Character study - Brief Article

Three weeks after the final entry appeared, Liberation published, in the same half-page format, the furious response of Pierre D. (who signed his real name, Pierre Baudry). He had been filming a documentary in northern Norway the whole time, and only on returning did he discover that he had been "exposed," that so many facts of his life and traits of his character--including his repugnance toward any form of publicity--had been revealed to a wide audience. (How extraordinary that he was in the same trade as Calle!) His outrage was an informed one, and his retaliation thus all the more to the point: He published a photo of Calle in the nude (without naming her, however). Even though the editors had cropped out Calle's face, her punisher underscored that he was performing a violent act, one he wouldn't usually condone: He wrote that when he filmed he always worked with his subjects so that "they are not the objects, the victims, the prey of an inquiry" whose "model is that of police surveillance and of spying. "

Perhaps the most spectacular of Calle's projects, The Address Book is also the only one she can't fully document, at least in book form. (I wonder how this piece will be displayed in the retrospective.) Quoting her contract with Violette Editions disclaiming all responsibility on the part of the publisher in case of a lawsuit, she offers her regrets: In Double Game only the first and last entries of the feuilleton series are presented, along with a photograph showing the stack of Liberations in which her daily installments appeared. Of the address-book owner, she writes, "He is still resentful, he has let me know."

The pieces discussed to this point are all examples of Calle's early work. Curiously, the retrospective follows the book (Double Game) in skimming rapidly over her activities during the latter part of the '80s and the beginning of the '90s (it fails even to mention her series of works executed in museums, in which Calle asked guards and curators to describe from memory an absent painting-- a work stolen or temporarily on loan--and filled the void on the wall with a typographic or calligraphic version of their comments). But following the book is precisely what Calle herself has been doing in recent years, and here her talent for involving her persona in a mix of fiction and reality is staggering.

Double Game is a hall of mirrors. Its starting point is Paul Auster's 1992 novel Leviathan, in which the character of Maria, who makes a brief appearance in his story, is based on Calle's antics (the pages in which Maria figures are reproduced in facsimile at the beginning of Double Game, with Calle's red-ink annotations). Other than The Bronx, The Sleepers, and The Blind, the works I have discussed to this point were all described in Auster's book as the doings of his fictional protagonist; it is for this reason that they appear in Double Game (the recap of this set of pieces constitutes the second part of the Violette publication). In other words, Calle did not choose which works of hers should be anthologized in Double Game; she followed Auster's inclinations (an excellent choice, one should add; the novelist is obviously well informed about contemporary art). But a few of the projects ascribed to Maria were purely Auster's invention, which Calle in turn decided to realize after the fact as her own (the f irst part of Double Game documents these). The work is far from being up to snuff--yet Calle enacted it to a T. Auster had "Maria" go through "chromatic diets" (she would eat all orange items one week, all red or white or green the next, etc.), or spend certain days under the spell of a particular letter of the alphabet. In the Violette book she scrupulously records her version of these projects--but the reader is relieved, after this brief introductory section, to be led into Calle's own turf.