Sophie CALLE | PERROTIN

Born in 1953 in Paris, Sophie Calle is a writer, a conceptual artist, a photograph, a movie director or even detective. She might be a little of each, according to the characters that she interprets, the rituals she imagines, the parts of her life that she tells and the feelings that she shares. The artist often explores the investigations methods and her work , most of the time, consists in the association between photography and text.
Sophie Calle creates her own game rules, in order to "Make life better", to give life a structure. For her first project in 1979 she decides to follow a stranger, and this chase brings her to Venice. " Suite Venitienne" is the result of this shadow.
For most of her works it is only in a second part that she leads them into the art sphere. Her installations are the conclusion and the effect of situations which are entirely staged by the artist and lived in an autobiographic way.

What happens when two radically opposed artistic traditions collide? Take the work of art as the reclining nude, a figure in a picture. Its subject is passive, the aesthetic object of the artist’s gaze, part of a pictorial tradition that dominated painting from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. Now take the work of art as a body in space. Its subject is the artist’s body and that of anyone entering the space of the work transformed into active participant. Here we recall the radical propositions of performance art of the 1960s and 1970s. It is an unlikely fusion of these traditions that characterizes Sophie Calle’s paradigmatic work of 1979, The Sleepers. It is also why we can regard her work as a new kind of figuration, one that offers social interaction.
‘I’d set up a small lab ... I’d met Gloria Friedman who had an enlarger, while I had a basement. We took turns. One morning, she woke me up so that I could have my turn. Because she didn’t feel up to going back home, she asked me if she could lie down in my bed. She must have said something like: “The sheets are warm, it’s nice …” I probably said something like: “That would be fun, a bed that’s always got someone in it”. Calle contacted friends, acquaintances and strangers and asked whether they would sleep in her bed and allow her to photograph them.
‘I intended my bedroom to become a constantly occupied space for eight days, with sleepers succeeding one another at regular intervals.’
The black and white photographs of The Sleepers are interspersed with short written accounts of each volunteer and Calle’s exchange with them. They can be regarded as models in the classic sense – they recline and they are pictured. Yet Calle’s images of them are neither aesthetic nor erotic; they appear documentary, like evidence compiled by a detective or a psychologist. Each subject is also a participant. Although the artist asks them to make a work, her invitation requires only that they rest. They act by agreeing to enter the intimate space of the artist’s bed with all its connotations of the body in sickness and in health. There is the frisson of sex, the taboo of hygiene. To be horizontal is also to be vulnerable, incapacitated. There is a strong element of risk for the participants – one, a babysitter, is frightened and phones her boyfriend to ask his advice – and for Calle, whose motivation could be misinterpreted – ‘He tells me he came because he thought there would be an orgy’.
By asking her subjects to sleep, Calle allows them a measure of autonomy, allowing them to disappear appear into their unconscious. When they awake they look as if they have returned from a journey, silent, blurry-eyed, acclimatizing to the light and the strange situation in which they find themselves. Both Calle and the sleepers are vulnerable: she is sharing her bedroom with strangers. They are asleep in the bed of a woman they do not know. Each has made a pact of trust.
The Sleepers offers a paradigm for understanding Calle’s future oeuvre: making a proposal that triggers a sequence of unpredictable events, and involves a degree of risk, even danger; bringing strangers temporarily into the realms of intimacy; and documenting the consequences through text and image. The bed itself has been a recurrent motif, with its attendant connotations of the erotic and of the unconscious. Above all, Calle enters into temporary agreements with strangers that require mutual trust. It is this aspect of her work that suggests a political and ethical dimension.
Taking up the camera initially gave Calle a way of ‘getting about and discovering the city’.4 Being behind a lens offers a protective distance, the detachment of the observer also crucial to the flâneur. In 1980, Calle agreed to participate in a show at the Fashion Moda Gallery in the South Bronx. ‘Right away I stumbled upon a simple idea: playing with the fear created by that neighbourhood and its ghetto aspect.’5 Calle stopped passers-by on the streets of the Bronx between 2 and 5 p.m. and asked them to take her somewhere of their choice.
Following New York State’s bankruptcy in the 1970s, the Bronx had suffered unprecedented levels of unemployment, dereliction and violence. One of her guides comments, ‘when a white person comes to the neighbourhood, it is either a policeman, a dope peddler or it is a mistake’.
Calle recounts each encounter in a framed text. Beside it is an image of the destination selected by each passerby – the ruin of what was someone’s home; a lone sapling tree.
Calle used the terms of an enquiry to offer a framework for interaction. Despite the ‘shield’ offered by her camera Calle does not succumb to the opportunism of photo journalism. Her subjects shape the narrative structure of the work by determining the route the artist follows; and they select what she should portray of their terrain. Calle’s youth, gender and white skin make her a potential target; yet no one abuses her trust. Each is given their voice and their opportunity to memorialize a loss or find some expression of hope in this hostile landscape. The massed ranks of the irredeemable are individuated, given back their humanity by making manifest their search for hope. The night before the show opens the gallery is broken into and all the works are covered in graffiti – Calle leaves the tags on her work simply remarking on an intervention by ‘an unexpected collaborator’.

‘I spend the days with this blotched blotter before me and I read the correspondents’
confidences’ André Breton et Philippe Soupault

The importance of chance in Calle’s work reiterates a preoccupation that runs from Surrealism through the psychogeographic dérives of the Situationists. Chance brings with it the spontaneous, the unexpected and the irrational. As Calle has commented, ‘I like being in control and I like losing control. Opening the door to the unknown, it can also offer the solution as to what to make next. In 1983 the artist found an address book, photocopied it and returned it anonymously to its owner. Some time later he was to read descriptions of himself in the French newspaper, Libération, solicited by Calle from the friends whose contact details she had copied. As with The Sleepers and The Bronx this is also a portrait but the subject is absent. Calle pieces together different perspectives provided by a random group of people who are defined by knowing one individual. As with Breton and Soupault, reading private correspondence from the ink traces on a blotter, there is something voyeuristic, even predatory about this and other works in which Calle has followed and photographed strangers (or their rooms) without their knowledge or permission (Suite Venitienne, 1980/ The Hotel, 1981). ‘I would get to know this man. I would try to find out who he was without ever meeting him …’ There is also the sexual frisson of pursuing the obscure object of desire. Might the appeal of this work to the female viewer lie in the pleasure of this role reversal?
The violation of privacy would certainly have appealed to the anti- bourgeois ethos of the surrealists; someone who is neither topical nor a celebrity, becomes, albeit anonymously, the unwitting topic of a daily newspaper article. If readers hoped for salacious or unpleasant disclosures however, they were to be disappointed. Those providing the descriptions were literary, funny, insightful, yet discreet. Calle’s experiment demon- strates the affection and tolerance we have for each other’s idiosyncrasies and the levels of decorum we adopt when making a public address.

‘The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.’ Sol Lewitt

Just as conceptual artists accorded idea and process equal status, Calle presents the concept of the work as an establishing statement outlining the terms of the experiment and the circumstances for what follows. The results of the initial concept then unfold as a journal or narrative. Experiments require a form of notation; similarly performances and happenings became manifest beyond the moment of their execution through photography. Accompanying Calle’s written commentary is a photographic record of events. Her images have a snapshot quality that looks expedient and intimate. She nearly always pictures people or spaces but her images have neither the drama of reportage nor the aesthetic of the tableaux.
Anatoli (1984) takes the form of a letter addressed to ‘My love’ It continues, ‘I boarded the Trans-Siberian in Moscow, on my way to Vladivostok. It was October 29, 1984, 2.20 p.m. I was in car 7, com- partment 6 … The other traveller was in berth 4. I sat down and waited for him. At 2.30 he walked in.’11 This suspenseful, Hitchcockian opening is enthralling, and as the train pulls out the reader gets on board. In the account that follows Calle describes her life in the train compartment with
a 68 year-old Russian man called Anatoli. They have no grasp of each other’s language. To his annoyance she is also unable to play chess and he tries, unsuccessfully, to swap her for another passenger. He drinks vodka and snores profusely. Yet they establish a routine; they look after one another. Apparently insurmountable barriers disappear through their mutual acts of civility. Her journey is not described in scenic terms; rather it is a wry account of how mutual incomprehension evolves towards an unexpectedly nuanced relationship. Calle’s epistolary account is enlarged and presented as a wall text. The photographs of Anatoli and their brief encounter are unframed and arranged on a table where the visitor is invited to sit and sift through them. Calle invites her viewer to act as witness: to the private language of a love letter, to a personal encounter in a train carriage and to translate these personal relations into the public sphere. This is to engage in what Nicolas Bourriaud, a decade later, identifies as ‘relational’ art, ‘an art that takes as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an autonomous and private symbolic space’.
Although Calle’s work operates in the sphere of human relations, her project is neither emotionally expressive nor sentimental. Her writings are characterized by a comic detachment, observing rather than interpreting. Driving her work is a desire to find a connection between people and to identify a locus of aspiration that is essentially utopian. This often evolves through the process of a journey. From the expedition to the road movie, this is a narrative form that presupposes a quest, the search for Mandalay, El Dorado, Shangri-la, Hollywood. This is always tempered however, by the artist’s acute awareness that the beckoning ideal is a mirage. Los Angeles (1984) reiterates the strategy she evolved in The Bronx. Where the Bronx is synonymous with fear of the ghetto, Los Angeles symbolizes a form of Occidentalism, and its concomitant association with pioneering. Commissioned to create a piece about the city, Calle ‘… decided to ask people a single question: “Since Los Angeles is literally the city of the angels, where are the angels?”’
The pursuit of hope as expressed by her Californian guides, leads Calle variously to a liquor store, a family living room, and to one man’s conclusion that ‘the whole city is a monument to their failure to appear’.13 If Calle is a sceptic she also demonstrates how giving up on the search for an ideal, whether it be true love, a social aspiration, or even a political ideology –leads to artistic stasis and the impoverishment of the public arena.
She herself is challenged to ‘improve life in New York City’ by the author Paul Auster. Having inspired a character in his 1992 novel, Leviathan, Calle asked him ‘to invent a fictive character which I would attempt to resemble’. He decides instead to send her instructions to be carried out on the streets of New York. These involve smiling at and talking to strangers, helping beggars and homeless people and cultivating a spot. The terms of the ‘social contract’ that is at the heart of her work are here, set by someone else, enabling Calle to relinquish agency - ‘I like to lose control’.
In 1994, on the streets of Manhattan, Calle sets to work. However disingenuous her smiles and overtures to conversation may be, she scores a not inestimable return on her performance: ‘Results of the Operation – 125 smiles given for 72 received … 154 minutes of conversation’. She also decorates a phone booth, furnishing it with flowers, refreshments and a pad for the public’s comments. These range from appreciation to abuse.
The project is an act, a work of fiction and an anthropological experiment. It emerges that beggars would rather smoke than eat; that men ‘can be pigs’; and that most social dialogue takes the form of platitude. But the mission is broadly successful. Art is not instrumentalized, rather its instrumentalization becomes the subject of the work of art. ‘Sophie Calle’ as a character envisioned by Paul Auster and performed by the artist, makes people happy.
In 1996 she embarked on the third of her psychogeographic city tours titled The Detachment. ‘I visited places in Berlin where the symbols of East Germany have been removed. I asked passers-by to describe the objects that once filled these empty spaces.’15 She photographed the location of each public sign or monument detached after the 1989 reunification of East and West Germany and recorded people’s descriptions of what was there. Despite their confidence in recollecting shape, material or colour, they are often visually inaccurate. The emblem of a dove removed from a high rise is variously remembered as ‘bronze’, ‘white’ and ‘stainless steel’. The absence of the symbols that once defined the public realm in ideological terms, also elicits sadness, annoyance and relief – few are indifferent. On the removal of a GDR insignia, a person comments,
‘The instruments of utopia have now disappeared. All that’s left is the utopia, but an empty one. We only see the void’. The monuments and signs that are part of the fabric of the city and that become invisible with familiarity are, paradoxically brought sharply into focus by their absence. Calle elicits reflections from the citizens of East Berlin on how ideology shaped not only their urban environment but also their sense of identity. Most critically they mourn the loss of ‘the possibility of remembering’. With the removal of the propagandist symbols of the state, history appears to have been erased. Calle relocates it within the memories of her subjects. The unreliability of their visual recall makes this history a subjective one, giving it a veracity and a complexity that transforms it into a narrative of lived experience. In the new dawn of unification, there is no illusion about the triumph of capitalism. ‘We could just leave things as they are. As traces. Rather than make way for Coca-Cola signs’.
A work where her subjects were unable to talk back generated a fifteen year crisis in its making. In 1988, invited by an American bank to make a project, the artist gained access to the surveillance films taken by hidden cameras, of clients using cash machines. Although struck by the strange betrayal of trust that these covert films represent, by the mysterious beauty of the portraits they make and by the occasional crime they document but cannot actually prevent, she can’t work out what to do with them. Years pass. Calle interviews tellers, she photographs money, she talks to security agents and policemen. In 1994 she asks Jean Baudrillard to help out. She visits a hypnotist. Still nothing. In 2003 she decides to make a video about all these failures and to show the original photographs of the cash machine’s users. Frustrated by the silence of these strangers and by the abstraction of money itself - ‘Is it because money is an enabler that I am unable to find an angle on it?’16 – Calle struggles to bring the closed-circuit encounter between a person and a machine into the subjective terms of her authorship. Unfinished (2003) is another journey, towards the elusive act of creation itself. If social interaction is one engine driving Calle’s work, autobiography is the other. The epic Take Care of Yourself (2007) takes as its muse a former lover. On receiving his email ending their relationship she takes literally his suggestion that she should take care of herself, by asking for professional assistance. Making the letter the transitional object for the locus of anger and loss, she commissioned over 100 women whose jobs touch on human relations, to give their professional response to it. Some provide literary, psychological and legal analysis; others use their creative skills as dancers, singers, storytellers or performers, to make an alchemical transformation of the letter into multiple works of art. The operatic scale of this installation, initially presented at the French pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, encompasses moving image, sound and printed matter. On being invited to represent France, Calle advertised for a curator; the winning applicant was the artist, Daniel Buren. Together they collated Calle’s films, recordings, photographs and transcripts of the women’s professional responses, into a Borgesian library, a labyrinth of text, sound and image.
Take Care of Yourself proceeds from a betrayal of trust represented by rejection and exacerbated by its delivery via the remote proxy of the email. Calle mirrors this act of displacement by employing others to analyse or perform the source of her anguish. Neither mawkish nor vengeful, this composite work presents a remarkable testament to the poise, wisdom and artistry of 107 women. This work of art proceeds from Calle’s transference and sublimation of pain and emerges through the symbolic acts of her female chorus.
While each contribution is characterized by absolute tact and professional composure, it is difficult to resist the comic deflation visited on the self- regard of Calle’s male muse. By contrast, the power of Couldn’t Capture Death (2007) rests in an almost unbearable use of humour to mark the trauma of death. Taking the form of a wall text, Calle portrays her mother by recounting the arrangements she makes as she prepares to die. The organizing structure of this, perhaps Calle’s most profound written work, takes each distinct action as the final one of its kind: ‘The last journey’, ‘her last party’, ‘a last poem’. Throughout this devastating yet elegiac epitaph, Calle enumerates the activities that elevate us above mere existence: looking at the sea, reading, listening to Mozart. The significance of perceiving nature, immersion in culture and of recourse to the comic –
‘her epitaph: I’m getting bored already!’ is not only a way of paying tribute to this central figure in her life. It is also a testament to how the pleasure, the continuity and necessity of these acts, transcend mortality. If her mother’s last breath evaded capture, this work of art can be said to have captured her life.
Although enacted in 2005 the final work in the Whitechapel exhibition, which this book accompanies, is recuperative. Where and When? Berck (2008) is the name of a seaside town in France that has thirteen hospitals, its beach the site of convalescence. Having persuaded Maud Kristen, a clairvoyant, to use her powers to propose a course of action, Calle travels to Berck at the suggestion of Maud’s cards. Once there, she reports by phone on her encounters, which Maud offers to ‘the cosmos’ for interpretation and guidance as to how to proceed. For Calle, ‘It is restful. Obeying rules, controlled wandering, the relief of not having to judge events … everything becomes a sign and so glows with grace’.17 A woman invites Calle to take deep breaths of air and to note its singularity in different locations. The cards indicate that she should find a memorial to two dead brothers who had loved boats and challenges. The monument she finds is blank. At this moment she receives a phone message from a friend, one of two brothers who love boats and challenges and whose surname is Berque. On her way home to Paris, she buys a souvenir for Maud from a café called Succès berckois. Maud comments, ‘I just wanted to admire the coincidences’. The work appears as a book where flipping the pages shows the cards in action; and a film. The final image is a road leading into the sea. For the artist and the viewer who accompanies her, this bland coastal town has unexpectedly offered a breath of fresh air, life instead of death.
Calle adopts multiple identities as author, performer and character. She invents or invites games and rituals to pass the time and initiate social exchange that in turn beguile and entrance her audience. Behind the artifice of the mask and the arbitrary structure of an instruction, lies the messy emotional truth of loss, disappointment, or frustrated expectation. The catalyst and consequence of many of her investigations is failure. Yet her unswerving application to following the rules of her own protocols and the remarkable responses that she elicits from her protagonists, suggest what should be necessary, ethical conditions of social life.