Following Sophie Calle

Lounge area at the Walker

I love this room. For me it embodies its setting--Minneapolis, Minnesota 

where snow and ice are likely to be part of the environment half the year.

I took break from my home improvement chores the other day--an art break. The Walker Art Center is one of those museums I could go to over and over again. Iconic modern masterpieces. Surprising temporary exhibitions. This visit I spent almost all my time at a traveling exhibit called Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Since 1870. Here's a quote from the Walker's website, "Exposed offers a fascinating look at pictures made on the sly, without the explicit permission of the people depicted. Investigating the shifting boundaries between seeing and spying, the private act and the public image, the exhibition reveals the myriad ways photography has brought to light the forbidden and the taboo. Homing in on sex, celebrity, violence, and surveillance, it provokes an array of uneasy questions at the intersection of both power and pleasure."


There were photos from Brassai's series "Secret Paris of the 1930s." And more photos of people in Paris by Henri Cartier-Bresson. But I think one of my favorite parts of the exhibit was a series of photos by Sophie Calle, a French photographer, writer, and installation artist that I've written about HERE. The photos I just saw at the Walker are a project of hers called The Shadow. Ms. Calle had her mother hire a private detective to follow her for a day while she went various places in Paris that were personally significant for her. She wrote journal entries throughout the day, and these are included in the project, too She wanted photographic evidence of her own existence, she said.


The are so many significant days in a person's life. People and places that are like the sun to us as we revolve around them. Would we see them differently if we had a photographic record of them? Would we see something new? Change our minds about someone or something? What would that surveillance expose? Would it change us?

I Wish I Knew This Woman

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.