting—a work stolen or temporarily on loan—and filled the void on the wall with a typographic or calligraphic version of their comments). But following the book is precisely what Calle herself has been doing in recent years, and here her talent for involving her persona in a mix of fiction and reality is staggering.
Double Game is a hall of mirrors. Its starting point is Paul Auster’s 1992 novel Leviathan, in which the character of Maria, who makes a brief appearance in his story, is based on Calle’s antics (the pages in which Maria figures are reproduced in facsimile at the beginning of Double Game, with Calle’s red-ink annotations). Other than The Bronx, The Sleepers, and The Blind, the works I have discussed to this point were all described in Auster’s book as the doings of his fictional protagonist; it is for this reason that they appear in Double Game (the recap of this set of pieces constitutes the second part of the Violette publication). In other words, Calle did not choose which works of hers should be anthologized in Double Game; she followed Auster’s inclinations (an excellent choice, one should add; the novelist is obviously well informed about contemporary art). But a few of the projects ascribed to Maria were purely Auster’s invention, which Calle in turn decided to realize after the fact as her own (the first part of Double Game documents these). The work is far from being up to snuff —yet Calle enacted it to a T. Auster had “Maria” go through “chromatic diets” (she would eat all orange items one week, all red or white or green the next, etc.), or spend certain days under the spell of a particular letter of the alphabet. In the Violette book she scrupulously records her version of these projects—but the reader is relieved, after this brief introductory section, to be led into Calle’s own turf.
The relationship between Auster and Calle doesn’t end there, however. After the Leviathan experience the artist decided to up the ante and totally abdicate her authorship: “I asked [Auster] to invent a fictive character which I would attempt to resemble.” It was no longer a question of performing a score that had already been written—the apocryphal part of Auster’s Maria—but of Calle’s putting herself at the mercy of someone else’s whims: This body of work, called “Gotham Handbook: Personal Instructions for S.C. on How to Improve Life in New York City (Because she asked . . .),” 1994–98, constitutes the third part of Double Game and marks the end of her retrospective. Challenged by the obstinate Calle, Auster reluctantly devised a series of tasks for her doppelgänger (he called his script “Personal Instructions”): smiling, talking to strangers, feeding the homeless or providing them with cigarettes, selecting a spot of the city as her own (a requirement obviously reminiscent of Calle’s early Bronx piece). For a week, Calle fulfilled her obligations in various combinations, mostly at the phone booth on the corner of Greenwich and Harrison streets in Tribeca that she chose as her living quarters (she decorated and cleaned it, brought “in” a chair or two as well as other items that were regularly stolen, all the while greeted by passersby who thought she was nuts). Gotham Handbook registers the various reactions Calle encountered. (A writing pad was provided in the booth for the times she was absent or off distributing her manna in the streets nearby; these scribblings are extravagantly reproduced in facsimile, as if they were pages from a precious illuminated manuscript.) She met some hostility, not always of a paranoid kind—ever the peeping Tom, she listened in on and tape-recorded the phone conversations taking place in the adjoining booth—but on the whole most people welcomed her experiment. As is often the case, the visual material resulting from Calle’s probing of reality’s tissue is relatively poor—but that is not what matters to her. With Paul Auster’s help, she created a social situation that forced others to crack the wall of their indifference.
Although Calle never claimed Guy Debord as her ideological mentor, she might be the only artist in recent years who has found a way to carry out the poetic principle of the Situationist dérive. No doubt she’ll move on, the eternal wanderer.
Yve-Alain Bois is Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University and a contributing editor of Artforum.
