Who is Who and What is What?
Johanne Logstrup
Sophie Calle, Exquisite Pain, 1984/1999, photo and text embroidery, copyright: Paula Cooper Gallery
In the last two winters the French artist Sophie Calle (1953) has shown her works at two large retrospective exhibitions, the first one at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2003) and last winter at Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. The exhibitions showed a wide collection of Calle’s old and new works from the past 25 years. Viewers experienced the ways in which Calle reuses and renews a select variety of stories and recollections through the years. The works often appear as framed photos and text patterns, told with a pseudo-scientific distance that documents an experience or a happening.
Sophie Calle does not have a degree from an art school; it was merely a coincidence that she became an artist. The story is that back in 1979 she did the project Les Dormeurs (The Sleepers). The project was about letting 45 different, specially invited, people sleep in her bed in 8-hour shifts. Calle documented the sleeping sessions by photo and text. One of the participants told her husband, an art critic, about the project. He then invited Calle to exhibit at the Biennale des jeunes (The biennale for young emerging artists) in Paris in 1980. That became the starting point of her career. Les Dormeurs was exhibited in the old version and in a new version, called Journey to California, where 24 years later she sends her bed to a man in California, who would love to try and sleep in it after having heard of her project. By joint effort they document the happening — the shipping, the placing and the correspondence.
Breathing new life into the romantic myth of the artist
Calle has said about her art that to her, it is a way ‘to survive’. The starting point of her projects is often personal, and it is tied into her own life but it is also a staging of it. The meaning of the staging is produced in a combination of cultural codes for understanding art and the artist’s subject. She puts emphasis on the relation between private and public concerns in a deliberate and sophisticated game with herself as the protagonist. Calle’s works are somewhere in between reality and fiction. With her works, Calle gives life to the romantic myth of the artists as a person raised above other people, who lives her life as an isolated, creative and inspiring genius, who can only relate to her own personal life.
The staging, however, does not appear (as it would traditionally) in the relation between the usual parts, that is the artist as a creator, the work as a sublime object and the public as worshippers of art. To Calle it happens in a joint play where all the parts melt together, and become impossible to separate. The art works are not tied up with any particular media forms but all build upon more or less staged happenings exhibited as installations (a kind of documentation by text and photo). It is the conceptual part in the works and the myths that rise around Calle that gives them their uniqueness and quality. Through Calle’s confessions of intimate episodes from her own life, and in spite of the many banal seducing codes, the viewers are seduced into a game that seems to reveal the real truth of the life and work of an artist. In general, a lot of Calle’s works are about the question of identity. The interesting thing, then, is the way she represents her self.
100 days before and after the pain
The most surprising and exciting work on view was the two-part work called Exquisite Pain from 1984/1999. The work is an investigation into the idea of pain. In the first part of the work, you follow Sophie Calle on a 100-day journey to Japan. A journey she doesn’t wish to go on because she has just met what she believes to be the love of her life. She takes off on her journey believing that if this is true love it will last in spite of the 100 days of separation. He, on the other hand, is opposed to her leaving and claims that he will not wait for her. The first part of the work is a travel journal with photos from the journey and examples from the correspondence between the two lovers. The photos are hung in one long row, one following the other, from one room to the next. The only surprising and different touch to the series is a scarlet letter stamped in each of the photos. Using huge numbers and letters, the stamps show how many days are left before the exquisite pain will start. The grand love is doomed, we know that from the start.
The lovers have decided to meet in New Delhi but he never shows up. She calls him after having received a rather strange message — something about going to the hospital. This, of course, is a lie. He has found a new love.
The next part of the work is a square room with lots of space in the middle of which soft and comfortable sets are placed, from where you can look at the photos hanging next to each other on all four walls. The feeling is almost like the feeling one gets in a mausoleum. Beneath each photo hangs machine-made text embroidery. Every other photo is the same, showing a red telephone on a bed in a hotel room. On the embroideries beneath the photos, Calle tells the story, over the following 100 days, of what it was like to discover the real reason her lover did not come to New Delhi. Not surprisingly, and happily, the pain is reduced as the days go by. In between her story other people tell their stories about experiencing the ultimate pain. Each story is illustrated by a photo. The many texts are touching and tough stories about losing people close to oneself. Each story is horrible to read and if Calle’s own pain hadn’t been decreasing, the viewer would certainly experience it vicariously after the reading of all the breathtaking stories. In this fine and self-ironic way the work touches upon the nature of pain— and the problem of how to retell and relive it.
The relation between seeing and reading
For those who did not get to see these large retrospective exhibitions, Calle publishes great catalogues — or rather artist books. For this exhibition she did the huge book called M’a ta vue? (Can you see me?). Holding the great artist book in my hands I wondered if Calle’s works are as satisfying to see in a book as on exhibition, since the works are also exhibited as photos and texts. Many of the works are greatly informed by the provided text. (This observation does not count for Calle’s video works or the works by her made specifically for the museums outside the art institution.) Studying the books closely my hand I felt an intimacy that is hard to get in a museum.
I asked Sophie Calle what the exhibition room and the book means to her as medias. And she answered me: "The book means a trace, a memory, a cheap (economically), sensual, sentimental object. The exhibition is more ambitious, more complex to fabricate, more scary. I have more love attraction for the wall and more friendship for the page."
Exquisite pain will be shown at Paula Cooper Gallery from the 5th May 2005.
Sophie Calle, Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin (10. September – 13. December 2004)
M’a tu vu? Illustrated catalogue, 444 pages.
