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Sophie Calle

For 30 years the Paris-based artist Sophie Calle has been preoccupied with boundaries—especially those between private and public. In her work, she has exploited the demise of photography’s authoritative status as factual evidence in our postmodern world of mass replication and digital transformation. Undermining once-stable boundaries between fact and fiction, Calle leaves us to perform our own detective work based on the evidence she provides.

Coincidence and chance inform her works, as does a psychological undercurrent that she connects with the voyeuristic nature of photography. Calle has often used the format of the captioned photograph, implicating us in her project of destabilizing photographic veracity and suspending meaning through uncertainty, but paradoxically leaving us to doubt her persuasiveness.

In Prenez soin de vous (or Take Care of Yourself), created for the 2007 Venice Biennale and shown in Montreal last summer, the artist recounts her abandonment by a lover known only as “G.” The lover’s self-absorbed email farewell to Calle is the basis of the work, which is an intricately detailed narrative consisting of texts, photos and films—the statements of 107 women and one parrot—that interpret the breakup letter from varied professional perspectives. Calle takes the subject of abandonment and transforms it into a meditation on the nature of the viewer’s relationship with the work of art. In therapeutic terms, abandonment implies a prior state of unity, referring all the way back to time spent in the mother’s womb. Birth (separation) then represents an inevitable wound that also, according to psychotherapy, informs the trajectory of maturation to independent adulthood.

Calle deliberately abandons us, the viewers, before the artwork. We have no recourse to the artist as a source of a secure meaning. Instead, we must become “adult” in the face of the work of art and perform our role as interpreters independent of her guidance. Calle manoeuvres us into this terrain of uncertainty through her overt mingling of fact and fiction, and the laying out of what often look like false trails.

She favours a viewer who is suspicious of her attempts to persuade us that a monumental work of art is “only” a therapeutic working-through of a life experience. She cuts the cord of cause and effect between artist, artwork and viewer, abandoning us to the pleasures and pain involved in interpretation. This may be standard procedure among artists of the postmodern era, but what is so interesting in Calle’s work is her treatment of everyday life experience in psychotherapeutic terms—but subjected to her wry skepticism.

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