Questioning the Void: Sophie Calle’s Archival Subversions
Pairs of photographs and text fragments hang in thick frames on gallery walls like unhinged and misshapen diptychs in Sophie Calle’s installation of Last Seen … /Dislocations … of 1991. Her large-scale photograph Last Seen: Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Lady and Gentleman in Black (Figure 15.1) depicts the shimmering, green brocade-lined walls of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where the stolen Rembrandt referenced in the work’s title once hung. Like a funerary shroud marking a loss, a curtain of rich silk damask festooned with an ornate motif drapes over the gallery’s gaping void. And the accompanying text—resembling an oversized exhibition wall label—communicates anonymously recounted and conflicting descriptions of the painting’s previous presence in the museum’s Dutch Room, recollections gathered by the artist in a series of interviews conducted with members of the museum’s staff. The types of absence so literally framed here as a means of challenging the singularity of collective memory form the focus of Calle’s “phototextual” works of the 1990s.
Extensive fieldwork—in the form of interviews and the mining of institutional archives for informational records—yields an assemblage of chronicled testimonials and documentary photographs that fill or replace the physical voids and cultural absences interrogated in Calle’s work. Her projects not only draw upon existing archives of information and conventional archiving methodologies, but see her create archived collections as well. Archiving, therefore, not only serves as her working method but also her artistic product. In Last Seen … of 1991, Calle situates the art museum as an archive, asking random employees at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to describe and verbally recreate stolen artworks from memory. She makes use of this same collaborative approach in The Detachment/Souvenirs de Berlin-Est (or Die Entfernung) of 1996, where personal remembrances recorded with passersby metaphorically fill in the physical voids left by the removal of communist-era monuments that once dotted the everyday topography of former East Berlin. In both projects, personal recollections and subjective responses—in place of institutional decrees—reconstruct the meaning behind these missing objects. As such, Calle uses the archive’s inherent materials and practices to subvert its institutional status as an objective repository of historical information, rather than preserve the archive’s status as a cultural authority.1 Her juxtapositions of collected reminiscences and official directives ultimately call into doubt the way in which history is transcribed. Conflating fact and fiction reveals the power relations embedded in the construction of a singular remembered narrative, and suggests that individual memory should play a more critical role in the documentation of cultural accounts.
We generally think of the archive as a neutral or passive storeroom that safeguards textual and photographic records of past events. Calle’s practice partakes in the broader postwar drive not only to remember, but to collect and preserve concrete markers of memory. Theorists like Andreas Huyssen have situated this contemporary cultural obsession with historical memorialization as a bulwark “against obsolescence and disappearance, to counter our deep anxiety about the speed of change and the ever-shrinking horizons of time and space.”2 Archiving, remembrance, and “musealization,” for Huyssen, operate as defense mechanisms against perceptions of destabilizing temporal change. And in turn, the contemporary push to remember has led to a conception of the archive as a testament to the presence of the past and an authority on historical documentation. But like any other cultural institution, the processes of selection that go into the collection, taxonomy and circulation of historical information offer an authorial interpretation and specific historical narrative of the event recounted. Such an understanding of institutional power has even led Jacques Derrida to observe in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression that the archival process “produces as much as it records the event.”3 Despite understandings of the archive as a democratic collection, power structures implicit in its organization inevitably shape the master narratives through which history or artworks are read.
Calle confronts this flagrant presence of absence as a way to spotlight these abuses of power and draw attention to the constructed nature of all historical accounts. By situating herself simultaneously as author, artist, editor, and archivist, Calle’s work exists between objects, images, and texts, as she challenges us to unravel the processes that go into the construction of documentary evidence. She treats the art museum as an art-historical archive in Last Seen … where she asks museum staff at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to metaphorically fill in blank gallery walls with verbal descriptions of missing artworks. On March 18, 1990, five drawings by Degas, a vase, Napoleonic eagle, and six oil paintings by Rembrandt, Flinck, Manet, and Vermeer were violently cut from their frames and stolen from the institution in Boston, Massachusetts.4 Gardner, the founder of the institution, had stipulated in her will that nothing should be altered within the museum’s holdings following her death, including the replacement of stolen works.5 Calle therefore begins Last Seen … with a copy of Gardner’s last will and testament, a vital piece of archival evidence that makes tangible the embedded power structures within institutional authority. Rather than augment the collection, which was originally intended to enrich the cultural education of Boston’s public, bare gallery walls and empty frames (like those documented in Calle’s photographs) become vestigial proof of Gardner’s powerful social status and the preservation of a single woman’s view.6 As such, the opulent exhibition space now features “the sites of faded tapestry and the nails that make visible the original position of the artworks and their current absence.”7 It is Gardner’s will that renders this display of absence so palpable.
Rather than seek to recreate the missing works precisely, Calle focuses on individual reception, so that fragmented remembrances of and responses to the pieces inform the stolen works’ continued existence. Recollected details of Rembrandt’s A Lady and Gentleman in Black of 1633 differ widely. Some of Calle’s interlocutors describe the missing canvas in remarkably empirical detail: “In the foreground, on the right-hand side of the painting,” one participant recalls, “there was a woman sitting, gazing towards the left. Behind her, in the center, was a man … He was wearing a black cape and a hat. He had a pair of gloves, wearing one and holding the other … There were stairs nearby and a reference to travel with a map hanging on a wall in the background.”8 Another contributor describes the stolen artwork in terms of its iconographic historiography, explaining that the canvas had once been X-rayed, revealing that Rembrandt had originally included the image of a child within the composition. This participant, probably a curator or conservator, describes the exact placement of this erased figure, specifying its posture and gesture.9
Regardless of how such information was received by each participant, knowledge of the earlier compositional iteration informs the way the canvas was appreciated. One woman goes on to clarify that the child initially depicted in the painting had died, leading Rembrandt to replace the boy with a chair after his death. She explains that she had recently given birth and would spend time with the painting in the Dutch gallery, as though communing with friends and understanding their loss.10 This participant suggests that many of those interviewed related aspects of their own lives to the imagined dramas endured by the figures painted within the frame. Calle’s finished documentation of the missing artworks juxtaposes enlarged photographic reproductions of the Museum’s framed voids with textual compositions of her collected statements, hung side by side on the gallery walls. The size and format of the framed texts match the dimensions of the original, stolen artwork. Despite resembling a didactic museum wall label, here it is personal memory that interprets the missing artworks, and not an institutionally driven analysis. Each participant remains anonymous, beginning his or her statement with “I” in a way that mirrors its precursor. Subverting the conventions of the institutionalized oral archive, Calle chooses not to distinguish between interviewed curators or conservators and quotidian museum staff, giving a voice to those typically excluded from interpreting an institution’s collection. Her display methods elevate personal memory to the status of public document. She treats every memory equally as source material, while also revealing the discrepancies inherent to all documentary evidence, whether archival or acquired by word of mouth.
In her assessment of Last Seen … , performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan specifies that while the art historian values a cogent and precise historical analysis of a work of art, Calle intentionally emphasizes subjective associations and responses; “The description itself does not reproduce the object,” writes Phelan, “it rather helps us to restage and restate the effort to remember what is lost. The descriptions remind us how loss acquires meaning and generates recovery—not only of and for the object, but for the one who remembers.”11 By asking participants to express their memories verbally, Calle permits them to revisit the pictorial scenes mentally, to offer their own interpretive voice and remember imprecisely. Meaning is generated through a subjective response, rather than imposed by an institutional framework. Giving voice to memory grants the stolen artworks a continued presence, while also revealing that relations between object and viewer persist beyond the physical canvas.
Scholar David Greetham has added to this discussion by suggesting that archives and institutions present constructed narratives of collective history, forging a single account rather than embracing the plurality inherent to various memories and experiences.12 Even when a work is missing, the framework offered by the exhibiting institution imposes a singular interpretive narrative. This is particularly the case in a space like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; the institution provides an in situ viewing experience, where Gardner’s collection of decorative arts and domestic furnishings not only enhance the contextual lens through which the objects are read, but also continue to drive the way they are interpreted. Calle’s reconstruction of Rembrandt seems to address this idea of institutional hegemony, since her final composition actually highlights the museum’s framing devices. Her photograph does not simply invoke the viewer to examine the gallery’s outlined void, but also spotlights the interior’s lush tapestries, ornately gilded picture frame, and delicate volutes of hanging candelabra. Calle takes the playful mise en abyme as her subject—the picture of a (absent) picture—as well as the institution’s physical interpretive support.
Calle’s Last Seen … ultimately suggests that only once the artwork disappears does the frame’s inherent “constructedness”—the institutional framework—become apparent. She follows in a long line of postwar French artists interested in embedding institutional critique within their practice: namely by manipulating the visual and spatial to challenge the ways in which art is conventionally exhibited in the museum or gallery system. Just twenty years prior, French conceptual artist Daniel Buren had defined the Museum as “the frame and effective support upon which the work is inscribed/composed. It is at once the center in which the action takes place and the single (topographical and cultural) viewpoint for the work.”13 Buren’s assertion becomes a textual analog to Calle’s photograph, where institution and frame are one. Institutional power, therefore, leaves its mark literally on every work exhibited. As such, the museum inevitably mediates every viewing experience, imposing curatorial taste and official readings on every interaction between viewer and work.
Although she takes on the role of curator and archivist in Last Seen … , her working methods reveal an interest in decentering the artwork from a single authorial interpretation and departing from the accepted understanding that a legitimate authority exists. An archive or museum exercises power in the very acts of accumulation and collection; deciding what to collect, preserve, and exhibit obliquely conveys a level of taste that is then imposed on a viewing public. But Calle subverts the power of institutional collecting, since her assemblages include new interpretive sources—anonymous voices with disparate levels of art-historical knowledge. “The [ostensible] unity of an archive,” Allan Sekula rationalizes, “is first and foremost that imposed by ownership.”14 By acknowledging this intrinsic claim to ownership, Calle exposes the ways in which institutions mark and control the cultural landscape and how it is understood.
This same tactic operates in Calle’s The Detachment of 1996, where she extends her examination of constructed cultural meaning to question specific historical documents. In her 1996 project, Calle interrogates absences within the topography of former East Berlin, voided sites that mark the removal of prior GDR monuments in the German capital.15 The wave of collective optimism following the fall of the Berlin Wall had quickly given rise to the graver discussion surrounding the reunification of a nation with a divided history. With the surge in proposals for state-sponsored commemorative public projects, leaders in the early 1990s grappled with the task of erecting monuments that venerated two former “Germanys” with remarkably disparate histories. As the German political landscape shifted following reunification in the 1990s, the new Federal Republic covertly “relativized” those East German symbols that it saw as ideologically incompatible with the image of the new German nation.
Yet, this normalization effort not only dismantled the emblems of the dissolved communist East, but also expunged the quotidian signs comprising individual histories and cultures, leaving behind only traces of a former country. “To record this process,” writes Calle, “I visited places from which symbols of GDR history have been effaced. I asked passers-by and residents to describe the objects that once filled these empty spaces. I photographed the absence and replaced the missing monuments with their memories.”16 The finished project juxtaposes photographs of each commemorative site before and after the fall of the wall, alongside a page of text that recapitulates the divergent memories shared by those interviewed. Calle’s visual dialectic between visibility and invisibility ultimately challenges the historical discourse offered by the reunified state, whereby the personal meanings attributed to each GDR object undercut the demand for their official removal; such a process, German studies scholar Lyn Marven explains, had functioned “to demonstrate the power of the state (now the unified Federal Republic) not only over public space but also over the meaning of the monuments and the narrative of history that they represent.”17
Calle procured ordinances from the Abgeordentenhaus, the parliament for the state of Berlin, of which the city of Berlin is the capital.18 These ordinances included a list of twelve monuments to be dismantled, removed or reworded in an effort to rebuild the recently reunified state (and city) of Berlin with a uniform set of public symbols and insignia. Her collection of individual memories contrasts sharply with sanctioned directives and counters the forms of history they represent. And her photographic juxtapositions literalize this fissure in the historical narrative. By contrasting the contemporary images of negation in color film with the older photographs of the intact monuments in black and white, she makes an aesthetic statement about the transition in time from monument to absence. Her simple photographic compositions document the life of memorials without regard to the heroic monumentality prescribed to these structures by history. Instead, she contextualizes them in everyday experience, debunking their mythical status in plain documentary form. Her choice to work in color film refuses the texture of historicity that attaches itself to the black-and-white originals, so reminiscent of jaded textbook snapshots. Rather than situating her color photographs as historical evidence corroborating a particular narrative, she treats her prints as detached artifacts, choosing to exclude details concerning physical size or materials used. Rather, the disparity between “official” account and personal memory guides the historical story. The Detachment compels society to actively remember and make sense of the void, in lieu of passively accepting it as a symptom of historical progression.
Such is the case in Friedenstaube (Nikolaiviertel) from Calle’s The Detachment.19 The original image from the 1980s reveals the wall of a communist-era housing project, upon which hangs the metal form of a dove in flight and text that reads Berlin Stadt des Friedens (Berlin City of Peace). The Nikolaiviertel refers to the oldest city quarter in former East Berlin, which had received the peace dove in 1979 as a token of recognition from the Soviet World Peace Council. Following reunification, however, many such signs “were converted or equipped with an additional inscription,” explains Peter Carrier, in his research on postwar monuments and memory—“either in order to modify their political content, or else turn them into ironic public citations of the former state ideology by highlighting their origins as an ideological product of a defunct regime.”20 Calle’s 1996 image (Figure 15.2) reveals this editorial process.
Her composition highlights the two concave hollows that scar the building’s façade, inconspicuous vestiges of the former iconography. The replacement sign reads NIKOLAIVIERTEL in a bold, flashy print, labeling the neighborhood for the sake of tourism, alongside an advertisement that broadcasts the district’s commercial offerings: a shop selling denim jeans, an Argentinian steakhouse, a gimmicky inn that proposes “hearty” German cuisine, and a salon. Calle’s photograph points to the ways in which the neighborhood’s identity has been erased throughout history, supplanting it with capitalist amenities that would have been completely foreign to the socialist GDR.
Those surveyed about the change in imagery diverge vastly in their recollections. In terms of the dove, descriptions oscillate: “It was a big dove, kind of ‘Picassoesque,’ with this twig in its beak”; or, “It was all gold, somewhat pretentious.” Some found the Friedenstaube beautiful, honorable, or precious, while others remember the bird as cynical and annoying. But regardless of remembered disparities in physical characteristics, Calle’s reportage conveys consensus in terms of the circumstances surrounding the dove’s removal, with one participant citing frankly: “We don’t just go to West Berlin and remove things, do we? … I hardly recognize my old Berlin. But you can’t put it back, the symbolism was ruined by taking it off.”21
The act of erasure documented in Bibliothek (Bebelplatz) has left more politically charged wounds in the city’s landscape. A tarnished, early twentieth-century plaque appears in the earlier image of this work, reading, “In the year 1895 Lenin worked in this building, formerly Königliche Bibliothek.”22 Calle’s later photograph (Figure 15.3) depicts the empty, recessed spatial niche where those words once lay; it fills the frame entirely.
Crude holes in the aged concrete become the only indexical trace of the original commemoration, suggesting that no one bothered to fill them in—let alone replace the plaque with an updated tribute. Despite the fact that the installment of this particular plaque took place well before the founding of the GDR, its reference to Lenin was perceived by reunified Germany as a threatening trace of Eastern communism. The accompanying reminiscences symbolically fill the pictorial void, offering hypotheses as to why the unassuming plaque necessitated removal in the first place. Some speculate it was destroyed following a petition, while another suggests it was stolen. One remembers it as a commemoration to Karl Marx, and another posits that the library had not yet been constructed during Lenin’s time in Berlin. The most insightful witness reaches the crux of Calle’s aim: “I don’t think there was anything on it that couldn’t have remained there. It was part of the building’s history, there are so few opportunities to remember. Now that it’s gone, I miss it.”23 Calle’s project, however, precisely provides an opportunity to recollect. The radical inconsistencies present in the text speak both to the fallibility of human memory, and the fact that no single collective memory exists. Rather, Calle’s collections assert that memory-making is socially constructed and temporal mediation occurs on an individuated basis.
To underscore this quality, Calle compiled the sites documented in The Detachment as a travel guide. Reproductions of each memory site appear in the form of a postcard, and complementary maps of Berlin allow the visitor (or rememberer) to steer a personal trip down memory lane, partaking in a literal remapping of Berlin’s historical landscape. These photographed postcards become a collection of souvenirs of an absent East Berlin, where each image and caption describes the missing objects and insignia. Rejecting physical materiality in favor of showcasing absence ensures that society holds the agency to make memories of its own by filling in the void—no matter how pedestrian or unheroic these conceptually commemorated sites may be. Instead of submissively affirming the historical snapshot imposed by a conventional state-sponsored monument, Calle’s collaborative process permits a nation’s people to experience time and place on its own terms.
In both projects, Calle employs the medium of documentary photography to further subvert the archive. Inextricably linked to the concept of historical evidence, the photograph’s journalistic texture focuses more on the image as an active archival record or piece of documentary evidence than purely aesthetic object. Furthermore, documentary photography, and even the amateur pictorial aesthetic Calle employs, is widely understood as objective for its erasure of the artist’s hand and detachment from more clearly subjective artistic processes. John Roberts calls this quality “historical disclosure,” where photography’s “cut into the continuum of experience … recovers for us the ‘pastness’ of the past, and as such—as the discursive life of the image unfolds in time—the moment’s historical textuality.”24 This understanding of photography as “truth telling” explains why the medium holds such a privileged position in relation to historical knowledge or evidence. Yet, the subjects Calle chooses to photograph, alongside the textual recollections she gathers, mock the constructed neutrality associated with the medium. By manipulating photography’s cool, detached tone, her photographs interrogate the reliability of the medium as a historical source and raise doubts about the accuracy of historical documents more broadly.
Photography also exists as a medium that typically defies absence, since it generates a printed image that captures a visual presence. The photograph compensates for a temporal loss (the disappearance of a moment that occurs when a photo is snapped) by emphasizing its visual verisimilitude and material presence. Thierry de Duve, a Belgian theorist and scholar of philosophical aesthetics, argues that although “the photograph is seen either as natural evidence and live witness (picture) of a vanished past, or as an abrupt artifact (event),” subjectivity and processes of selection remain intrinsic.25 Typically, the viewer of a photograph encounters a performed movement or ephemeral moment, which is then made to look naturally frozen or eternal by the printing process. But photographs are not objective evidence or reliable snapshots of a historical instant; “they can only provide evidence of stories,” cites Philip Gourevitch, “and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation. Looked at in this way, as evidence of something beyond itself, a photograph can best be understood not as an answer or an end to inquiry, but as an invitation to look more closely, and to ask questions.”26 Calle’s photographs become invitations to revisit the past in a similar way.
Questions about the transmission and communication of information are precisely what Calle poses in each of these phototextual projects. In his work on historicism, Sekula explains that “the archive confirms the existence of a linear progression from past to present, and offers the possibility of an easy and unproblematic retrieval of the past from the transcendent position offered by the present.”27 But Calle’s work—her fusion of the recollected and the factual—suggests that the notion of such historical progression is just one interpretation of many. She collects first-hand accounts and archival materials to question the very nature of the archive and reveals that all authorial documents, no matter how “official” or “reliable,” are based on memories and subjective positions. Historical “perception exists only in theory, because it is continually invaded by memory,” cites film and media scholar Mary Ann Doane.28 Doane goes on to explain that the ostensible neutrality of observation or a well-researched analysis are always rooted in memory or based in intuition. Memory, of course, subsists as a perpetually fluid phenomenon that ties past to present. Always fluctuating and never stabilized, it stands as the absolute antithesis to notions of dependability and facticity associated with the authority of archival documents.
Documentary photography, however, has become inextricably linked to understandings of visual records as accurate and objective. Michael Roth expresses this accepted incompatibility: “With the triumph of photography’s capturing events of the past we can no longer find our way in history—no longer navigate within our own personal memories—without the filter of photo-like images. The triumph of the photographic means the past has become accessible, but only accessible in image-like terms.”29 Conceptualizing the photograph as a precise replica or indexical proof of the real conflates personal recollection with images seen. As such, the documentary photograph, a product of the archive, is understood as closer to the truth than a mere remembered utterance. Calle complicates this hierarchy by including photographs of empty space or nothingness (sites of authorial manipulation) on the same plane as quotidian recollections. “Photography,” alleges philosopher Stanley Cavell, “maintains the presence of the world by accepting our absence from it. The reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it.”30 Therefore, the image viewed exists in a markedly detached realm from the viewing subject, a much greater division than that which separates an individual from his or her memories. Calle’s fieldwork, whether in the space of a museum, or on a city street, seems to address this divide, questioning why we assign visual evidence great value, while considering recollections with such skepticism.
Calle subverts the power of the archive by suggesting that accepted documentation, quoted opinion and historical proof are just as fictionalized and fallible as collected personal memories.31 This aspect of her work proves additionally significant with the knowledge that the artist frequently incorporates lies or self-fabricated snippets of “evidence” in each of her collaborative projects. When asked in an interview with Swiss art historian Bice Curiger: “What is your relation to the false and the real?” Calle admitted that “So every time there is a lie, and generally there is only one in each work: it is what I would have liked to find and didn’t.”32 But Calle goes on to explain that the presence of a lie does not alter the “truth value” of her project, since all truths are subjective interpretations.
If Huyssen asserts that “the mode of memory is recherche [research] rather than recuperation,”33 Calle seems to imply that the transmission of historical material is equally rooted in subjectivity. The lapses she emphasizes between the subjective and objective in Last Seen … and The Detachment reveal the extent to which memories remain precluded from historical accounts, and suggest the constructed and uncertain nature behind all archival material. Calle underscores the personal and lets memory reconstruct the history of artworks and a nation, while history becomes the fodder for playful, phototextual installations. She imposes the subjective techniques on her empirical, research-driven projects to emphasize the presence of “narrativity” and self-reflexivity inherent to all (art) historical accounts.
Ultimately, Calle collects personal memories. Her practice offers an additional framework through which cultural objects and the circumstances surrounding their removal can be interpreted—frameworks that supplement the institutionally driven physical voids recorded in her photographs. Many of the individuals who participated in Calle’s projects have noted a deep appreciation for her works. For many, Calle’s process shifted the focus away from the sadness and loss associated with the violent act of removal, and instead, returned attention to the very intimate act of personal recollection.34 With Last Seen … in particular, interviewed participants felt that Calle helped the museum staff to recall and reacquaint themselves with the collection, rather than simply dwell on the aggressive act that left behind the documented absences. The success of Last Seen … even led the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum to invite back Calle in 2012 for a second engagement with the stolen works. In this later iteration, What Do You See?, Calle asked staff members and anonymous visitors simply to describe their surroundings in the Dutch Room gallery. The resulting texts were exhibited next to photographs of each interlocutor anonymously photographed from behind, standing before an empty frame. In a sense, then, the traces and voids Calle photographs have continued to become invitations to remember—no matter how inconsistently—but also poignant memorials to that which has been lost. Archiving these varied memories and including unconventional documentary sources function to reclaim and rewrite the narratives generated by institutional frameworks. Calle’s projects suggest that uncertainty and fabrication are the only constants when dealing with the medium of recounted information, whether researched in an archive or gathered from a stranger on the street.
1 Sophie Calle has always worked with information, and began using investigative and surveillance techniques in the 1980s to glean information about strangers and construct their identities. In the 1990s, she began extending these practices to explore the relationship between public and private in institutional contexts. Much of her work considers memory, absence, identity, and intimacy by making use of methods typically associated with archivist, ethnographic, and even scientific approaches.
2 Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 33. Similar arguments are made in Huyssen, “Escape from Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Media,” in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), 13–36.
3 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 17.
4 See Sophie Calle, Disparitions, tableaux volés (Arles: Actes Sud, 2000). The FBI describes the heist as the “largest property crime in U.S. history,” offering a $5 million reward for the return of the thirteen missing works. The case information details: “On March 18, 1990, two men disguised as police officers gained access to the Gardner Museum. Once inside, they tied up the security guards and proceeded to steal 13 objects, including rare paintings by Rembrandt, Degas, and Vermeer, valued at approximately $500 million.” Gardner Museum Thefts, www.fbi.gov. For an virtual tour of partially bare gallery walls, see www.gardnermuseum.org/resources/theft/.
5 “Isabella Stewart Gardner, qui avait vécu là avant de léguer la maison à la ville, avait expressément stipulé dans son testament que rien ne devrait être touché après sa mort.” See Calle, Disparitions.
6 Gardner stipulates in her will, “le fonds d’un musée pour l’éducation et le plaisir du public sans limite de temps.” Ibid.
7 “Les emplacements délavés de la tapisserie et les clous rendent visible la position originale du tableau et par conséquent son absence.” Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 “When they x-rayed the painting, they found that there had been a child in the picture, between the two figures, holding onto his mother’s hand and clutching something that looked like a whip.” Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 147.
12 David Greetham, “Who’s In, Who’s Out”: The Cultural Poetics of Archival Exclusion, Studies in the Literary Imagination 32, no. 1 (1999): 9.
13 Daniel Buren, “Function of the Museum” for “Position–Proposition,” trans. Laurent Sauerwein (Munich: Museum of München Gladbach, 1971), 58. Buren and Calle are friends and collaborators. Most recently, Calle selected Buren as a curator for the installation of her Take Care of Yourself for the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007.
14 Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photography between Labor and Capital,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (New York: Routledge, 2003), 443–453, 444. Sekula was an American photographer, filmmaker, and cultural theorist who wrote extensively on photography as both an aesthetic and documentary medium, often exploring its relationship to critical theory and political Modernism. For Sekula’s work related to the archive, see also: Allan Sekula, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984); Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 343–389.
15 First created and exhibited at Arndt & Partner in Berlin in 1996, Calle then published Die Entfernung in 1997 as a dual-language edition, known as The Detachment in English, and later as Souvenirs de Berlin-Est in French. See Sophie Calle, The Detachment/Die Entfernung (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996), and later, Sophie Calle, Souvenirs de Berlin-Est (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999). Sophie Calle is one of several artists who produced site-specific projects exploring cultural memory in former East Germany following the end of the Cold War and fall of the Berlin Wall. See, for example: Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Reichstag (1995); Christian Boltanski’s Missing House (1990); Shimon Attie’s The Writing on the Wall (1992–1992) and Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie European Projects: Installations and Photographs (Vermont: Verve Éditions, 1998); Tacita Dean’s work like Palast (2004) and Die Regimentstochter (2005).
16 Malene Vest Hansen, “Public Places - Private Spaces, Conceptualism, Feminism and Public Art: Notes on Sophie Calle’s The Detachment,” Journal of Art History 71, no. 4 (2002): 197.
17 Lyn Marven, “History, Photos, and Form in Texts by Daniela Dahn, Irina Liebmann, and Sophie Calle,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 43, no. 2 (May, 2007): 229.
18 The Abgeordentenhaus equates roughly to the American House of Representatives and functions as the parliament for the state of Berlin. Its power was restricted following the Second World War, as decisions had to be confirmed by the Western Allied forces. Since reunification, the Abgeordentenhaus’ primary responsibilities have included passing legislation, selecting city mayors, and drafting the government budget.
19 Friedenstaube is German for “peace dove,” and refers to the sculptural token of recognition given to the city of East Berlin after having been selected as the venue for the Special Session of the World Peace Council conference from February 2 to February 5, 1979. The World Peace Council (WPC) was founded in 1950 by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a means to promote world peace and more specifically, to oppose the propagandistic-driven perception of American violence and warfare. As part of the Cold War ideological divide, the WPC communist doctrine understood the world as divided between peace advocates in the Soviet Union and warmongering capitalism in the United States. See Phillip Deery, “The Dove Flies East: Whitehall, Warsaw and the 1950 World Peace Congress,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 48, no. 4 (December 2002): 449–468.
20 Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 33.
21 All quotations taken from Sophie Calle, The Detachment/Die Entfernung (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996), 55–58.
22 The German on the plaque reads “Lenin arbeitete im Jahre 1895 diesem Gebäude, ehemals Königliche Bibliothek,” Calle, The Detachment/Die Entfernung, 27.
23 Calle, The Detachment/Die Entfernung, 25–27.
24 John Roberts, “Photography after the Photograph: Event, Archive, and the Non-Symbolic,” Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 2 (2009): 281.
25 Thierry De Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox,” in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2006), 109.
26 Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 148.
27 Sekula, “Reading an Archive,” 447.
28 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 77.
29 Michael S. Roth, “Photographic Ambivalence and Historical Consciousness,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December, 2009): 94.
30 Stanley Cavell, The Word Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 23.
31 For more on the relationship between history and fiction, see Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit 3: Le temps raconté (Paris: Seuil, 1985). Ricoeur explores the ways in which different modes of fictional narrative and storytelling shape the construction of narrative discourse more broadly, even arguing that it is fictional narratives that offer a more profound understanding of historical time than purely historical forms of narrative.
32 Bice Curiger, “Sophie Calle in Conversation,” Sophie Calle: A Reader (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2009), 49–58.
33 Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 3.
34 See Elena Stylianou, “Artists’ Photographic Reflections: Imag(in)ing the Art Museum through Fictional Narratives,” Photographies 7, no. 2 (2014): 117–129.