A Toi de Faire Ma Mignonne (It’s up to you, darling)

Sophie Calle at the Musée Picasso

A retrospective of the artist Sophie Calle opened at the Musée Picasso in early October. Thank goodness it has been extended through January so I can see it again (and again) when I get back. I saw it as soon as it opened. I saw it again a few days later and then a few days after that. I was planning to go more regularly (twice a week? every day?) until I left Paris in mid-November. But my plans went awry when my migraine put me out of action and then my reaction to a Covid vaccine laid me low. I only had time to visit once more before I left for San Francisco.

As I read the above I see that I have become a wee bit obsessed with Calle. I find her work seductive, compelling because she takes random ideas and transforms them, mostly through photographs and words, into art. It makes me think that my pensées, my experiences might become art. Could that be her goal? Nah, not a chance.

I read somewhere that Sophie Calle wanted to live at the Picasso Museum during the run of the exhibition. (Fig 1) When that didn’t pan out for prosaic reasons, (location of bathroom, shower, surveillance cameras, etc.), she found another way to install herself in the installation. Installing herself in her art is something she has done since the beginning, as we shall see. Anyhow, she transformed a space on the top floor of the museum into her office. The door to the office invites visitors to knock and if she’s there, she will (probably) open the door. (Figs 2, 2a) The first time I went to see the exhibition, I didn’t even see the door. The second time, I saw a woman knock on it. I walked over, to see what would happen. When Sophie Calle answered the door, the woman just stood there, mute. If she had thought about what she was going to say, she had forgotten it when Sophie answered the door. And then the woman walked away. I thought it would be stupid to just let Sophie Calle close the door. So I asked her if I could take her picture. Of course she said yes. Why didn’t I take a selfie? (Fig 3)

Figure 1. Sophie Calle at the Musée Picasso, Paris

Figure 2. Non descriptive door to Sophie Calle’s office at the Musée Picasso

Figure 2a. Note on the side of the door to Sophie Calle’s office explaining why she is there.

Figure 3. Sophie Calle answering the door to her office at the Musée Picasso

That encounter whetted my appetite for more. I began to formulate a plan. I would come to the exhibition as often as I could. I would knock on Calle’s door each time. And each time she opened the door, I would ask her some questions. From a list I began to prepare. With this exhibition as my guide, I would document our exchanges in words and photos and make them into art. How? Keep reading.

Anyhow, the second and third time I visited the exhibition, I knocked on the door, but no one answered. So, I began to think like a scientist and understood that Calle not being there was not a non-experience, it was simply a different experience.

The fourth time, I began to get frustrated. I asked the ticket scanners (always two women standing at the stairs to the exhibition entrance) if they knew if Sophie Calle was in her office. One of the women told me that she wouldn’t recognize the artist if she saw her (which was too bad since her access to the exhibition and the artist could easily become her art piece if she had thought of it) The other woman told me that Sophie Calle was usually there in the afternoons (I was there in the morning).

The next time I came in the afternoon. I knocked on the door, no answer. As I was leaving, I asked the ticket scanner if she had seen Calle. Yes she had, only a few minutes earlier, walking around with a group of young people. I set out in pursuit, but I couldn’t find her. Alas, because of the aforementioned migraine and vaccine reaction (and the other exhibitions I had to see), I left Paris without seeing Calle again.

What I find fascinating and troubling about Calle is that she makes art out of random things that happen to her, like a boyfriend breaking up with her by email (Fig 4). Or random ideas that pop into her head like what a blind person’s idea of visual beauty is. (Fig 5) Or what people who worked at the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum remembered about the paintings that were stolen in 1990. (Fig 6)

Figure 4. Dumped by email, Sophie Calle, 2009

Figure 5. Blind, Sophie Calle, 2011

Figure 6. Last Seen, Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, Sophie Calle, 1990

Oh, before I forget, here are some of the questions I thought of, to ask Calle. 1. What does she think of people who record and document their lives on Instagram and TikTok. 2. Does she think that selecting awkward moments in life to transform into art (as she does) is more valid, than selecting cool ones like Influencers do? 3. Does she see her own work as a precursor to those people who ‘share too much online?’ 4. Does she see a connection between her work and reality TV? 5. When everything that happens ‘in real life’ can become art, how does she establish boundaries between a life lived and a life curated. 6. Finally (so far) What does she think about the work of Ragnar Kjartansson, (the conceptual and performance artist whose retrospective I saw at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen this summer).(Fig 7)

Figure 7. Mother Spitting on Son, (self portrait) every 5 years since 2000, Ragnar Kjartansson, 2015

I promise that I am going to tell you about the exhibition, but first I want to tell you about the first time I heard about Sophie Calle. I was teaching in the tiny art history department of an art school that my not yet conceived son would attend 25 years later. One day, a colleague told me about an article she was writing about a performance artist, a woman who roamed the streets of Paris, a female flâneur

We all know about flâneurs, those dandies and boulevardiers, those men who saunter around the city, observing, but not participating. The focus of their gaze, their male gaze, is typically a woman. So, how could there be such a thing as a female flaneur, a flâneuse. Because invisibility is key to flânerie. A flâneur can wander aimlessly. He doesn’t have to worry about being harassed or propositioned. A woman has to walk with a certain purpose or she will be mistaken for someone looking for male attention. Having your body evaluated as you walk, making yourself visually or verbally vulnerable when you are outdoors without a man by your side to protect you, is antithetical to strolling around the city unseen, with ease.

I taught courses for Elderhostel the same years I taught at the art school. One of those courses was on 19th century French art. In discussing artists like Boldini and Toulouse-Lautrec, (Figs 8, 9) I talked about flâneurs. I repeated what I knew, what we all knew. Women can’t be flâneurs because women are not invisible. One of my students, a woman ‘of a certain age’ told me that when I got older I would understand how invisible a woman could be. An older woman, for example, trying to get the attention of a salesperson in a department store or a waiter in a restaurant.

Figure 8. Robert de Montesqiou, Giovanni Boldini. 1897

Figure 9. Louis Pascal, Toulouse Lautrec, 1890

If Sophie Calle couldn’t be a flâneur the way a man could, how did she do it. How did she avoid getting unsolicited attention. Although honestly, the more I learn about Sophie Calle, the more unlikely it seems that any attention would be unwelcome.

Lauren Elkin, in her 2016 book, Women Walk the City, wrote about women who walk in a city but who aren’t ‘femmes de la rue’ (aka street walkers). According to Elkin, “To suggest that there could be no flâneuse …is to limit the ways women have interacted with the city to the ways men have interacted with the city…. Perhaps the answer is not to attempt to make a woman fit a masculine concept, but to redefine the concept itself.” “It’s time,” Elkin continued, “to recognize a counter-tradition of the flâneuse, (from) …Virginal Woolfe …. to Sophie Calle..."

For Woolfe, walking and creating went hand in hand. Her book To the Lighthouse came to her one afternoon while she was walking in London, ostensibly out to buy a pen. One of her heroines, Mrs Dalloway is, according to Elkin, ‘the flâneuse incarnate.’ The first thing Mrs. Dalloway says is this: “I love walking in London. Really, it’s better than walking in the country.” (I agree!) Historian Rachel Bowlby tells us that Mrs. Dalloway embodies her name, she is “a woman who likes to dally along the way.”

If 19th century novelists and their protagonists got away with walking through city streets because they claimed that they had something to do, something to buy, what about Sophie Calle? According to Elkin, Calle’s career as a flâneuse “began the day that, out of boredom, she began following people in the street.” People chosen at random, whom she photographed and whose movements she noted. “One evening, at a gallery opening, she encountered a man she had been trailing earlier that afternoon. The coincidence seemed like a sign….” According to Calle,”During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning a trip to Venice. I decided to follow him.”

In Venice, she kept photographing and kept writing down her observations. “Over the course of almost two weeks in Venice, Calle notated, in time-stamped entries, her surveillance of Henri B. (he man she was stalking), as well as her own emotions as she finds him and then follows him through the labyrinthine streets of Venice. Her investigation is both methodical (calling every hotel, visiting the police station) and arbitrary (sometimes following a stranger--a flower delivery boy, for instance--hoping someone might lead her to him).”

A female flaneur even now, can’t wander aimlessly, like her male counterpart, but like her 19th century predecessors, she has to be doing something. But rather than shop for a pen, Calle stalks people.

After she returned to Paris, she assembled the black and white photographs she took, turned her notes into text and turned the entire experience into an installation and book she called Venetian Suite (1980).(Fig 10)

Figure 10. Venetian Suites, Sophie Calle, 1980

As one critic writes, “It was her first artist's book and the crucible of her inimitable fusion of investigatory methods, fictional constructs, the plundering of real life and the composition of self.” If you tease apart this sentence, you can see the possibility of making art out of your own life. Which intrigues me.

Here’s another one of Calle's projects, The Sleepers (Les Dormeurs). (Fig 11) Calle’s explanation for the project is this, “I asked people to … come and sleep in my bed. To let themselves be looked at and photographed. To answer questions. To each participant I suggested an eight hour stay.” Some of these people were Calle’s friends. Some of them were friends of friends. And some of them were complete strangers. She photographed them when they were asleep, but like a good hostess, she fed them when they were awake.

Figure 11. Les Dormeurs, Sophie Calle, 1979

When I read about The Sleepers, I was reminded of a 1968 film called Sweet November. It’s about a terminally ill woman played by Sandy Dennis, who picks up men. Men who are down on their luck, in financial or emotional difficulty. She lets them share her apartment, her bed, her life for a month. The men mostly don’t know that she is sick and they mostly accept her hospitality and move on. The story is about the November guy, who falls in love with her and doesn’t want to leave. Calle’s guests are there for the artist, for her art. She is not there for them. It kind of bummed me out.

So, now you have an idea of the kind of projects that Sophie Calle embarks upon. And understand, too, how this exhibition has got me thinking about life as art. I promise to tell you more about the exhibition next week. And I insist, if you are in Paris now or will be any time through the end of January, you must go see it.

Copyright © 2023 Beverly Held, Ph.D. All rights reserved

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