Abstract
The mobility of people and objects is a central motif in the work of contemporary artist Sophie Calle. In this article, I compare two of Calle’s exhibitions that take a particularly unusual approach to mobility. In Fantômes and Prenez soin de vous, the objects are an email and works of art and their mobility arises from their displacement. In both exhibitions, Calle obliges the spectator to look at other people looking at the artefacts, which I refer to as the ‘double look’. In this article, I analyse how this technique serves to question the notion of a unitary, individual artist behind each work of art, how it questions the parameters of spectatorship, and how it challenges understandings of intimacy in contemporary culture.
Sophie Calle’s provocative artwork has achieved fame for its generic innovation, its melding of visual forms and its challenge to the concept of performance. For over 30 years, Calle has been staging installation exhibitions that comprise photography, film and text, and which play with the ethics and responsibility of spectatorship. As Maïté Snauwaert and Bertrand Gervais note, her work represents ‘un labyrinthe à la fois urbain et narratif’ and has a striking literary quality (Snauwaert and Gervais, 2006: 10). The way in which Calle’s work intersects with philosophical, literary and cultural debates has attracted the attention of scholars in several disciplines beyond the visual arts. Scholarly interest in Calle’s work has concentrated upon two main aspects. First of these is its challenge to current understandings of self-representation, since Calle’s work is self-referential yet also blends multiple voices, develops a fictionalised self and emphasises its lack of authorial control. As Shirley Jordan shows, Calle’s work ‘repeatedly highlights the inherently performative nature of autofictional production’ (Jordan, 2013: 250). The second aspect that has received sustained scholarly attention is Calle’s representation of space, particularly public space and the ways in which people move through public spaces in contemporary culture. This is Calle’s major preoccupation in what art historian Janet Hand refers to as her ‘walk-works’ (Hand, 2005: 468): works in which the artist is outside and mobile. In Suite vénitienne (1983), for example, she follows a man whom she barely knows to Venice, photographing him without having asked permission. In Le Carnet d’adresses (1998c), she claims to have found an address book in the street and moves around the city photographing people and places mentioned within it. In M’as tu vue? (2003), she photographs people whom she follows in the street and in ‘La Filature’, which appears in À suivre … (1998a), she displays photographs by people who have followed her. Mobility is therefore a central aspect of Calle’s artistic practice, which is based upon the movement of herself and of others through open space, and which relies upon both pre-empted events and unexpected encounters.
What I want to focus on here, by contrast, is the mobility not of people but of objects in Calle’s work. I contend that a central motif of her installations is the way in which she displaces inanimate objects into unusual, foreign or inappropriate spaces. Sometimes her exhibitions themselves become these inappropriate spaces, since Calle rarely asks permission to photograph her subjects. Her exhibitions are thus comprised of scenes that are out of place according to social norms. In Les Dormeurs (2001), for example, she photographed sleeping people and displayed the images in the public space of the gallery. In ‘L’Hôtel’, which forms part of Doubles-Jeux (1998b), she displayed objects that she had found and photographed in guests’ rooms while working as a chambermaid. In this paper, I explore two works in which the displacement of objects is the central motor. In Fantômes (2000), Calle assembles photographs of replacement artworks; she visits galleries, museums or collections from which a work of art is missing and asks the staff to draw and annotate the work from memory. In Prenez soin de vous (2007), she assembles photographs, films and other representations of women reading and responding to an email that Calle received from a lover announcing the end of their relationship. The objects are thus very different from those on view in many of Calle’s other works; viewers see an email or an artwork rather than the inanimate objects – a chair or a pair of shoes, for instance – of other exhibitions. These two exhibitions stand out from other work by Calle due to their unusual objects and the unusual approach to the representation of them. Instead, the email and the artworks function as artefacts – fabricated objects of cultural or artistic significance – that take on a specific function. What unites Fantômes and Prenez soin de vous is their performance of what I refer to as the ‘double look’. I argue that the main motif in these two works is the displacement of artefacts into unfamiliar spaces and the way in which viewers are invited to look at others who are looking at the artefacts; the spectator does not look at an artefact but looks at another person looking at it. I contend that this mechanism of the ‘double look’ subverts the notion of a unitary, individual artist behind each work of art, questions the parameters in which we look at art, and challenges understandings of intimacy in contemporary culture.
Challenging the unitary artist
In both of these exhibitions, the ‘double look’ is a collective performance that involves a series of individuals in the creative process. Michael Sheringham has observed in relation to other works by Calle that she focuses upon the process of creation rather than the product of the exhibition (Sheringham, 2006: 343). The same is true of both of the exhibitions in question here. The artefacts in Fantômes are paintings and sculptures and their mobility arises from the fact that they are displaced: some temporarily, through loans to other galleries or removal from public display and others permanently (perhaps) through theft. Rather than showing familiar works in an unfamiliar setting, therefore, Calle shows the removal of these from their usual space and interrogates the void that they leave. In Fantômes, she replaces works by well-known artists such as Rembrandt, Bonnard or Magritte by memories of these works taken from ‘conservateurs, gardiens et d’autres permanents du musée’ (Calle, 2000: 7). Some of these onlookers write words to convey their memories of the missing artwork and others produce drawings, which Calle assembles and superimposes to produce an alternative work. Calle thus invites individuals who are employed to observe visitors to the galleries, and who insist upon silent observation of the works on display, to voice or represent their own observations. The exhibition that results from this practice becomes a polyphonic text that combines the voices of several spectators. Moreover, these spectators are connected to the work through the space of their professional activity but are not, for the most part, experts, artists or academics. For example, Calle investigates the void left by Modigliani’s The Great Nude from the Museum of Modern Art in New York after it was temporarily removed. The onlookers’ comments include, for instance, ‘It’s like any other nude. It’s a horizontal painting of a female lying naked’, ‘it’s a nude, well-proportioned, I remember … I wouldn’t mind having her in my apartment’, ‘her blank eyes remind me of ancient sculptures’ or ‘there is a sensuous melancholy about her’ (Calle, 2000: 30–1). These are the words of the untrained eye, the engaged but non-academic viewer who is unfettered by the protocol or expectation of so-called ‘high culture’. Calle’s project could therefore be interpreted as a democratisation of artistic practice, a reconceptualising of art to focus upon the relationship between art and the individual or between art and the general public.
The polyphonic nature of the exhibition insists that there are several people involved in producing this work. We readily associate works of art with one specific person, referring to ‘a Monet’, ‘a Sergeant’ or ‘an O’Keefe’, and, to recall the example of The Great Nude, we are accustomed to considering artworks to be composed by one artist and on the basis of one model. Fantômes, however, demonstrates the contribution of the original model, the celebrated artist, the staff in the galleries, the visitors to the gallery and, later, the readers of the published version. Calle’s exhibition reveals the input of multiple agents in the creative process and serves to blur the distinction between artist and spectator. Calle’s insistence upon a collective involved in producing the work thus questions the parameters of artistic practice. Moreover, it also displaces the role of the artist herself at the centre of it. Calle assembles an exhibition based upon an absence and is – unusually for her – nowhere to be seen within it. The artist is not in a position of absolute control, authority or power and the exhibition is an open-ended, mobile concept that insists upon its incomplete, evolving nature.
By contrast, the displacement of the artefact at the centre of Prenez soin de vous places Calle within the installation but only on its margins. In a similar way to Fantômes, the exhibition is predicated upon spectators looking at others looking at an artefact. The title is the last line of an email received by Calle in which a lover ended their relationship: an ironic play with the English expression ‘Take care of yourself’ that instils a new level of formality between them through the use of the formal second-person pronoun vous. Calle gave a copy of this email to 107 women and asked them each to respond to it from the perspective of their different professions, photographing them as they read the email and presenting the photograph next to their creative response. Thus singers sing it, a DJ raps it, actors perform it, a sexologist analyses it, a typesetter corrects it, a philosopher reflects upon it, and so on. The result is a mixed-media exhibit consisting of texts, photographs, films and recordings. The artefact, the email, is thus displaced into a series of unfamiliar settings, as we view a series of women reading it, either in their professional or their home space. Whereas Fantômes was based upon the removal of artefacts and the unfamiliarity of their absence, this later exhibition places artefacts (printed versions of the email) into spaces where they should not be. Both lead to a collective, polyphonic exploration but the collective anonymity of the earlier exhibition compares to a sense of trespass in the later. The democratisation of an artistic object of the first exhibit becomes a voyeurism of an intimate object in the second. Taken together, the two works force the viewer to question our own responsibility and sense of propriety as we gaze upon an object in a different place. Moreover, in both of these exhibitions, the displaced materials function to displace the identity of the artist responsible for them. Rather than following a model of the artist as a unitary, individual being who is entirely responsible for her or his own art, both of these works offer a different approach to the concept of the artist. In Fantômes, Calle is nowhere to be seen, as she herself functions as the ghost behind the missing objects. In Prenez soin de vous she moves to the margin of the work, replaced by other women who produce their creative responses. The two exhibitions thus become the site of an alternative formulation of the artist as creator and originator of the work by collectivising its perspective, voice and agency.
Challenging spectatorship
The technique of the ‘double look’ in these two exhibitions serves to question not only the role of the artist but also the role of the spectator. Anna Kemp (2013) views Calle’s work as a reflection on the commercialisation of spectatorship and Johnnie Gratton (2011) considers her installations to be an investigation into the role of the spectator in postmodernism. Calle is well known for playing with the concept of voyeurism by pushing the spectator into an uncomfortable, self-reflective position. In the two exhibitions under consideration here, as we gaze upon people gazing upon displaced artefacts, we are invited to reconsider the nature of the performance in which we are engaged. To look first at Prenez soin de vous, visitors to the exhibition received a copy of the email, which is printed in full in the book that was subsequently published of the exhibition. The work is thus predicated upon a betrayal, as multiple viewers are invited to look at something that was intended for one individual’s eyes. The exhibition pushes this sense of betrayal further by then inviting us to look at others looking at the intimate object. In one section of the exhibition, for example, a sexologist is shown reading the email in her office. Her written response, displayed next to the photograph, is: Non, je ne vois pas de raison de vous prescrire des antidépresseurs. Vous êtes simplement triste. Un évènement triste, ça fait mal, mais la solution normale n’est pas chimique. Vous avez certainement assez de force pour aller de l’avant et trouver en vous des ressources pour agir et réagir. (Calle, 2007: n.p.)
This example brings intimate details involving sex, psychology and mental health into the exhibition and, crucially, without the email writer’s consent. The ‘double look’ therefore accentuates the voyeurism that the exhibition stages, by inviting the viewer to look at somebody else looking at an object that should rightly be looked at by neither. The exhibition could be interpreted as an act of revenge against the former lover for the way in which he chose to end the relationship. Yet, it represents much more than revenge, since it provokes the viewer to question the enjoyment of witnessing the act of revenge. The exhibition stages a collective mocking of the writer of the email through the way in which his writing is corrected, derided, criticised and analysed. It demonstrates the voyeuristic pleasure of the viewing public and pushes the spectator to question her/his relationship with Calle’s work. The humour of the exhibition pushes this still further, as the exaggerated performances – dances, songs, videos – invite the spectator to laugh openly, and ultimately to laugh openly at the writer of the letter.
Furthermore, not only is the spectator gazing upon something private and intimate, but s/he is doing so in an inappropriate, even jarring, environment. Calle exhibited her work in the former main site of the Bibliothèque nationale in the rue Richelieu, which now holds archival documents and, most interestingly for this discussion, the Bibliothèque de l’institut national d’histoire de l’art. The exhibition booklet emphasises that the Richelieu houses some of the library’s oldest collections. These include artefacts from the Art History Library and ‘les arts du spectacle’ (Picq, 2008: n.p.): similar kinds of materials that comprise the exhibition, but from different time periods and imbued with different purposes and meanings. The writer of one of the articles in the booklet, Anne Picq, highlights how this particular exhibition symbolises the juxtaposition of the old and the new, insisting that ‘il faut casser l’idée que le moderne se trouve à Tolbiac, laissant l’ancien à Richelieu’ (Picq, 2008: n.p.). In particular, the exhibition was staged in the famous Salle Labrouste, the reading room of the Bibliothèque nationale. By placing a strikingly innovative multi-media exhibition within the principal collection of French art history, Calle invites a reassessment of the value, purpose and impact of engaging with art. Jordan (2013) notes the importance of the fact that Prenez soin de vous was exhibited in this room, arguing that the viewer was invited to reinvent her or his notion of reading through the exhibition. By introducing out-of-place objects – shiny photographs, new screens, moving films, noisy renditions – into this space, the viewer is also invited to reinvent her or his notion of looking. The Salle Labrouste becomes something of a peep show, in which objects are photographed in the wrong hands and are exhibited in the wrong place. On one level, this lively, noisy exhibition questions the traditions associated with established institutions. On another, it elicits a reaction from the spectators – especially from spectators who would not normally be in an archive or a reading room at a national library. The fact that Calle seduces people who may ordinarily have no interest in historical or archival materials to enter this space and look at intimate confessions increases the sense of trespass. The women should not be looking at this private email, we should not be looking at them looking at it, and we should not be looking at anything of this nature in a reading room.
While Fantômes is displayed in an art gallery, the ‘double look’ that it stages also questions the position of the spectator and the act of spectatorship. By asking individuals to reproduce absent works of art from memory, Calle reverses the gaze of the gallery workers: they normally look at people who are looking at the images, but are now asked to reverse their perspective and look at the images themselves. This practice highlights the multiple ways in which individuals engage with the works and – because they are not looking at the images themselves but examining their recollections of them – the ways in which memory distorts the images in individuals’ minds. For those who write words to convey their recollections (as opposed to others who draw images), many foreground the fallibility of their memory. They often begin their pieces by writing, ‘I remember this’ or ‘this one’s easy to remember’ and end ‘that’s all I remember’, and their transcribed memories are remarkable for their divergence. For example, remembering Seurat’s Honfleur un soir, embouchure de la Seine, one onlooker describes it as ‘a realistic interpretation of nature … No heavy concepts, just a pleasant scene out of New York’, another writes that it is ‘yellow, red, purple and brown’ and another that it is ‘white, navy blue, pink, and aqua’ (Calle, 2000: 46–7). As these statements demonstrate, the individuals who have spent hours in the gallery in which the painting is hanging are uncertain of the subject matter and/or its presentation. By insisting upon the incompleteness of memory, Calle’s work questions the medium in which she is engaged, highlighting individuals’ divergent responses to art and warning us not to underestimate the impact of art upon audiences. The gallery workers may not remember the scene of a painting or the colours in which it was painted and they might be unfamiliar with the painter, the city, the medium or the discourse surrounding art, but they often attest to the feelings it arouses in them. As we saw in relation to Modigliani’s nude, the exhibition occasionally shows that some onlookers are indifferent and represents this reaction without judgement, insinuating that it is perfectly acceptable to be unmoved by or uninterested in art. Overall, however, while the artworks incite different memories among the onlookers, the exhibition dramatises the long-lasting impact that they produce on individuals from different backgrounds, levels of education and artistic experience.
What is most interesting about the way in which Calle exhibited these re-creations is that they appear individually among other artworks in a gallery: that is to say that they are displayed on a wall while the original is temporarily or permanently absent, next to original pieces. The spectator thus moves from gazing upon a regular work of art to gazing upon this, the re-created piece developed by Calle and the gallery workers. This practice obliges an engagement on the part of the spectator, who is forced to acknowledge the difference. The works necessitate a comparison and a reaction: some viewers may find the re-creation comical or light-hearted, for example, while others may consider it frivolous, irritating or even offensive. While Prenez soin de vous displayed artefacts in an unexpected place, the Salle Labrouste in the Bibliothèque nationale, Fantômes displayed them within the appropriate, expected space of the gallery, but in an unexpected manner. By mingling these irregular works within regular displays, Calle calls upon the spectator to question her/his practice of looking at art. The unexpected artefact within the gallery asks the viewer a series of questions, in particular about the differences between original and re-created works and upon the ethics of re-creation: is the re-creation a corruption of the original; should it be treated as plagiarism or as profiting from somebody else’s artistic innovation, for example, or should it be greeted as a mode of paying tribute to a famous artist or work? The viewer may remember the original work and imagine how s/he would re-create it, or ponder the possibilities of creating other works in the gallery. The ‘double look’ of this exhibition therefore challenges the spectator to question the way in which s/he engages with works of art, to reflect upon the value and impact of art and even to consider the value of the art gallery itself.
Challenging intimacy
In both of these exhibitions, then, the mechanism of a ‘double look’ forces spectators to look at others looking and poses questions about art and our engagement with it. Moreover, the artefacts that we look at in both works pose additional questions about intimacy. Several of Calle’s exhibitions explore understandings of intimacy in contemporary culture but the two in question here approach this differently by placing the spectator in the position of looking at somebody who is looking at something else. Calle is highly engaged in interrogating changing patterns of intimacy in contemporary culture, exploring such phenomena as the effect of media and technology upon relationships. As Edward Welch writes, her work responds to ‘the question of being in contemporary society’ and explores how technologies ‘impinge on and remodel the practices of everyday life’ (Welch, 2009: 67). This theme is most apparent in Prenez soin de vous, which is based on an email and which involves video, sound recordings, moving images, photographs and animation. The exhibition surrounds the spectator with various forms of technology, competing sounds and multiple distractions. Viewers may be tempted to forget amid this overwhelming environment that the exhibition is about a highly intimate object. The email written by the former lover may be predicated upon an unusual sense of formality – vous rather than tu – but its message clearly refers to an intimate relationship with its addressee. The exhibition presents the act of intercepting an intimate email as normal, since 107 women have done so and we as spectators are doing likewise. We are positioned as intruders in this exhibition, which is shot through with suggestions of trespass and betrayal, but the overwhelming technology around us may tempt us to forget this. Calle’s exhibition could be interpreted as suggesting that the connection between private and intimate is no longer as clear or as stable as it once was and that technologically driven contemporary culture has contributed to a changing notion of intimacy.
In addition to the intimacy of the original email and the relationship to which it refers, the exhibition also questions the intimacy of looking. Gazing on a work of art in an exhibition may be considered to be a silent, individual act in which a solitary onlooker creates meaning from an individual work: an intimate action of engagement between one individual and one piece of art. Instead, this cacophonous exhibition is not in a gallery and is not something we walk around in quiet, individual contemplation: it disrupts the intimate performance of looking at art and displays the private act of looking for public consumption. Furthermore, the 107 women whom we are looking at, as they look at the email, are mostly photographed in personal spaces, in either their homes or their private offices. Although they have clearly consented to this practice, the choice to represent individuals’ private space highlights the sense of trespass that this exhibition stages. It should be noted that they are not merely looking at the email in the photographs but clearly reading it. The photographs thus catch them in the intimate act of reading and engaging with a text within the privacy of their own homes/spaces. Prenez soin de vous thus presents a series of unexpected encounters, many of which involve practices that may be considered to be intimate, and puts them on display in unexpected ways.
In a similar way, Fantômes also questions the nature of intimacy as we look at others recalling the often highly personal impact of artworks upon them. The representation of intimacy is particularly apparent in the scenes in which the volunteers describe stolen or unretrieved works. In the case of these paintings, the onlookers’ memories are tinged with the permanence of the disappearance of their subject matter. These contrast sharply to the comments made by gallery workers who were asked to recall works that had been removed temporarily and were scheduled to return to their regular display in the gallery/museum. Those who described stolen works made comments such as ‘I loved it, absolutely loved it,’ ‘je me sentais très protecteur vis-à-vis de lui. J’avais l’habitude de passer devant et de lui sourire’ and ‘je l’ai contemplée le vendredi 31 décembre à quatorze heures. Pour la dernière fois. Je ne la reverrai probablement jamais’ (Calle, 2000: 129). These melancholic statements testify to the loss felt by gallery staff and volunteers and almost personify the works of art, portraying them as real-life beings whose permanent disappearance heralds a process of readjustment. Calle’s installation functions almost like an act of mourning for some of these individuals, who testify to their relationship with the works and to the memories they provoked about other parts of their lives. Nigel Saint writes in relation to Fantômes that, ‘absence and presence seep into each other, so that presence of the artworks is not always the best opportunity for viewing them, while their absence does not translate into blankness and oblivion’ (Saint, 2011: 136). As Saint suggests, the absence of the artworks creates an awareness of their lasting impact upon the onlookers, pointing to the longevity of the relationship between the individual and the artwork. This relationship is particularly intimate, as the exhibition records the depth of their feelings at the loss and the permanence of their memories. Overall, this exhibition suggests that art continues to produce intimate responses from spectators and that looking at somebody describing the loss of a non-human object remains an uncomfortable experience.
This voyeurism is pushed even further in the final section of the published work, in which onlookers are photographed gazing at the empty frames of stolen works. What we see is a faceless person photographed from behind staring at an absence, alongside a caption in which they speak of their feelings of loss. Their comments include, for example, ‘je vois mon reflet, donc je vois ma tristesse’ and ‘je me vois, moi, pile au centre de ce cadre splendide … C’est un peu narcissique mais je ne peux pas m’empêcher de m’imaginer comme un personnage’ (Calle, 2000: 151). These photographs position the spectator directly over the shoulder of the onlooker and, although the onlooker is clearly aware of and consenting to the process, increase the exhibition’s sense of trespass. For the only time in the exhibition, therefore, these photographs show (if only from behind) the gallery workers who contribute to the work. In some photographs, elements of their ghostlike faces are even partially discernible in the reflection of the empty frame. Their presence in these faceless images and the comments about loss that surround them draw a closer link between photography and mortality. The haunting quality of photography has long been pondered by theorists of the medium. Susan Sontag described the photograph as ‘something stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask’ (Sontag, 1979: 154) and Camille Laurens writes that ‘toute photo fait une ovation à la mort, et même elle la provoque, elle la donne: on vise, on appuie, ça tue’ (Laurens, 2004: 35). In this section of Fantômes, Calle uses photography to point to several levels of disappearance. These photographs draw attention to the actual disappearance of the artwork and to the eventual disappearance of both the individual who gazes upon it and the photograph that captures this moment. This section of the work could be interpreted as a reminder of the temporary nature of art and life, warning us against imagining works of art as permanent, immutable artefacts. Overall, this section stages the impact of both their presence and their absence on individual onlookers and the displaced objects occasion a mourning that testifies to the importance of their existence.
The displaced objects in both exhibitions thus ponder the possibility of being not just displaced but replaced. In Fantômes, the images such as that of the nude suggest in a light-hearted, comical way that artworks are irreplaceable and that attempts to replace them can often appear misguided or ill-conceived. On a more sombre note, the images of the individuals looking at stolen works, gazing into a void left by the missing object, testify to the impossibility of replacing cherished works that have permanently disappeared. In Prenez soin de vous, it is Calle herself who is potentially going to be replaced. While the email does not mention a third party, one may surmise that its writer will find a replacement partner by engaging in other relationships in the future. Ironically, perhaps, since these are collective artworks that insist on the non-unitary artist and spectator, both exhibitions simultaneously hint at the value of the unique: the unique individual and the unique work of art, permanent and irreplaceable.
Taken together, these two exhibitions that move unusual objects into unfamiliar, unexpected spaces and that are based upon a ‘double look’ serve to question the role of the artist, the spectator, the participant and the voyeur. By refusing a model of the unitary, individual artist, Calle collectivises both the process and the product of the work of art and nuances understandings of the relationship of artists to the works that they create. By defying viewers’ expectations, both of what they will see and where they will see it, Calle’s exhibitions pose questions about the position and responsibility of the spectator and the impact of art upon individuals. The ‘double look’ that both exhibitions stage serves to interrogate not just how we look but how we look at other people looking. Throughout, the spectator is carefully positioned as an intruder and is invited to question her/his understanding of the place and function of intimacy in contemporary culture.