Sophie Calle at the Boymans Museum - Boymans-van Beuningen Museum - Rotterdam, Netherlands - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Jan, 1995 by Tony Godfrey

Sophie Calle made Calle's Objects especially for her exhibition at the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum. One could rent an Acoustiguide that came with a list of 21 objects she had inserted into the museum's decorative arts and design collection. The first of these was a small piece of a bed, displayed in a glass case containing 13th-century furniture fragments. On the Acoustiguide, in heavily French-accented English, Calle told us a story from her childhood relating to this bed. A musical soundtrack specially commissioned from Laurie Anderson accompanied Calle's commentary. A museum label in the case presented Dutch and French translations of her story.

The second object was a red plastic bucket placed in a case with 15th-century chamber pots. Calle recounted, "In my fantasies I am a man. Greg was quick to notice this. Perhaps that was why he invited me one day to piss for him. It became a ritual between us. I would come up behind him, blindly undo his pants, take his penis out and try my best to aim well. Then after the customary shake I would nonchalantly put it back and close the fly. Shortly after our separation I asked Greg for a photo-souvenir of this ritual. He accepted. So in a Brooklyn studio I got him to pee into a plastic bucket in front of the camera. This photograph was an excuse to put my hand on his sex one last time. That evening I agreed to divorce." At the start of the anecdote, Anderson's violin jumpily played short, high-pitched notes; toward the end the phrases became longer and slower.

Calle's objects were generally banal. What was important were their associations: a coffee cup from a meal she had with someone; a razor blade that had belonged to a person who slashed a drawing of her made when she modeled for a life-drawing class; a letter from her ex-husband, Greg Shephard; the red shoe she stole as a teenager; the wig she wore when she was a stripper. The objects that surrounded hers were related only by use. What was most fascinating was not, as one would suppose, the way the project deconstructed the museum and the Acoustiguide, but how it enlivened one's experience of the place. What anecdotes and fantasies, one wondered, were once attached to those jugs, those buckles, that 1930s bakelite telephone, etc.? The museum became a repository of lost fantasies, desires and remembered lives. A marvelous conceit of this show was that the Acoustiguide turned the museum into a true gesamtkunstwerk with poetry and music conjoining the visual.