whitehot | December 2009, Sophie Calle @ Whitechapel Gallery

Sophie Calle; Police captain, F. G., detail Take care of yourself, 2007
Copyright ADAGP Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris / Miami; Arndt & Partner,
Berlin / Zurich; Koyanagi, Tokyo; Gallery Paula Cooper, NY

 

Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7QX
16 October, 2009 through 3 January, 2010

Take Care of Yourself (2007) is the English language premier of Calle’s acclaimed multi-media installation Prenez Soin de Vous (note the formality of the ‘vous’). Borne as a response to a breakup letter received by email, the story has reached almost legendary status: Calle received an email from her lover, the mysterious X, who, after a convoluted, self-deprecating yet accusatory explanation, ends the email with the infamous ‘Take care of yourself.’ (It is safe to assume that X will never again break up with anyone via email). The French artist does precisely that, in typical Calle fashion. In her own words:

The result is a powerful celebration of female dignity, talent and solidarity.

Take Care of Yourself is the centrepiece of Talking to Strangers, the first UK retrospective of Sophie Calle’s work, on show at Whitechapel Gallery, London. Curated by Andrea Tarsia, this intellectually and visually mesmerising exhibition brings together twelve seminal works which showcase Calle’s most compelling explorations as a ‘self-styled ethnographer’ of the everyday. Amongst these are The Detachment (1996), a telling exploration of the erasing of Soviet monuments in Berlin, and of the people struggling to come to terms with a newly polished reality; The Address Book (1983), a voyeuristic investigation and identity reconstruction of the owner of a lost address book by means of the contacts found within providing descriptions of said owner; and Anatoli (1984), a humorous textual and photographic documentation of the random, daily co-habitation between Calle and Anatoli, a Russian 64 year-old, in their train berth from Moscow to Vladivostok.

Sophie Calle, Anatoli,1984
Copyright ADAGP Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris / Miami; Arndt & Partner,
Berlin / Zurich; Koyanagi, Tokyo; Gallery Paula Cooper, NY

The Bronx (1980), is the result one of Calle’s earliest forays into audience participation. It was exhibited for the first time at Fashion Moda, a south Bronx gallery. Interestingly, Fashion Moda  originally invited Calle to show the earliest and most voyeuristic piece in the Whitechapel retrospective:The Sleepers (1979), in which the artist asked various acquaintances and friends to sleep in her bed for eight hours while she observed and photographed them. She found the choice to be, in her own words, a ‘little obscene in such a neighbourhood where many people really had no bed, to show these games about beds in a comfortable Paris apartment’. She consequently had ten days to come up with and execute an entirely new concept. For this project, Calle drew on the dual ideas of the paranoia of outsiders about the Bronx and the harsh reality of living in a neighbourhood which was becoming more and more rapidly derelict and poverty-stricken.

In what later became one of her signature artistic methods, The Bronx resulted from random encounters with strangers which were documented both textually and photographically by the artist. Here, Calle stopped eight strangers at the same hour, on the same street in the Bronx and asked them to take her to a site of their choice which was important to them in some way. Once there, she took their portrait in black and white, photographing them whichever way they wished to be depicted. Each photograph is presented alongside its accompanying text, typewritten on a plain sheet of paper. These texts relay inevitably touching descriptions of the events, reported in an unemotional and clinical style. Lili, a 33 year-old, takes Calle to a site which was blessed by the Pope; Sahara, 22 years old, takes the artist to a small bridge, which she employed as a shortcut to run away from bullies at her school; William, 37 years old, takes Calle to the house where he was born, now an abandoned building, stating ‘this destruction is like a plague, an infection from one building to another’. Bob, 27, provides perhaps the most chilling and at the same humorous encounter: he takes the artist to a bank, saying ‘I used to have a bank account, I would like another one, so my wife wouldn’t have to feel less than she really is’, adding that he wants to be God.

The Bronx is a moving visual documentary of an increasingly abandoned neighbourhood and its inhabitants. There is a sense of entrapment – of the existential huis clos. Although Calle’s black and white portraits are not perhaps technically impressive, presented together with the text they are charged with spirit and dignity, the character of the subject powerfully emanating from the photo. They are just as gripping as, say, Walker Evan’s early snapshots of New Yorkers on the subway, in their capacity to tell an important story and elicit a level of identification with and empathy for the subject. It is evident beyond a doubt that Calle has created a bond with her subjects, no matter how brief their encounter may have been. What astounds is her capacity and ease with not only engaging with complete strangers, but also creating an immediate tie – somehow, she manages to make people open up. Or, the piece hints, is this simply because they are given an opportunity to talk?

Her ethnographic explorations of contemporary society were many years later put to the test by the US novelist Paul Auster in Gotham Handbook (1994) (also shown at Whitechapel.) Sophie Calle asked Auster to invent a fictional character that she would later attempt to resemble; instead, Auster sent her Personal Instructions for S.C. on How to Improve Life in New York City. Amongst other things, he instructs Calle to cultivate a spot, talk and smile at strangers, and offer sandwiches and/or cigarettes to homeless people. Calle settles on a telephone booth at the junction between Greenwich and Harrison Street in Manhattan. She paints the booth turquoise, covers the telephone company’s name with an eager and loud ‘ENJOY!’, cleans and decorates the booth with flowers daily, as well as leaving treats and a comment sheet. She obsessively writes every observation in diary format, also noting smiles given and smiles received, as well as extracts of phone conversations which she recorded with a secretly planted recorder in the phone booth. At the end of this ethnographic experiment, we learn that small talk is undervalued, cigarettes are more appreciated than sandwiches and that for 125 smiles given, only 72 were received.

 

Sophie Calle; Detail, Gotham Handbook, 1994/2000.
Collage with gelatin silver print, text, cibachrome print on plexiglas frame.
Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris & Miami

Both Auster and Calle are interested in how the social space surrounding people frames them and Gotham Handbook provides a compelling example of social interactions and human relationship with objects. Initially, Calle is mainly taken for ‘a nut’ and largely ignored, but she quickly builds a relationship with people who drop by to observe her, chat with her, partake of the treats or leave her comments. The first colour snapshots show several men ogling at her followed by various people turning around to stare at the booth as they pass by. The later ones, however, show Calle in conversation with other strangers and therefore highlight how gradually her eccentric antics become accepted by the passersby. The comments are perhaps the most telling example of varying degrees of engagement, the most colourful declaiming ‘This is bullshit and fucked up. Please take this motherfucker down’, under which a newer comment points an aggressive arrow at the former, stating ‘IGNORANCE SURROUNDS US ALL’. Gotham Handbook succeeds in breaking our façade of indifference to our surroundings, as well as in destabilising preconceived notions of public space and ownership. It induces viewers of the piece to pause and reflect on their own everyday experiences, often producing uncomfortable conclusions on our social interactions with ‘undesirable’ strangers.

Drawing on Calle’s well-established interest in audience participation, Prenez Soin de Vous consists of an elegant combination of textual analysis, photographic portraits and performance videos. Like the other earlier works in Talking to Strangers, it demands meticulous attention and time (it is no wonder that stools are provided in strategic spots across the exhibition.) A pair of glass doors leads to gallery 1, the room entirely dedicated to the installation. On passing through them, the viewer is immediately confronted with a white wall adorned with large, striking colour portraits of women of all shapes and ages. Technically, the portraits are undoubtedly Calle’s best: everything, from the lighting to the setting to the pose, has been clearly thought out and staged – a marked departure from the artist’s more characteristic snapshot approach ubiquitous in her previous photographic works. It is clear that these women are forces to be reckoned with, although not with any femme fatale connotations. The message here is clear, almost acting as a kind of disclaimer: warning - this is a show solely about and by women. One can’t help but wonder how men feel upon entering this highly gendered space. After all, the exhibition is dedicated, in principle at least, to a man’s worst nightmare: the dissection and obsessive deconstruction of his every, single word (one respondent, a criminologist, notes ‘he says ‘I’ more than 30 times in a letter with 23 sentences’).

 

Sophie Calle, Tango singer, Déborah Russ, detail Take care of yourself, 2007.
Copyright ADAGP Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris / Miami; Arndt & Partner,
Berlin / Zurich; Koyanagi, Tokyo; Gallery Paula Cooper, NY.

As one enters the installation, a cacophony of female voices and music – including that of the only non-human participant, the parrot Brenda – float into the gallery space, as the viewer is confronted with the monitors, remaining portraits and their accompanying framed textual analyses. The responses of the performers – from Feist’s hypnotic a cappella solo to tango singer Debora Rus’s passionately sung and spoken recital of X’s letter – are especially arresting, perhaps, quite simply, because it is easier to be captivated by moving image and sound rather than by text. It is easy to spend hours watching the various responses and reading the analyses, which are a clear testament to how embedded deconstruction has become in conceptual art.

Calle’s female choir includes a headhunter (who suggests X’s ‘admirable capacity for dismissing could be profitably used from time to time by companies that are "restructuring" ’), a police captain (‘reading this text, it may be noted that the author’s malaise is characteristic of an attitude that is widespread among French males’), a sexologist (‘no, I don’t see any reason to prescribe you antidepressants’), and a 9 year-old schoolgirl (‘it is sad’), as well as a chess player, an accountant, a French intelligence officer, a UN diplomat, a clairvoyant, a clown, a rifle shooter, and an Indian dancer.

As one gradually absorbs Take Care of Yourself, it soon transpires that what may have started out as a search for the catharsis to a painful breakup developed instead into arguably one of the most original and engaging pieces of contemporary feminist art in recent years. By using X’s email as a springboard, Take Care of Yourself has produced a compelling feminist document, acting as both a mouthpiece and a homage to the empowerment of women in virtually all professions. Here, Sophie Calle successfully merges the theoretical framework of conceptual art with the aesthetics of socially engaged collaborative art, as well as drawing on feminist art from the seventies – Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974) comes to mind – repositioned here within a postmodernist dialogue. Ironically, Take Care of Yourself is rooted in an inevitable paradox: whilst being a powerful celebration of all things female, it is also intrinsically bound to ‘X’, the deafening male presence without which the piece would cease to exist.

 

Sophie Calle, Etoile dancer at the Opéra de Paris, Marie-Agnès Gillot, detail Take care of yourself, 2007.
Copyright ADAGP Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris / Miami; Arndt & Partner.
Berlin / Zurich; Koyanagi, Tokyo; Gallery Paula Cooper, NY