Dinner conversation is pretty amazing when one is at a writer's residency. Tonight, dining in the Ragdale dining room, I learned of a French artist named Sophie Calle. I just read about her on Wikepedia.
Here's an excerpt which describes some of her work. The italics are mine.
I love that she referred to her boyfriend as "X."
I hope I can see her work someday. To see it in France would be even better
"Douleur Exquise" (exquisite pain) 2003. She was supposed to go to Japan but didn’t want to, so she took the train through Moscow and through Siberia, then through Beijing, then to Hong Kong. She was supposed to meet her lover in New Delhi, but he made up some sort of story about a car accident, which she realized was a lie. She took a photograph every day until the day they were supposed to meet in New Delhi, and wrote about how much she looked forward to meeting him. The second half of the book was all about the pain of the heartbreak. She would write about the horrible memory of the conversation where she realized he was breaking up with her on one page, and ask people to tell her their worst memory, which was placed on the right. Over the days, her story became shorter and shorter as her pain dissipated over the time. The juxtaposition of everyone’s terrible memories also played down the pain of a simple breakup.
At the 2007 Venice Biennale, Sophie Calle showed her piece Take Care of Yourself, named after the last line of the message her ex had left her. Calle had asked dozens of women—including a parrot and a hand puppet—to interpret the break-up e-mail and presented the results in the French pavilion. [5]
At her gallery shows, Calle frequently supplies suggestion forms on which visitors are encouraged to furnish ideas for her art, while she sits beside them with a disinterested expression.
In November 2008, she will participate in an exhibition "Système C, un festival de coincidence" proposed by the Stéréotypes Associés inMains d'Oeuvres, Paris.[citation needed]
Sophie Calle was recently awarded the frieze Writers Prize 2009 for Take Care of Yourself. Take Care of Yourself is a break-up letter her then-boyfriend (dubbed ‘X’) sent her via e-mail. Calle took the e-mail, and the paralyzing confusion that accompanies the mind’s failure to comprehend heartbreak, and distributed it to 107 women of various professions, skills and talents to help her understand it – to interpret, analyze, examine and perform it. The result of this seemingly obsessive, schoolyard exercise is paradoxically one of the most expansive and telling pieces of art on women and contemporary feminism to pass through New York in recent years.
Posts
