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ViewWomen—Sophie Calle - author - Brief Article
Interview, Oct, 2001 by David Rimanelli
YOU WANT WILD?
Sophie Calle is very much a special case: a conceptual artist who successfully reaches a diverse audience--her first book, Suite Venitienne (1983), was a best-seller in France. Although her work is rooted in '60s conceptualist strategies such as documentation and enumeration, it certainly isn't dry. If anything, it's sensationalist. Working in diverse media--photography, books, films and performances--her oeuvre is by turns secretive and exhibitionistic. Calle makes her art by prying into the private lives of anonymous strangers or by making a spectacle of herself--a stunning example of the latter is The Striptease (1979), in which the artist got a job as a stripper. A friend photographed the proceedings, including a cat-fight instigated by another dancer.
But Calle's undercover investigations into the lives of anonymous strangers are even more notorious. In The Hotel (1983), she took a job as a maid, surreptitiously photographing the rooms she cleaned and rifling through suitcases, drawers and closets for the guests' personal effects. That same year, Calle produced The Address Book, an even more shockingly risque exercise in art as an invasion of privacy. She had found a lost address book on the street, but before anonymously returning it to its owner, she photocopied it and proceeded to contact the people whose addresses and phone numbers were recorded therein. Over the course of a month, the results of her inquiries were published in the French daily Liberation. (A few weeks later, the same newspaper published an outraged response from the owner of the address book--a documentary filmmaker!)
Voyeurism, exhibitionism and a needling strain of sadism course through Calle's work, which is inescapably fascinating even as it's ethically disturbing-and often quietly melancholic. She's the artist as stalker, delving fearlessly into the minutiae of other people's lives, long before popular culture took up similar material in "reality" TV shows like The Real World and Big Brother.
David Rimanelli is a contributing editor of Artforum. Above:
COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
