Character study - Brief Article

Sophie Calle's work has appeared in a range of media and formats, from a major French daily to a Manhattan telephone booth. As "The True Stories of Sophie Calle" goes on view in Kassel and the artist's book Double Game appears, contributing editor Yve-Alain Bois examines Calle's seamless transitions between fiction and reality.

Long a cult figure in France, Sophie Calle is admired in several disparate circles, each of which has a partial grasp of some aspect of her work--one thinks perhaps of Laurie Anderson by way of comparison. For her earliest projects, she sidestepped the rarified precincts of the art world in favor of the mass media--how many Conceptual artists can claim that their first book was a bestseller? Or can compete with her invasion, over the course of an entire month, of half a page in a widely read French daily? Calle has always felt more confident outside the museum and gallery ghetto. Though she has since become part of the international art scene proper, exhibiting in respected venues--including the Boijmans in Rotterdam and Leo Castelli in New York--she continues to move at a rapid clip, attracting new audiences along the way. Her 1992 feature-length film Double Blind (which documents a cross-country odyssey that climaxes with Calle's drive-thru wedding in Las Vegas) was distributed under the title No Sex Last N ight in commercial movie houses through channels usually reserved for big-budget productions. She has worked in so many genres and fields that it's not always easy to realize that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

The near coincidence of "The True Stories of Sophie Calle," the artist's retrospective opening this month at the Fridericianum in Kassel, and the publication of Double Game (Violette Editions, London), a hefty, luxurious compendium that contains among other things the translations of her previous books, provides a good occasion to pause and attempt to fit the various pieces of her career together. With few exceptions, the works selected for the show correspond to those in Double Game. Calle's favorite mode of display being the gridlike mural intertwining text and photo, her transition from the book format to the gallery space (and the other way around) is seamless.

"At the end of January 1981, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice, I decided to follow him." This opening paragraph from Calle's first book, Suite venitienne, published in 1983, is paired with a photograph of a man's rear bust, shot from below and at close range. (The text is fully translated in Double Game, although the choice and presentation of images vary a bit from the original.) We notice the brim of his hat, a white highlight on the nape of his neck. This double spread is a good place to enter Calle's vast and diversified production, for regardless of media, her work has always revolved around issues of distance and absence, of voyeurism and exhibitionism; it has largely adopted the structure of the forensic archive; it has often deliberately confused levels of reality--or, mor e precisely, it has successfully transformed reality (the archive) into fiction (narration), and vice versa.

Suite venitienne is a scrapbook of Calle's quest for, and later obsessive surveillance of, a man she identifies as Henri B. during a thirteen-day stretch in the Italian city. We are spared none of the details--a list of all the hotels she called in order to find him; a photo of the door of the pensione where he stayed with his companion; snapshots of the streets he walked; maps charting his wanderings; a precise countdown of Calle's frustrating schedule as a shadow; and interviews with "witnesses" (the owner of an antique shop that Henri B. patronized, for example). The few glimpses of the city that are provided utterly depend on Henri B.'s stereotypical tourist's appetite (Calle shot them while waiting for him to exit this monument or that); one of my favorites shows a kid chasing pigeons on the Piazza San Marco (he's seen from behind, of course, clasping a knife in his hand: "I would like to see him kill one," notes Calle). Nothing is spared--that is, except the face of the man she pursues; he's always vie wed from the back, from a safe distance, since the whole enterprise was predicated on Henri B.'s ignorance of his being followed. At some point, though, the wig and disguise fail Calle, and Henri B. recognizes her eyes--she is disappointed at his cool reaction. She tries to take a portrait of him but he blocks the camera with his hand: "No," he says, "that's against the rules."

Early on in Suite venitienne Calle offers us four technically mediocre shots, arranged in a grid, that show several men conversing around a dinner table. The edges of the visual field are blurred: These images were her first attempt at using a Squintar, a lens attachment that allows one to take photos without aiming at the subject. The quality of the images says it all: Calle's not interested in photography per se, she's an apprentice sleuth. More precisely, she's only interested in the predatory and voyeuristic aspects of photography, in its sadistic nature. Even before the publication of Suite venitienne, she had been fascinated by the act of shadowing: Commissioned to do a piece as part of a Centre Georges Pompidou show dealing with self-portraiture, she hired a private eye to document her comings and goings and exhibited the proceedings of his investigation, his bureaucratic report ("At 10:20 the subject leaves home. She is dressed," etc.), and the sustaining evidence provided in the form of his photogra phs. What the detective did not know was that he was her employee; nor did he notice that she had him tailed as well--a friend of hers shot him entering a porno cinema. (Displayed as The Shadow in the retrospective, this 1981 work appears in Double Game under the title The Detective.) For further evidence of Calle's incipient interest in this aspect of photography, consider The Sleepers, 1979, the earliest work in the retrospective (it is absent from Double Game). Calle invited others to sleep in her bed; she photographed them every hour, the only rule being that the bed remain constantly occupied. The experiment lasted eight days. The resulting grid-mural documents the sleep (calm or agitated) of the thirty or so people who lent themselves to her archival impulse.