Double Game. - Review - book review

Art in America, July, 2000 by Maud Lavin

Double Game, by Sophie Calle with the participation of Paul Auster, London, Violette Limited (distributed by D.A.P., New York), 1999; 293 pages, $65 hardcover.

She was the one who set the rules of our friendship, and I stuck to them as best I could, a willing accomplice to her whims and urgent demands. At Maria's request, I agreed that we would never sleep together two nights in a row. I agreed that I would never ask her to introduce me to any of her friends. I agreed to act as though our affair were a secret, a clandestine drama to be hidden from the rest of the world. None of these restraints bothered me. I dressed in the clothes that Maria wanted me to wear, I indulged her appetite for odd meeting places (subway token booths, Off-Track Betting parlors, restaurant bathrooms), I ate the same color-coordinated meals that she did.

--Paul Auster, Leviathan

In 1992, Paul Auster published the novel Leviathan, in which Maria, one of the main characters, is based on the artist Sophie Calle. On the copyright page, he writes, "The author extends special thanks to Sophie Calle for permission to mingle fact with fiction." In 1999, Sophie Calle published a book titled Double Game. In it, she documents: 1) her many already existing art works that Auster ascribes to Maria in Leviathan, 2) the works Calle created by imitating other art projects Auster invented for Maria, and 3) a work that Auster created for Calle, at Calle's request. On the copyright page, Calle writes, "The author extends special thanks to Paul Auster for permission to mingle fiction with fact." Double Game stands as a lustrous, witty and involving archive of a creative collaboration.

Yet as much as Double Game records a collaboration between Calle and Auster, it represents a volley played, after Auster's original lob, under Calle's rules. It serves also, in a way, as a book-length exhibition of Calle's works cocurated by Calle and Auster. The volume provides a sensuous, image-heavy compendium of selected Calle works--ones that raise issues of primary interest to the two collaborators, as evidenced in her art and his novels. These issues include the chance intersections of lives, the trying on of different fictions of the self, and the odd mixing of passivity, control and aggression. For instance, in Suite venitienne (1981), a project which is republished in Double Game, Calle stalked and photographed an acquaintance for 13 days, following the man from Paris to Venice and back. Her act of invasively photographing another person parallels the act of Leviathan's narrator, who writes--devotedly and furtively--about his male friend's secrets. Both acts are simultaneously aggressive (in their exertion of control) and passive (in their will to self-erasure).

In Leviathan, the narrator, Peter, records his observations of his friend Ben's life. He does more than tell Ben's story, he filters it through his own intricate experiences with Ben, pushing himself into the background as he does so. But then Ben, we learn at the end, had been for a while impersonating Peter, performing his own act of aggression and self-erasure. Throughout the book, the plot moves along according to chance and bizarre meetings of the various main characters, some of whom exchange places and identities, others of whom are simply derailed and sent along surprisingly different paths. In one way or another, and always unintentionally, Maria, the Sophie Calle character, is behind each of these unforeseen switches. For all its drama of plot, Leviathan is written subtly and with sensitive emotion. But just so the reader doesn't miss the symbolism of Maria, Auster spells it out midway through: Maria is the "reigning spirit of chance," the "goddess of the unpredictable."

Maria is a catalyst whose actions not only advance the plot and prompt identity changes, but even inadvertently cause deaths. This hybrid female character, Marie/Sophie/Chance, is also highly erotic and, for a while, the narrator's lover. As in tales of more traditional femmes fatales, Maria evokes both desire and fear in the narrator. But when Calle, through her art, rewrites the rules of the game and responds to her double, Maria, she ignores the fictional Maria's overtly erotic and aggressive acts in Leviathan and, not incidentally, Maria's relationship to Auster's double, the narrator. Instead she sticks to the original eight-page description of Maria given early in the novel (and reprinted in Double Game with Calle's emendations handwritten in red) and acts out the more playful art projects Auster made up for Maria.

When Calle enacts and lavishly documents Maria's esthetic exercises, they become hers, and when she republishes the art works originally hers that Auster ascribed to Maria, they become hers again. In Double Game, Calle thus takes back control of her fictional double from Auster but adds a passive twist; she follows the author's descriptions as if they were instructions, bending the self-administered rules with additions and humor. For example, in his book Auster details one of Maria's projects called "the chromatic diet," for which she ate foods of only one color on a given day. In her book, Calle writes, "To be like Maria, during the week of December 8 to 14, 1997, I ate Orange on Monday, Red on Tuesday, White on Wednesday, and Green on Thursday." For Double Game, a beribboned picture book with extensive text, she composed gorgeous photographs of the meals and displayed them one per page, museum-catalogue-style, with large white margins, beautiful color, precious-object lighting and deadly serious centering, over captions such as "THURSDAY: GREEN / Menu imposed:/Cucumber / Broccoli / Spinach / I completed the menu with: / Green basil pasta / Grapes and kiwi fruit / Mint cordial." On that Sunday she served all the color-coordinated foods and invited friends over to dine. Calle herself didn't partake, though, explaining, "Personally, I preferred not to eat; novels are all very well but not necessarily so very delectable if you live them to the letter." Two such "Maria" works plus Auster's original pages of description, now annotated, comprise Part I of Double Game.