Orchestrated Reflexivity: Sophie Calle’s Narrative Body as Artist

French visual and narrative artist Sophie Calle blurs the distinction between fact and fiction by using the material of daily life coupled with storytelling. Through the interplay between staged experiences and her narratives, she constructs herself as an artistic subject. Her creative process produces a narrative body that alters with each story she tells. Most critical reception of Calle’s work focuses on her blurring of fact and fiction, especially the use of the intimate as raw material for her art. While her artful storytelling engenders such an interpretation, I suggest that Calle tells a narrative of intimacy, rather than displaying intimacy itself. At first this distinction may seem minor; however, the level of storytelling in Calle’s work reveals complex orchestrated projects that seduce the spectator. Calle’s art demonstrates what I call orchestrated reflexivity since it depends on her presence, her idea for the project, and the story that emerges from the experience. Her construction of art under the guise of her life raises questions about the production of art, especially in terms of authenticity and authorial intervention. Calle employs the other in the act of storytelling throughout her work to shore up artistic authority; she especially uses the figure of the absent other in her work since 2007. I argue that Calle’s purposeful blurring of truth and fiction work underscores the art of storytelling, but more importantly, it produces the artist, not only as a figure with absolute authority but as the narrative itself.

If we compare Calle to any number of artists, from the Surrealists to the Situationists, from authors of the nouveau roman to those of autofiction, from Claude Cahun to Carolee Schneemann, her work manages not only to echo other avant-garde tendencies in art and literature, but to create a unique form of contemporary art through experiential storytelling and visual documentation based on an idea—a controlled, clearly delineated rule of the project.^[1] Through orchestration of daily activities while adhering to established rules, Calle imposes order and control but needs chance and convoluted interactions with others for her projects to work. The coupling of text and image, trace and absence, and orchestrated experience and storytelling characterizes Calle’s unique contemporary art. The significance of Calle’s work lies in its ingenious inability to be pinned down. This ambiguity results from her intriguing storytelling through both text and image and from her manipulation of the spectator’s desire to know more about the purposeful conflation of art and life in her work. Calle’s work and her status as a contemporary artist make a case for artistic production at the interstices of oppositions as an investigative way to look, to create, to document, and to be in the world.

Calle, born in 1953, came to art without any formal artistic training. Her father, Robert Calle, a doctor, art collector, and museum director, introduced her to art at a young age. Her parents divorced when she was young and she lived with her mother, a book critic and press attaché. After receiving her baccalaureate in her late teens, Calle traveled internationally for seven years, doing odd jobs to pay her expenses. She returned to Paris in her mid-twenties and did not know what to do with herself.^[2] Calle claims that she undertook various activities—following strangers in the street, for example—to fill a void, without an artistic goal in mind:

Calle’s motivation for following strangers in the street suggests that her emptiness and lack of direction were so great that she sought completion and purpose through the action of others’ energy. There is an important depersonalization of Calle at work here: she is implicated in the act of following but subsumes her action to that of the other person. She produced her own desire as an effect of the desire of the other, underscoring the importance of the other as a driving force for her art.

In an interview with Ben Lewis, she offers another version of how she got started in the art world, which indicates narrative spinning of even the beginnings of her professional career.^[4] After returning to Paris from her travels, she wanted to get her art collector father’s attention, so she looked at the art on his walls and tried to do the same thing. She actually uses the word “seduce,” implying an attempt to beguile, maneuver, or lure. Calle does not give any more details to this story, but since her father supported contemporary artists including Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager, one can imagine that she saw avant-garde works and wanted to try her hand at experimental practices. In both narratives of her artistic beginnings, the desire of the other—strangers in the street or her father—motivates her expérience and sets her on the path of artistic creation.

The transformation of Calle into an artist occurred after the fiancée of the art critic Bernard LaMarche Vadel, then curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, participated in Calle’s Les dormeurs (1979) project, which she first conducted as an expérience during what I call her “pre-art” phase. Vadel subsequently became interested in Calle’s work and proposed to include it in the fortieth Biennale des Jeunes in 1980. Calle explains, “I agreed. That’s when it happened. He decided for me—that I was an artist.”^[5] This comment points to the importance of the other in Calle’s artistic practice: she needs the other to decide for her. She did not consciously choose to be an artist, but it was the will of an art curator that transformed her. This passivity informs how Calle views herself as an artist and how she understands the artistic process, since she depends on circumstance and others’ participation to facilitate her project. Her work depends on the simultaneous presence and absence of herself in the work, which further emphasizes her role as the orchestrator.

Although Calle portrays the beginning of her artistic trajectory as haphazard, the perception of her projects and therefore her art subsequently changed when she made up her mind to be an artist. Ginger Danto explains, “By the early ’80s Calle was receiving widespread recognition of her work. ‘I had become an artist,’ she says coolly of her courtship by the Paris dealer Chantal Crousel . . . ; by the Pompidou Center for a 1981 show called ‘Autoportraits’; and various other venues. . . .”^[6] Calle’s recognition of her projects as art marks an important moment in her entire body of work, since she henceforth has a direction and a purpose.

Calle’s project-driven expériences have garnered success in the art world: over the last thirty years, she has established herself as one of the most internationally acclaimed contemporary French artists. In 2007, she represented France in the Venice Biennale, and in 2010, the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography was awarded to Calle. Since the early 1980s, Calle has worked in several media: texts, images, photographs, happenings, installations, and video. She made the cover of ARTnews in December 1992, and the first retrospectives of her work occurred in France in the early nineties, including one at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 2003, the retrospective M’as-tu vue at the Centre Pompidou further recognized her importance as a contemporary artist. In 2009, the Center of Fine Arts in Brussels held a retrospective of Calle’s work, including commentary on the “life” she constructs through her art. Her progression from accidental artist to a leading contemporary artist indicates her established presence in France and in international venues.

The Strange Quotidian

Calle’s acclaimed status in the art world establishes and reinforces her authority as an artist, which she uses as artistic capital in her projects. She relies on this authority to sell, both metaphorically and literally, the narrative of her projects. Furthermore, she constructs an aesthetic frame that passes art off as life in her narrative investigations, thereby blurring fact and fiction. This ambiguity between fact and fiction generated by the elements of daily life in the narrative projects renders them more believable and simultaneously incredible. She therefore successfully allures the spectator through the use of the everyday (for simplicity, I will use the terms “everyday” and “daily life” interchangeably). In 1947, Henri Lefebvre published his Critique de la vie quotidienne, and the Situationists in the mid-1950s took up his critique of everyday life by enacting experiments to transform the organization of social space.^[7] For Calle, the everyday is the representational context of her art, which she employs to shore up her artistic authority. The spectator’s enthusiastic acceptance of Calle’s authority due to the engaging nature of her work, however, obscures the narrative mechanism that presents art as life.

Calle’s artistic projects bracket an element of daily life, sleeping for instance, and amplify the activity to the point of hyperbole: she establishes a premise or a situation, creates clearly defined rules, and adheres to them for a given amount of time. For Les dormeurs, she invited forty-five people (strangers, acquaintances, friends, and even the neighborhood baker) to sleep in her bed; twenty-eight people accepted. Each person had an eight-hour shift, and the participants succeeded one another around the clock for eight straight days.^[8] During their stay of eight hours, she offered them clean sheets, asked them questions about their expectations of the project, observed them while they slept, and took photos of them at various intervals. Two sleepers came expecting an orgy or a sexual game; one commented that changing sheets after another person had slept in them was a bourgeois notion; some slept soundly; others changed sleeping positions quite often; and some slept naked. She observed the sleepers and documented each person with photographs and narrative description. Calle had to call a babysitting service to get a substitute when a person did not show up, and she also filled in for an absentee sleeper. Calle explains her role in Les dormeurs: “I put questions to those who allowed me; nothing to do with knowledge or fact gathering, but rather to establish a neutral and distant contact.”^[9] She also established another rule: she photographed the sleeper every hour.

The sleepers agreed to participate for various reasons, but it was especially the sense of mystery that attracted people. One may have wondered: “Why is she inviting strangers to sleep in her bed?” Calle capitalizes on the potential mystery of the situation: her questions, photographs, and transformation of the sleeping activity into an event are simultaneously ordinary and peculiar, which suggests that the artist has a special power to transform the quotidian with just a touch of strangeness. The framing of the event or the ensemble of situations by the artist makes the spectator question what we do on a daily basis usually without reflection. This making extraordinary the very ordinary draws attention to the role of the artist and her own presence in the act of creation; she entangles herself in the everyday in order to transform it into something unexpected and unusual.

Calle’s participation in her projects implicates her fully even though she may not have a precise goal or purpose in mind. Not only did she mastermind the project of the sleepers, she also took part in this investigation of sleeping: her own sleeping was dictated by the actions of others for eight days. This is an important example of Calle’s art influencing her life, since her sleeping pattern was adapted to that of her sleeping subjects. She would nap when they would sleep or sleep when there was a void in the chain of sleepers. Even though Calle did not consider herself an artist at the time and did the project without a specific goal in mind, the mise en scène of the situation indicates an artistic project in the making. Moreover, the established premise with a set of rules to which others adhere establishes the basis for her art. The fact that the participants followed her rules indicates her authority in the making.

Calle’s second project, Suite vénitienne (1980, published in 1983), also reveals the important distance between herself and the situation that she controls through the establishment of a rule.^[10] This concept of the rule establishes an organizing idea for each project, a cornerstone of her work, and contributes to her perceived artistic authority throughout her career. She describes the groundwork for the Suite vénitienne project that occurred during her tailings when she first returned to Paris:

Calle’s subsumed will is displaced by that of the other—where Calle goes would depend on where the other person wanted to go. She chooses the person based on something that attracted her, a coat or hat, for example, which reinforces the idea of the strange in terms of both the unusual and the unfamiliar. She then lets the other person decide where to lead her, her presence practically becoming a shadow. Her activity ends when the person leads her to a place where she could not follow, for example, the individual’s home. She later started photographing these strangers and jotting down descriptions of them and of what she did in a notebook. A tension therefore exists between the rule that Calle determines for the particular activity and the will of the other who also influences the unfolding of the action.

The orchestrated event of following, coupled with chance, creates the possibility of an encounter with another for Calle; however, she ultimately chooses to keep the other at a distance. In one particular incident that led to the creation of Suite vénitienne, Calle started following a man during the day, lost track of him, and then later saw him a second time at a gallery. Struck by the coincidence, she approached him and explained that she had followed him during the day. He did not seem surprised by the information and during the course of their conversation mentioned that he was leaving for Venice the next day. With this information, she took a train to Venice the next day to continue following him. She documented this activity by taking photos of him from afar. The element of distance is important in this project, because her goal is to follow him, not to get to know him. When he finally discovers that she is following him and confronts her, the diversion loses its purpose. While in Venice, she learns when Henri B., the name Calle uses for the man, is supposed to leave Venice and arrive in Paris. She takes an earlier train to Paris, so she can be there for his arrival and take one last photograph. Suite vénitienne, as she later named the collection of photos coupled with her journal, was first exhibited in 1980 and then published in 1983.

Calle’s pursuit of Henri B. evokes trace, absence, and the other—dominant themes developed throughout her work—since she records only traces and shadows of him. She photographs where he has been, takes photos from the vantage point that he just vacated, and captures glimpses of him. Jean Baudrillard in his afterword to Calle’s Suite vénitienne explains the significance of the other and trace in the act of following:

The notion of trace suggests a sign of absence, the vestige left by the person whom she follows. In this case, Henri B. leaves a double trace of absence since he would not give permission to Calle to have his image used. When she wanted to exhibit and publish this project, she had to return to Venice and restage it and retake the photos using another man. From the very beginning, the absent other occupies a central role in her projects.

Baudrillard’s concept of trace is especially significant here because her documentations of following record a material trace of the activity, a reminder of her self-effacement. Her vanishing is illusory, however, since everything goes through her: her perspective, her description, and her journal. Although Calle acts as the grand architect of her projects, setting everything in motion, she must experience what unfolds. Her work exemplifies par excellence the double meaning of une expérience in French as both an experiment and an experience.

This project not only reveals the artist’s perspective and subjectivity, but displays a mysterious impression of the artist: when a street vendor offers to take a photograph of her, she accepts. Documentation of Calle in a blond wig playing with pigeons in a square in Venice is her visual imprint on the project, registering her presence.

The Experimental as Experiential

Both the experimental and experiential elements of daily life and self-representation are the underpinnings of the ambiguous relationship between fact and fiction in Calle’s work. Shirley Ann Jordan has used the term “process-driven project art” to describe Calle’s artistic endeavors since her work does not merely foreground a concept but also depends on the experiential elements of the happening.^[13] In an interview Calle explains that she provokes situations but importantly attempts to live them.^[14] To a certain extent her experimental projects can be compared to dares, since the premises of her projects are often provocative or skate the boundaries of social norms. The experimental is the driving force (le moteur) that allows her to live certain experiences that she did not anticipate, but she does qualify that these occurrences are ordinary and banal.^[15] Since these experimental lived experiences happen in the context of daily life, I contend that it is precisely for this reason that fact and fiction collapse together in Calle’s world: the experimental and experiential therefore become interchangeable.

In Les panoplies (published in 1998 but documented in the early 1980s), Calle experiments with being a stripper: she deliberately occupies the position of receiver of the audience’s gaze as a sexual object but is also the subject of her project. In the early 1980s, Calle took a job as a stripper in the Pigalle district and asked a friend to take photos of her while she was on stage. The series of photos in Les panoplies consists of twenty photos illustrating her striptease act. The first photo shows the stage with several women waiting for their act with a master of ceremonies announcing the acts. Calle emerges from the group of women to perform. She is wearing a long black dress, a boa, a blond wig, a hat, stockings, and black high-heeled shoes. The next photos show Calle posing in various positions, including one with her leg poised on the step of the stage. She is seen wearing a black bra, underwear, and a thigh-high garter belt in photos eight and nine. She reaches to detach the stockings from the garter and then reaches back to take off her bra in the next photo. A middle-aged man stage right of her gazes up at her intently. The man is in the same position in the next photo of a topless Calle looking up defiantly. In the last two photos of the series, Calle is naked with a boa draped around her shoulders; in the last photo she faces the audience. The demonstrative quality to the work of Calle—she wants us to look at her—underscores the look and her positionality in this expérience. Since Calle deliberately takes up the position and image of the object of the male gaze, one wonders at first what her purpose of assuming the role of the stripper and discarding it easily is.

This expérience, conducted before she became an artist and published after she had become one, highlights indeed the power of observation in Calle’s experiential experiment. She states that she was not an artist when she performed as a stripper and that she did it for the money. She also did it to overcome her past feminist opposition to stripping.^[16] The fact that she had the act documented makes one wonder how she considered her act and the position she was occupying on stage at the time. Calle explains that while traveling in California someone had asked her to do exotic dancing or stripping at a club. Due to her feminist position at the time, she refused, but admitted it was something that she wanted to do as a challenge to herself. When she returned to Paris and was offered a job at a strip club in Pigalle, she accepted.

Calle’s motivation to perform the striptease acts––it was something that she wanted to do, but felt it previously went against her convictions—points to her desire to experience this kind of embodiment. Her act begs further scrutiny, since she did not merely perform once and leave, but continued for a short period of time.^[17] By asking a friend of hers to photograph her striptease, Calle simultaneously occupies two positions at once: the performer on stage and the artist hors scène. Even though she is not directly behind the camera, she is directing her friend’s actions; that is, her role as artist implies a double position for her.

Calle’s multiple positions in Les panoplies and her mise en scène as a stripper draw attention to her body and the ways of looking at the female body. Her body implies the “to-be-looked-at-ness” that Mulvey argues in terms of male spectatorship and the female body. By literally exposing her body to the audience at the club and then to a larger audience by publishing the photos, she highlights the specificity of her female body and evokes the associations and connotations of representation of the female body. Does she alter codifications of the female body in this embodied performance? Since she, as a female artist, creates this situation and mise en scène, she alters the passive component to Mulvey’s theory. By actively putting herself into a scenario that has traditionally relegated women to positions of objects of a male desire, she questions this paradigm through herself as the actor in this situation.

In La filature (1981), the piece that was commissioned for her first Centre Pompidou exhibit, Calle is also simultaneously the artist, the subject of the work, the photographic object, and the narrative force of the story, all wrapped up in an experiential story.^[18] Calle asked her mother to hire a detective to follow her for a day to prove that she existed. This reason harks back to the following of strangers in the street––to mask her emptiness or to be filled by the other’s desire; she not only wants photographic proof of her existence but also wants a motivation for various daily activities. Knowledge of the other’s look motivates her to undertake certain activities; the awareness of his presence is the impetus for her itinerary of actions that day. The piece consists of the detective’s report of the day following Calle, including photos of her, contrasted with her narrative and telling of the events of the day.

Calle constructs her narrative of the day in a way that resembles the detective report: she gives the time of her activities and uses concise sentences describing her activity. An important element, however, separates the two versions of the day: Calle’s subjectivity as the artist and catalyst of this project comes through very clearly:

Since he does not know that Calle was the person who hired him, his participation is key to the deception of the project. His ignorance makes the project similar to Calle’s following others since the strangers in the street or Henri B. did not know that they were being followed. In addition, the contrast between Calle’s narrative of the day and that of the detective is striking; his style relays the facts of his observations and does not convey a personal subjectivity. He documents the beginning of the day:

Calle’s introduction focuses on the presence of the detective, while the detective reports Calle’s actions but does not understand the significance of them. He mentions that she enters and exits the hair salon and crosses the Jardin du Luxembourg, but he does not have any idea about the motivations behind Calle’s activities.

In addition to the differences in style, a divergence in the narratives toward the end of the day sets the two versions apart: Calle’s version of the day does not match with that of the detective. At the point when she enters the movie theater, her account differs from the detective’s report. At some point she leaves the movie theater and then specifies leaving a gallery at 8:00 p.m. to attend a party with friends. She goes to a café to eat at 2:00 a.m. and then leaves for a friend’s hotel three hours later. She wonders if the detective liked her and if he will think of her the following day.^[21] The detective has her watching the movie on the Champs-Elysées until 7:25 p.m., later leaving the cinema, where she takes the metro at the Franklin D. Roosevelt station, changing at Trocadéro, and getting off at the Denfert-Rochereau station. He stops following her at 8:00 p.m. when she returns home.

The narrative discrepancy between the two accounts points to a possible rift in Calle’s authorial authority. The spectator is left wondering if the detective stopped following her at 5:30 p.m. and made up the rest of his report. Calle’s friend who briefly followed the detective confirmed that the detective entered the cinema at 5:30 p.m., five minutes after Calle. Did he mistake someone else who resembled her and follow that person who happened to live in Calle’s neighborhood? Perhaps he took a break, assuming that Calle would watch the entire film, and when he could not find her, he made up the rest of his report. Are we more inclined to believe Calle or the detective? Perhaps it was Calle who changed the ending to her day to present a different image of herself. Since documentation does not exist for either version, only the respective narratives, the spectator might feel tempted to believe Calle because of her authorial authority. Her self-presentation depends on this authority, since it leads the spectator to have confidence in what she represents, but Calle’s manipulation of situations and active presence also raise doubt about the authenticity of the situations she creates. I am using the terms authenticity and authentic to mean that which is accurate and reliable, as well as the existentialist use of the word to denote an emotionally appropriate, significant, and responsible way to be in the world. Calle may, for instance, have included her friend’s photographs of the detective and his account as “proof” to corroborate her story, but there is no way to verify the detective’s account nor her own. It is this very inability to ascertain the intentions of Calle’s work and the distinction between fact and fiction that draws the spectator in, forcing her to participate in the project put into motion. The inability to distinguish fact and fiction in her work, however, makes Calle both the unreliable narrator and the unreliable artist to boot.

Calle experiments with authorized and unauthorized observation through tailing in Vingt ans après (2001), which uses the same premise as La filature and reenacts the tailing of Calle twenty years later to the date by the same detective agency. Calle explains in her text that this time it was not her idea for the project, but that of Emmanuel Perrotin, owner of a Parisian art gallery, who wanted to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of La filature. He ostensibly notified her of the project when he learned that she would not be in Paris for the long Easter holiday. She agreed to participate, changed her plans, and knew that April 16, 2001, would be the day. In both versions, her narrative of the day depends on the knowledge that she has been followed.

Calle’s tone toward the detective is decidedly different from twenty years before—she thinks of him but grows rather indifferent over the course of the day. She is acutely aware of the passage of time and is troubled that she does not have anything specific to show for the last twenty years:

Ironically, Calle’s artistic career has been made on exactly these very exercises in representation, but she finds it a chore in this case. Her comment indicates the close relationship between her reflexivity and signifying practices: the form, the exercise in representation, draws attention to artistic practice in general. In this project, she makes decisions or does activities to give meaning to this day that she knows is being documented. She agrees, for example, to work closely with Emmanuel Perrotin and his gallery, which she resisted before because she enjoyed her professional independence. The rash decision or sudden change of heart is related to the detective’s presence. She explains: “In fact, because of this detective, whom I have barely glimpsed, I have gone and committed myself to a gallery, just to make the day more special.” (En fait, voilà qu’à cause d’un détective à peine entrevu, je viens de m’unir à une galerie pour apporter à cette journée un quelque chose de plus . . . ).^[23] Calle makes a decision that will influence her professional and artistic career, thus highlighting the continued ambiguity between art and life that still defines her work twenty years later.

In contrast with this tailing and the original, Calle is now an established artist, a determining factor of the project. The fact that Perrotin wants to repeat the initial project only makes sense since as an established artist, people would be interested in a reiteration of her original project. In this rendition, Calle takes the detective to “[her] temporary exhibit at the Centre Pompidou” (cette fois, [elle va] lui montrer la salle qui [l]’est consacrée actuellement au Centre Pompidou).^[24] It is significant that she wants to show the detective her exhibit at Beaubourg, since it is a way for her to affirm her status as an artist that she has gained over the last twenty years. Her anxiety about her professional accomplishments contrasts with her aloof attitude about her projects during her pre-art phase when she followed people at random.

In a way that parallels the original project, a discrepancy arises between her narrative and the documentation of the detective, further muddying the waters of fact and fiction. This time we want to believe the detective, since Calle goes too far in her narrative high jinks. She claims to have arrived at her car and left her parking spot at 5:45 p.m. to show the detective the apartment building from where Bénédicte Vincens—barefoot—fled during a fire the night of February 26, 2000, and has not been seen since. In her diary, Bénédicte wrote that she wanted to live her life like Sophie Calle, which a detective mentioned to the press. Calle’s name was included in Le monde and Les inrockuptibles in reference to this missing young woman, and an inspector contacted Calle. Since she had become implicated in this story, Calle visited Bénédicte’s burnt-out studio, spoke with her friends, removed ashes, burnt negatives and photos that Bénédicte had taken, and took photos of the studio. Once again, the spectator questions the authenticity of the project, as well as Calle’s authorial authority, while experiencing malaise in the observation of this story.

Calle inserts this narrative backstory in her text, which serves as motivation for her narrative lapse or the discrepancy between her account and that of the detective. She explains:

This ostensibly haphazard meeting with Bénédicte’s mother creates the opportunity for the missing young woman who admired Sophie Calle to become the subject of Calle’s project, Une jeune femme disparaît. Calle expresses the worry that the detective may have lost contact with her and did not witness this important moment that gave meaning to her day:

Calle’s knowledge of the other, the detective in this case, shapes her itinerary for the day: her desire to show him traces of Bénédicte, the missing other, further underscores the absent other at the heart of her project.

The ambiguity between fact and fiction in this project makes any attempt to establish authenticity pointless, thus bolstering Calle’s absolute narrative authority in this closed circuit of her invention. Calle’s narrative intertextualities establish Bénédicte’s story as the basis for Une jeune femme disparaît, which features the story of her disappearance, her burnt negatives, photos of her studio, and an empty chair with an explanation that Bénédicte happened to work as a museum guard in the very galleries of the Centre Pompidou where Calle’s exhibit is housed. The story is too good to be true! And that is the very point. Since the Bénédicte story is so far-fetched and creepy, one wonders if Bénédicte was somehow complicit or collaborated with Calle on this project. The detective’s report in Vingt ans après states that after losing her at the exhibit they waited for Calle at her car until she arrived at 6:20 p.m., the time that Calle has herself leaving Bénédicte’s mother, opening a window of doubt that the inclusion of the Bénédicte story is indeed a narrative parenthesis. Calle asserts her narrative authority at the end by stating, “I don’t even wonder if he’s there, or if he gave up following me hours ago. I don’t really care” (Je me demande pas même pas s’il est là, dehors, ou s’il m’a depuis longtemps, abandonnée. Au fond, ça m’indiffère).^[27] Indeed, the detective’s presence is motivation of her authorial intervention, and the discrepancy between his narrative and hers shores up Calle’s authority since the spectator wants to believe her version.

The distinction between narrative, tales, and ostensibly real events is not always easy to make in Calle’s work. In an interview, Bice Curiger asks about her relationship to the false and the real. She replies:

Calle is referring to her L’hôtel (1984) project, for which she took a job as a maid in a hotel in Venice. Cleaning the rooms gave her access to the guestrooms that she then photographed. The published text consisted of both photographs and descriptions of the objects in the room, a catalog of the occupants’ possessions. The claim that all is true in her work except for a particular aspect that she fabricates raises questions about the construction of the entire project. If the spectator cannot distinguish which element is found or fabricated, then her claim to truth points to the ambiguity of this discernment. By pointing out the invented element of the project, Calle in turn casts doubt on the truth or authenticity claims of her art. Calle, however, “says that her photographic tableaux and texts report the activity between truth and fiction.”^[29] I propose that if truth and fiction bracket her work or delineate the set of her projects, then indeed Calle explores fertile ground between those two extremes. To be exact, she enjoys shuttling the spectator back and forth between the two poles to create a disorienting effect. Johnnie Gratton uses the term “truth value” to describe Calle’s narratives qualitatively. He quotes Paul Auster’s character, Maria, to specify the nature of her work: “‘[Sachs] understood that all of my pieces were stories, and even if they were true stories, they were also invented. Or even if they were invented, they were also true.’”^[30] The “truth value” lies then not in the fact or actual occurrence of the story or event, but rather in the spectator’s or reader’s perception whether the description somehow rings true with the spectator or reader. Likewise, for a true story to be also invented indicates the narrative frame of any event the moment the enunciator relays the story to an interlocutor.

Creating Fictions with Paul Auster

The entire premise of Doubles-jeux (Double Game), a collaborative project with American novelist Paul Auster, is to explore narrative processes, specifically when one story incorporates facts only to modify them into new fictional elements. In his book Leviathan (1992) some aspects of his character Maria are taken from Calle and others are invented. According to Calle, Auster borrowed from a number of her works including “The Wardrobe, The Striptease, To Follow. . . , Suite vénitienne, The Detective, The Hotel, The Address Book, and The Birthday Ceremony” (la suite vénitienne, la garde-robe, le strip-tease, la filature, l’hôtel, le carnet d’adresses, le rituel anniversaire).^[31] On the original of the French copyright page, Calle circles her clue with red ink to ensure that the reader sees it: “The author extends special thanks to Paul Auster for permission to mingle fiction with fact” (L’auteur remercie tout spécialement Paul Auster de l’avoir autorisée à mêler la fiction à la réalité), and Auster likewise thanks Calle using the same formula on his copyright page.^[32] In Double Game, Calle takes on the life of Maria, changes the fictional elements in Maria’s story back to her own, and then uses some of the fictional elements as bases for her own installations. Calle establishes the rules of the project from the onset:

Calle, in turn, chose certain days to live under the sign of the letters specified by Auster.

Challenging the distinction between fact and fiction in this way has significant theoretical consequences for Calle’s work, since it emphasizes the process of narration and storytelling in her projects. By deliberately assuming the actions of a fictive character, she makes her life and art a mise en abyme of narrative creation and brings to life the act of storytelling. Auster’s words become flesh in Calle’s actions and, in turn, return to representation as she is photographed in a blond wig in the Montparnasse cemetery. The repetition of the blond wig in Calle’s work highlights disguise, deception, and temporarily becoming another in addition to showing the false. In De l’obéissance, Livre I, Doubles-jeux, she includes the excerpts of Auster’s texts that were based on her, crosses out the fictional parts in red, and highlights the scenarios represented by her in her series (Livre I, II, III, etc.). This intertextual collaboration demonstrates a deliberate manipulation of the text to show different layers of representations and purported facts of Calle’s life and career that she embeds in the project.

Calle’s establishment of specific criteria—related to control—is a form of ordering, since she mediates the experience. In “Le régime chromatique,” food takes on a color according to the day of the week, as she orders and arranges the daily task of eating in an innovative way. The ordering of the everyday is based on a game between Auster and herself. The artistic project is the mode by which she lives for a given time, or so the story goes. In “Le régime chromatique,” Calle creates and photographs meals for each day of the week:

On Monday, her menu included puréed carrots, boiled prawns, cantaloupe, and orange juice. The daily gesture of eating—an activity most people do without thinking––becomes a game, a carefully planned moment, eating with flair.

Calle wanted to continue their intertextual game and asked Auster to make up a fictional character to whose actions she would try to adhere. She told him that he had complete license to invent what he wished up to a period of a year. He declined, saying that he would not bear that degree of responsibility for someone’s life. Instead, Auster provided instructions on how to live in Manhattan for a week and Calle followed his instructions, photographed installations she created on the street, and recorded a diary of her experiences. In this project, Gotham Handbook (1994, published 1998 in Doubles-Jeux), she decorates a phone booth in New York City, maintains snacks inside it, and smiles at passersby for a week. Once again, Calle lives the fiction created by Auster, which raises questions about the nature of the action once it is enacted. Is it still fiction? The transformation of the fictive into lived experience can be read as a continuation of the narrative or as an experiential interpretation of a story. In either case, it is the narrative turned into lived experience that is of utmost importance, since the experiential element adds another element to the project conceived as art. Auster takes events in Calle’s life and transforms them into fiction, and Calle in turn takes up the fiction in his text and lives it. This back and forth between her life and the fictional character raises the question about whether there is indeed a true “fact” which is the starting point—the project within a project is already the moment of departure.

The Role of the Other

The visual element in Calle’s work is fundamentally significant, since she photographs her happening or the object of study and then explains her perception of it in narrative form. She does not rely on one technique to the exclusion of the other but uses both to create a unique point of view and way of seeing her daily life and others’ place within it. In 1992, Calle departed briefly from still photography and experimented with video to create another version of herself as artist in No Sex Last Night.^[36] Although the form differs from her previous work since she shares artistic control with Greg Shephard, this project makes even more visible her modus operandi: she profoundly needs the narrative other in order to exist as an artist.

Calle’s video in collaboration with Greg Shephard, No Sex Last Night, is an important example of art producing life as well as a mise en scène of the quotidian. In the tape, Calle uses video as a means of capturing her body, the everyday, and her life on a road trip as the object of the video project. Calle and Shephard, using two video cameras, recorded their trip from New York to the West Coast. They videotape each other, the landscape, daily occurrences, and their conversations. Each morning Calle reports, with a corresponding shot of an empty bed, “no sex last night.” The form of the journal intime for Calle and Shephard creates ample opportunity for narrative commentary to emerge throughout the video, since it is ideal for both the revelation of intimate thoughts and daily encounters. The spectator is often left wondering whom to believe, since their perspectives often contradict one another.

In the video, Greg comments that he was first attracted to Sophie because she constantly reinvents herself. He explains: “Being with Sophie means being willing to become subject matter because there is no separation between her work and her life. Her art is how she invents her life” (my emphasis).^[37] He too maintains the narrative of her art as life: through her art, her life takes form. This is similar to Cabrera’s assertion, but qualitatively different since Calle does not offer authenticity to her spectators but absolute authority. Her art is presented through the filter of her life, but the representational bracketing of these expériences makes them first and foremost art.

The excuse to make the video was a way for Calle to be with Greg a little bit longer. She uses the creation of art as a way for her to live with him for at least the duration of the road trip. In the opening voiceover, she explains that the two had plans to drive cross-country, but due to the deterioration of their relationship, she was afraid that he would refuse to go and she therefore proposed that they make a film. Calle weaves the narrative background of the project:

The choice to use two cameras arose from a practical consideration, but its aesthetic consequences are important, since each camera simultaneously presents the point of view of the videographer and the image of the other being filmed. Both capture their perspective and their way of seeing, but more importantly they record how the other person is seen.

The cameras serve a dual function in this video: they are not only journals in which each confides, but also a means by which the two are able to talk to one other. The possibility for communication through the act of filming underscores the importance of mediation through the technological intervention of the camera. In other words, the mode of art, in this case video, facilitates communication since the camera serves as an initial point of contact and the overall project motivates their actions. I would like to use “Sophie” to denote the person in the tape and “Calle” as the videographer; this distinction, however, is difficult to maintain and points to the collapse between the two in this project and in her work in general. In the car, Sophie confronts Greg about making a phone call to a woman in New York and immediately picks up her camera (he highlights the fact that when she asked him to talk about it, she picked up her camera). The sequence is in shot-reverse-shot form, with both having turns to speak. After Sophie explains that she felt bad waiting in the cold parking lot while Greg ostensibly went to the bathroom, she lowers the camera from her eye and Greg asks if he may respond. His explanation of what happened corresponds to a shot of him cut off at the eyes; the point of view is consistent with the position of Sophie’s camera on her lap. An interesting juxtaposition arises: the image of the other and the corresponding revelation of feelings depend on the other’s point of view. Greg captures Sophie’s image and vice versa.

The use of the two cameras reveals a dependence on the other for existence. Sophie films what she sees, even films herself in the mirror; however, the majority of the images of her come from Greg’s camera, which serves as a counterpoint to her point of view. Likewise, the images of Greg originate from the way in which she sees and considers him. The interplay between the two cameras suggests that ways of looking at others and one’s daily life are shaped by a need to be affirmed by the other.

Once again, Calle needs the affirmation of the other to confirm her existence, her visual existence in this case. The scrutiny under which the two place each other, themselves, and their surroundings illustrates a way of looking that seeks out the location of the other and self-representation as well. In this case, self-representation is interpolated through the interaction with the other: Calle’s resultant image is a composite of images of herself that she records and Greg’s vision and impressions, demonstrating the complexity and multiple praxis of self-representation.

Fact and fiction and the interplay between the two are important in Calle’s work, but in this case the presence of the two cameras in this scene provokes a moment of authenticity since Calle cannot fully control the expérience. The shot-reverse-shot pattern allows both Sophie and Greg to express themselves: the cameras act as shields, protecting one from the other, but also facilitate conversation due to this layer of protection. This moment proves to be fleeting, and Sophie reverts to control tactics to attain what she wants. Despite the fact that Greg seems to be having a long-distance relationship with a woman in New York and shows no desire for Calle, she proposes that they get married in Las Vegas and insists until Greg gives her an answer. Apparently, she had the idea even before the trip started and Greg anxiously wonders on the road: “When is she going to bring up the whole Vegas wedding idea that she’s had since before the trip?”^[39] Sophie likewise thinks about when she should bring it up, considers not pursuing the idea, and finally asks him whether or not they’re going to get married in Las Vegas. In order to force Greg to give her a response, she gives him a two-hour deadline. Then she says that the hotel they choose would depend on whether or not they marry, forcing the other to participate by establishing arbitrary criteria that must be met. The confluence of video, reality, marriage, and seduction of the other resembles a reality television series avant la lettre; the artistic and representational bracketing of this project, however, makes it more theoretically engaging since Calle uses art as a motivation for the everyday details of life, for instance, driving, sleeping, and eating.

Both participate in a narrative of seduction, refusal of desire, manipulation (her imposing her will on him), and dependency: a back and forth dance. Lack of desire, sleeping, eating, and getting the car fixed fit into a larger narrative that both Calle and Shephard create simultaneously, but separately. There is, however, an uncomfortable element of prostitution or financial bargaining in No Sex Last Night—she supports Greg financially on this trip and knows that he needs the money and cannot afford to leave. She also paid a professional writer one hundred francs for her first love letter.^[40] Calle buys what should be given freely—in these cases, company and expression of love. The video—a narrative of refused desire of a woman, age thirty-nine at the time, who has never been married and who is not able to attain any sex or desire—is another seduction project based on absence. The mantra “no sex last night” punctuates her frustration and makes her marriage proposal to Greg even more poignant, albeit incredible: she needs the narrative other.

The fascinating layers of narration and observation in this video expose the process of creating fiction. Both Calle and Shephard weave stories for the other––anecdotes, lies, and tales. The moments when they talk into the camera are ostensible moments of authenticity that break through the narrative fabrication. However, even these moments raise doubt or at least further questions: was this indeed filmed at the time of the shooting or afterwards? The spectator gets glimpses of what each is feeling and thinking, but their personal thoughts do not evoke confidence.^[41] Their video journal seems to be another narrative form as each justifies behavior and lies to the other. Greg, for example, talks to his camera for at least a few minutes when Sophie asks him about what he is thinking. He tersely replies: “Nothing.”^[42] Both a technical and narrative question is raised during analysis of this video. When were the voiceovers recorded? During the wedding scene in Las Vegas, for example, the internal thoughts of Sophie and Greg are heard in voiceover in-between the saying of the vows; that is, they could not have been recorded simultaneously with the actual filmed sequence. If they recorded the voiceover later, some thoughts could have been added during the editing of the film, which raises questions about the authenticity of their seemingly in-the-moment reflections. If passages were added during the editing process, by nature of the time delay the thoughts then would become “narrativized,” since Calle and Shephard would have had time to think about their feelings and reactions. Their comments would tell a story, rather than be a spontaneous recording of thoughts and emotions. If the two recorded their reflections shortly after the wedding, in a hotel room, for example, their comments would be still somewhat spontaneous; however, the fact that they could not have been recorded at the wedding, but are presented as simultaneous in the final edited version of the film, is a narrative sleight of hand that may go unnoticed by the spectator.

The narrative drive of the video depends on the marriage scene, since the story needs a denouement. During the editing of the film, the two learn the private thoughts of the other spoken to the camera. In Las Vegas, she wonders what made Greg change his mind about marrying her; later she learns that he did it to add dramatic interest to the film. Greg’s voiceover in the film explains that he woke up and told Sophie that he wanted to get married: he told her first thing in the morning so that he would not change his mind. Her motivations to get married are never clearly expressed either; she does mention that now she can tell her mother she will not be an old maid, which indicates the importance of her mother for the artist, especially as a figure in her work. Perhaps her reasons were similar to Greg’s desire to make the video more interesting. In any case, the video both produces and reflects their life; the artistic decision produced a life event: the two were legally married in a wedding drive-thru in Las Vegas. This is one of the most striking examples in Calle’s work of art producing life. Greg even muses that if he had known that the person issuing the marriage license would not check his identification, he would have used a false name. Legal marriage is only one effect of the video since the story continues after the video. After its completion Calle engages in a couple of artistic projects based on her marriage, including agreeing to a divorce published in Des histoires vraies (1994, 2002).^[43] The divorce can be read both as another episode in the story and as a legal action that dissolves the union since the two-month trial period that Calle proposes clearly did not work out.

The repetition of the same stories throughout Calle’s work suggests a strong need to tell the same stories over and over in new contexts, always through the other. In No Sex Last Night, for instance, the voiceovers of stories that Calle tells throughout the road trip appear spontaneous, but in fact she repeats several stories that have been previously published in Des histoires vraies, without drawing attention to this fact. In Des histoires vraies, she tells short stories based on past life experiences and includes corresponding photos to illustrate them.^[44] The second edition of this text, Des histoires vraies + 10, includes ten additional stories and some formatting changes. These new stories take up the narrative and journalistic thread left off in the video No Sex Last Night. She tells of a fight that she and Greg had in the spring of 1992: she used their wedding photo in front of the drive-thru chapel to cover up the hole in the wall left by a thrown telephone. She also documented a fake wedding between them in France that summer: she had a photo taken of herself in a white wedding dress with Greg, friends, and family in front of the neighborhood church in Malakoff, a Parisian suburb. She said that their fake civil ceremony was conducted by a real civil servant. This blending of the fake and the real highlights similar processes involved in the coexistence of fact and fiction in Calle’s work: she needs the ambiguity to create an element of truth. The most telling line of her text is the following one: “I crowned the truest story of my life with a fake marriage” (Je couronnais d’un faux mariage l’histoire la plus vraie de ma vie).^[45] Her claim that a fabricated event is the most true or authentic moment for her indicates the power of narrative to reveal truth. Moreover, Calle’s assertion points to a convoluted effect of her storytelling: she needs others and the act of storytelling to attain a level of authenticity.

M’as-tu vue Exhibit: Narrative Showing Off

The Centre Pompidou’s exhibit of Sophie Calle’s work, M’as-tu vue, which ran from November 2003 through March 2004, not only indicates an increased interest in her work but also affirms her status as an important contemporary artist. This retrospective exhibit, a combination of old work and new projects displayed for the first time, illustrated Calle’s continuation of narrative fabrication through visual and textual means. The two most striking pieces of the exhibit were Douleur exquise (1984–2003) and Une jeune femme disparaît, the story of Bénédicte Vincens, featured in the last room. The former project occupies the first three rooms of the exhibit: the first room is entitled “Avant la douleur” and the third room is called “Après la douleur.” The middle room is a reconstructed hotel room where Calle received the phone call that ended her relationship: the spectator walks through a hotel door labeled 261 into a room with two beds with clothes strewn on one of them, carpet, a lamp, and the infamous red telephone. The third room of Douleur exquise featured the alternation of her story of the painful breakup of that relationship with other people’s stories of suffering. The repetition and distillation of her story produce variations that become more and more interesting in their reduction. Her narrative, the construction of art in the guise of life, alternates with the stories of lived experience of others. The construction of this entire exhibit, the form and physical presentation of her work, reflects the artist’s constant manipulation of images and narratives: it also mirrors the continual narrative transformation of herself as an artist through the repetition of different stories.

An unreferenced intertextuality is embedded in the very first part of the exhibit: the first section of the Douleur exquise project had been previously packaged as Anatoli (1984).^[46] Calle takes an incident, a breakup with a boyfriend, in the 1980s and transforms it into a project in 2003. She gives the background to the end of her relationship:

Calle’s comments reveal the juxtaposition between her travel departure and the ensuing emotional upheaval: combining photos, love letters, and passports with text, she creates the story of the ninety-two days leading up to their breakup. The first room of Douleur exquise consists of ninety-two individually framed documents that bear a stamp, for example “J-2,” indicating the number of the day (“J” stands in for “jour”) prior to the painful breakup. Just as an office assistant stamps a date received on a document, Calle processes each image: the mediation of the stamp fixes it in order for her to make sense of it, leaving a trace for others. The act and the visible sign are ways for Calle both to mark and emotionally process the information, so she can move on and not dwell on it. The phrase “X days to unhappiness” suggests a reading of the days leading up to the separation in terms of the event to come. Meaning is assigned retroactively in the anticipation of day zero.

The third room of Douleur exquise, labeled “Après la douleur,” featured twenty-eight large rectangular tapestries of variations of Calle’s story alternated with twenty-eight white tapestries of stories of the most painful moment in the lives of others, including strangers. She explains:

Calle chooses to dissipate her emotional pain by telling the same story over and over again until both the story and the pain have been exhausted. Strangely, it is Calle’s distilled story of the breakup told over and over again with interesting variation, repetitions, and transformations that becomes more compelling than the most painful moment in other people’s lives. Even though some of the stories treat topics more grave than a breakup, the death of a loved one, for example, they lack the narrative charge of the ensemble of the variations of Calle’s story.^[49] Each embroidered tapestry of her story gradually changes in color from black to gray, reflecting the permutations of the content, while the other people’s text remains constant, black on white.

Calle’s second video project, Unfinished, shown at the exhibit reveals a highly reflexive mode of artistic creation: her inability to find an idea became the idea of the video. The enactment of the creative process, her ideas and dead ends, becomes the substance of the project in a way similar to Akerman’s self-portrait. In Akerman’s case, she had the idea for the project but did not have confidence that it is the best one possible until she had vetted all other possibilities. In Calle’s case, she has the raw material for the project but not the organizing idea, which she deems a failure. Calle explains the background of the project:

Calle’s observation of people at the ATMs without their consent continues the theme of watching and even spying. The significant difference between this project and her other work is that in this case she had the material, but not the idea, which would reinforce the claim by some that she is a conceptual artist.

Although Calle has often been called a conceptual artist, there is disputed opinion about the role of conceptual art in her work. Calle sidesteps the issue by calling herself a narrative artist.^[51] Some critics see strong ties between conceptual art and her work but acknowledge important differences between the two. Conceptual art can be broadly defined as art that “communicates message and meaning through more permanent media, two-dimensional or three-dimensional or both, often in combination with printed text. The primary purpose is to convey an idea or a concept with whatever visual means are available.”^[52] Whether or not one labels Calle as a conceptual artist determines to a certain extent how she is situated in terms of larger debates in the art world. As Kathleen Merrill argues:

Her early projects, Les dormeurs, Suite vénitienne, and La filature, demonstrate the approach of documentation through observations and photographs, but she does not make any claims to truth. In fact, she does the opposite. “Though they have the ‘look’ of narrative or conceptual art, Calle’s works are neither documentations of performances nor deliberate comments on the relations of image and text or of art object and viewer. In carefully orchestrated episodes, she casts herself in her work as a willful and manipulative artist,” comments Sheena Wagstaff.^[54] Guy Scarpetta also argues against the idea of Calle as a conceptual artist since the role of the artist does not disappear in her work, but in fact depends on her intervention for its conception. By placing herself at the center of her work, she creates a very individualized situation.^[55]

Although Calle’s projects are imbedded within a tightly constructed narrative, her action as mediation is a necessary element. She is acutely aware of her role in the process: “What was my role in the all this? I needed to act” (Quel était mon rôle? J’avais besoin d’action).^[56] Her need to alter substantially what she sees indicates that her artistic agency was the missing glue of Unfinished. Indeed, the story of this search for her missing idea, how to act, becomes the story itself. She wonders if she cannot measure up to the expectations of the American bank that sent her these photos; perhaps the detail is merely part of the narrative. She wants to be through with these images, with these people waiting for their transactions to process. Telling the story of her failure, her inability to come up with a good idea for the project, becomes the story of the video. She punctuates key moments in trying to find an idea:

Calle surmises that she should accept these silent images and be quiet. The notion of toleration is tied to this project, since Calle believes that she was not suffering enough to make a project on the topic. A tale of failure is the story—the emptiness at the center of the project occupies the narrative space. In light of Douleur exquise, it is not surprising that suffering would be part of the criteria for her creative production.^[58] Her choice to use an English title to capture the incompleteness of this project is interesting, as if to create a linguistic distance between herself as the artist and the project that she deems a failure.

The title of the exhibit, however, M’as-tu vue, implicates Calle in the title by the gendered linguistic marker of the “e” while emphasizing the importance of vision and observation. In a similar way to Akerman’s stuck “e” on the keyboard in Le jour où . . ., Calle references her gender now as an established artist by indicating the feminine gender of the speaker at the end of the title, M’as-tu vue. The title’s literal meaning, “did you see me?” indeed evokes sight and observation, but the colloquial meaning of the phrase in French is translated in the English version of the exhibit catalog as “a show off” or someone or something that is “too flashy” and defined as an “allusion to the question with which actors draw attention to their success. Vain person.”^[59] The cover of the exhibit book and the posters of the exhibit feature a medium close-up of Calle covering her left eye and half of her face with her left hand, obscuring her image. This is an obvious play with sight, observation, and vision, since she is covering her eye as if she were testing her vision in an eye exam. The title of the exhibit is in the form of the optometrist’s eye chart. Her name, coupled with the image of her body, is a metonymy for her work, emphasizing the importance of reading, interpreting, and decoding meaning.

Calle’s preoccupation with observation throughout her work is linked to her continual transformation of herself as an artist: by observing others and using their stories, she creates her own narratives and images of herself as the artist through visual and textual means. The last room of the exhibit, featuring La filature and Une jeune femme disparaît, reinforces this very importance of observation. To the right of the exit of the exhibit is a mirror with the phrase “M’avez-vous vue?” labeled above it and the title “L’Ombre de Bénédicte” (“Bénédicte’s Shadow”) next to it. Calle shifts from the “tu” form in the exhibit title to the formal “vous” form without an explanation for the change in linguistic register. The following quote featured on the wall brings together the theme of observation in La filature, Vingt ans après, Une jeune femme disparaît, and the entire exhibit:

This could be read as another narrative detail for the spectator, except for the fact that I saw Calle on two separate occasions at the exhibit! The first time I saw her was toward the end of the “Avant la douleur” room: I was waiting to view the next document when I looked up and saw Calle walking out of the recreated hotel room. She paused, looked around, and turned back into the room. By the time I reacted and followed her through the room, she had disappeared. I checked all of the rooms but could not find her. I later learned when I spoke with her on a different occasion that she was looking for someone. I saw her a second time on a different visit to the exhibit being introduced to a guided tour group: interestingly she stayed at the exhibit and watched a portion of Unfinished. Her interactions with the exhibit resembled those of a visitor, but I surmise that she was observing other people more than her own work. Her very presence at the exhibit, coupled with the observation of the museum goers, is not only the epitome of the exhibit title but captures the significance of vision for her artistic self-representation overall.

Storytelling through the Other as an Established Contemporary Artist

In Calle’s more recent work, the telling of stories and interactions with strangers has continued to inform her work as an artist; one such example is her collaboration with Frank Gehry to create a telephone booth, Le téléphone (2006), commissioned by the city of Paris. Calle, along with eight other contemporary artists including Christian Boltanski and Claude Lévêque, created a piece for the new tramway so passengers could see art on their daily commute. Gehry designed the telephone booth to resemble a blooming flower and Calle included an inscription that explains that she would call the telephone booth periodically to exchange a story with the interlocutor who picks up the phone. She committed to calling the telephone booth five times a week for three years—the established premise—but the particular story being told would depend on the passerby.^[61] Storytelling, a temporary exchange with a stranger, and the element of chance highlight continued themes of separateness and ruptures between people in her work; however, the narrative impetus behind these projects foregrounds her ongoing efforts to tell a story with the desire that the other person will engage with her. If no one picks up the phone, for instance, she will not be able to tell her story, thus suggesting the heightened importance of the other in recent work.

In Calle’s work between 2006 and 2012 themes of the absent other and separation assume a different register from her previous work, which not only demonstrates a change in her work during this period but also a shifting perspective of her role as the artist in relationship to the other. In her exhibit for the Venice Biennale in 2007, for example, Calle employs the other, text, and image, but the role of the other becomes more acute in the execution of the project. In Prenez soin de vous (2007), a project that features the interpretation of a breakup e-mail by 107 professional women, themes of absence, seduction, lack of desire, loss, and chance coupled with control dominate. In her usual fashion, Calle masterminds the situation, but this time, she delegates the work to others—they create the texts instead of her. This textual outsourcing if you will points out that Calle executes the idea and pens her name to the project, but the others must do the heavy lifting in order for there to be a project at all. The opening page of the enticing, shiny, hot-pink book explains the premise:

The formal address and the use of “vous” in the e-mail, and subsequently in the title, emphasize linguistically the distance between the author of the e-mail and the artist, which spawns her narrative. In an interview, Calle summarizes the project, but a brief moment of inattention exposes her narrative tendencies. She explains that a man left her, so she started telling the story of the breakup. She catches herself right away and says that she started telling how it happened.^[63] Emma Wilson links the artistic project Douleur exquise, which also arose out of a failed relationship, to this one: “Prenez soin de vous seems to take up a similar challenge as Calle makes an excursion through the other to soothe herself and, at the same time, to interrogate the art of intimacy.”^[64] Her lover—the other—may have been the one to sever the relationship, but Calle turns to many others to take care of herself, as he recommends.

The disappearance of the other foregrounds the necessity of the other amplified in Calle’s later work: Pas pu saisir la mort (2007) investigates this very necessity by recording its disappearance. This project, exhibited in the International Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, features the video of Calle’s dying mother, the disappearing other, and the quintessential representation of the absent other. In French un disparu, literally one who is disappeared, means a dead or missing person (Calle also plays with this double meaning in the story of Bénédicte in Une jeune femme disparaît). On February 15, 2006, Calle received a telephone call informing her that she had been selected to represent France at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Such an honor places her among some of the best contemporary French artists; Annette Messager, Claude Lévêque, and Christian Boltanski have also exhibited their work in the French Pavilion in other years. Immediately after the first call, she received a second one informing her that her mother, Monique Sindler, had only a month to live. Wilson cites Calle’s text, explaining “the concept behind the installation. . . : “When I told her about Venice, she said: ‘To think that I won’t be there.’ She is here’” (Quand je lui ai parlé de Venise, elle a dit: “Quand je pense que je n’y serai pas.” Elle y est).^[65] The creation of Pas pu saisir la mort, an installation featuring an eleven-minute looping video of her mother as she lay dying at home, allows her mother to be present at the international art exhibition that marks Calle as a premier contemporary artist. The Prenez soin de vous exhibit, featured in the French Pavilion, also includes a letter from and photo of her mother. Wilson notes that very little has been written about the centrality of Calle’s mother to both projects and the correspondence between the two images of her mother separated by the exposition garden: one still photo depicting her full of life and the other a video image showing a still, pale, dying figure.^[66] In future work, I hope to build on Wilson’s work to help fill this critical void about the significance of Calle’s mother in her work, especially in projects in 2007.

In the beginning, Calle followed people to give herself meaning, which became art; at this moment where the meaning is too much, she reverts to the artistic process in order to break away from the significance of her mother’s imminent death. In an interview, Calle explains that she wanted to be by her mother’s side at all times as she lay dying. She had heard that often people who are dying choose to die when their loved ones leave the room for a few seconds to get a glass of water, for example. Calle wanted absolutely to be there at the exact moment her mother died. Calle adapted the rhythm of her life to be with her dying mother—she claims to have stopped sleeping and eating so she could be with her constantly. Recording the last hours of her mother’s life also allowed Calle to know and to record her last words and her last gestures. Managing the video camera also became a way for her to transfer her anxiety from worrying about when her mother would die to when she would need to change the sixty-minute cassette. Calle focuses her attention on the minutes remaining on the instrument of record rather than on the minutes her mother had left to live.^[67] Calle employs this ritual as a means of control, but also to provide comfort for herself. She acknowledges her mother’s complicity and explains that her mother knew what she was doing and consented to the documentation of her death; her friends thought it was fine, too. Wilson underscores the notion of the game that is central to Calle’s art: “The poignancy of Pas pu saisir la mort, and I think that this is what the installation asks the beholder to confront, is that it offers an image of the mother absenting herself, of the mother withdrawing from the daughter’s game of death.”^[68] While Calle’s application of certain rules or rituals to her mother’s death appears macabre, it is consistent with her methodology. The fact that she relies on the artistic process to record and to document the soon-to-be-absent other, however, makes the sense of loss weigh heavy in the image.

Calle’s inability to control the disappearing other is central to Pas pu saisir la mort, since she can only manage the contingent details of death, but not death itself. Although Calle was in the room when her mother was dying and witnessed her last book read, the last piece of music to which she listened, her last words, and her last smile, Calle could not perceive her last breath, the exact moment when she died. The spectator who watches the eleven-minute video cannot make the distinction either between life and death. Calle was able to put her finger on everything else except the elusive moment of death, which was impossible to seize or to grasp. The nurse’s verification of the pulse indicates that her mother has indeed died, and that they thought that the end was imminent, but her lack of consciousness as she lay dying makes the transition impossible to detect from outside visual perception. The ambiguity between life and death at the end of her mother’s life reflects the general blurring between fact and fiction in Calle’s work; in this case, the disappearing other makes this liminal space a little more intelligible for the spectator.

The distance between Calle and her mother, the disappearing other, is mediated by the camera: the aesthetic distance eliminates the emotional charge. The medical verification of her mother’s pulse, the touch of the nurse, contrasts with the lack of physical touch on Calle’s part. The spectator wonders if this was her mother’s wish. Was Calle not sure that she was actually dying? Wilson interprets this lack of physical comfort as both a protective distance for the daughter and a chosen aesthetics for the project. Calle’s desire to be with her mother in the room at the exact moment she dies contradicts the lack of physical contact, or perhaps the lack of physical contact anticipates their physical separation. The technology of the camera creates a distance between Calle and her mother, allowing her to manage her anticipated pain and grieving. Wilson notes “Calle’s own relative absence from the image,”^[69] which suggests a retreat from visual self-exposure. In addition, I contend that the artist’s absent image further registers the absent other in this project.

Calle’s three-part project, Où et quand? (2008–2009), a collaboration with a clairvoyant, Maud Kristen, also foregrounds absence, especially her mother as the absent other, in significant ways. The first book, Où et quand? Berck (2008), establishes the premise of the project: the artist wants to know her future in order to go out and meet it head-on by following the clairvoyant’s instructions through text messages.^[70] Calle wants Maud Kristen to tell her: “Where? When? What?” (Où? Quand? Quoi?), but “she refused. . . . Where and When? Nothing more” (Elle avait refusé. J’avais réduit mes ambitions: Où et Quand? Pas plus).^[71] This demurral is reminiscent of Auster’s refusal to play the way Calle would like: the clairvoyant did not want to give her orders, but only use her intuitive talents and parapsychological skills to help Calle in her artistic work. She notes that Maud still consulted her cards for this project.

By seeking out others to tell her what to do, to give her specific prescriptions to which she must adhere, Calle uses the other as a form of control. The other temporarily fills a void, a general emptiness at the center of her projects. Both Auster and Maud Kristen tempered Calle’s request, so that she still has to assume responsibility for her choices. The clairvoyant reads the cards and tells her to ask people what they lost from their childhood. Berck, a seaside town with numerous hospitals, has a large quantity of convalescents. Although Calle asked blind people to describe beauty for a past project, Les aveugles (1986), she did not seem up to the task of asking what was missing to someone in a wheelchair. She instead poses the question to an elderly woman who is able to walk. This woman who introduces herself as Mémé and never gives her real name informs Calle that she has not lost anything, and immediately demands that Calle follow her. The artist is relieved to have someone who is willing to order her about. The pages of the second half of the book document the transcription of the DVD. The materiality of the text, featuring transparent pages pleasant to touch, fosters a haptic reading experience. Traces of Calle linger in this project: her shadow and her voice, but we do not see her directly. Calle finds comfort in following the rules of the project and reminds herself that it is no use wondering why she is in this depressing town. She states, “I am here because it is the rule of the game” (J’y suis parce que c’est la règle du jeu).^[72] The following of rules that she puts in place has become the most salient element of her work: “Obeying the rules, wandering under control, and the relief of not having to judge the events” (L’obéissance aux règles, l’errance sous contrôle, le soulagement de ne pas avoir à juger les événements).^[73] When Calle returns from Berck, she feels encouraged by the success of the experience, signs, and coincidences, so she returns to Maud to find out where she should go next.

The absent other, Calle’s mother who died in 2006, occupies a central place in the second book, Où et quand ? Lourdes (2009): the cards send Calle to Lourdes with the hope that her mother might be cured when she is first diagnosed with breast cancer.^[74] This project published in 2009 features the attempts Calle made to prevent her mother from dying three years before, including a turn to religion for a fleeting hope of a miracle. The artist notes that the Catholic Church has documented sixty-seven cures of illnesses, but not one single case of a recovery from breast cancer. She wants to attempt to save her mother’s life by bringing her to Lourdes for a cure but accepts that it is already too late to save her since the doctors have diagnosed that she will only have three more months to live. In a different variation of control, religion or the Church, in this case, tells her what to do: the directive is to accept her mother’s imminent death.

Calle, as always, stages the project, but she needs the other as a central figure in the work: the absent other reveals the pain of impermanence and the inability to be fixed despite the artist’s attempts to do so. In this case, Calle’s actual self-representation in image form is minimal, which further emphasizes the importance of the other. She sends a photo of her face via her phone to Maud Kristen: the cards’ orders were clear: “Come back immediately” (Rentrez vite).^[75] A close-up image of a tired and haggard-looking Calle contrasts with the image of her on the front cover that Jean-Baptiste Mondino took before. She incarnates a crying Madonna figure with exaggerated black eyeliner running from her eyes and donning a pink shroud. Although the visual allusion to the Virgin Mary is clear, she inserts herself as a Madonna figure while knowing very little about Catholic tradition, specifically the Mass rituals. She asks her friends how she should address the Virgin Mary and queries the local priest about grace and salvation, which introduces the ideas of acceptance and surrender into the project.

Going nowhere in the last book of her triptych, Nulle part, Calle foregrounds the other and storytelling by indirectly exploring practices of reading and interpretation. L’Intelligence, the psychic force Maud consults, refuses numerous times to play with Calle and even evokes the first name of Maria, Paul Auster’s character based on Sophie Calle. Maud consults several books, flips through the text, and chooses a sentence, and interprets it. She summarizes the refusal to engage in Calle’s project by referencing the artist’s previous work with Auster: “Paul Auster—who previously refused to play with you as I am doing” (Paul Auster—qui avait autrefois refusé de jouer avec vous comme je le fais).^[76] The photos of hands holding the books underscores that the project ends up as an exercise in reading interpretation, since no destination is provided. Despite the refusal of the psychic forces to engage with her, Calle decides to go to the North Pole, since that was one of her mother’s wishes that she never fulfilled; Calle decides to go in her mother’s place. The artist asserts her resolution to go somewhere:

In an interview, Calle explains that she goes to the North Pole to leave a photo of her mother and a diamond; now, she can say that her mother has been to the North Pole.^[78] Calle organizes her project around the wishes of her mother as the absent other: the artist turns to her absent mother for a directive about what to do. Even in her physical absence, Calle’s mother influences and controls the artist’s actions.

Calle continues the interplay between the other and storytelling by highlighting the ambiguity between the fake and the original in a story about her mother’s necklace. Echoing Baudrillard’s simulacra, Calle mixes copies and originals. She removed her mother’s necklace after her mother’s death to avoid a possible theft, but decided to keep it and not bury it with her mother. She also bought an identical necklace to have a replacement, but then mixed up the two, so she does not know which necklace was the one her mother always wore. Calle explains:

Although the two necklaces look identical, only one necklace holds the story of her mother’s life if you will. The two necklaces reflect the narrative processes at work in her artistic endeavors: she proliferates stories, but the spectator or reader is not able to discern if there is an originating one or an initial true event. Although a distinction cannot be made, this blurring between the fake and the original, between fact and fiction, occurs in a representational space where they both have the same value, which suggests that ambiguity holds the most artistic capital of all.

The desire to know the truth behind the narratives is strong, and one that Calle consciously manipulates. In a television interview, Frédéric Taddeï asks her: “And what if everything were false?” (Et si tout était faux?).^[80] He asks her what it would mean if the clairvoyant did not exist or if Calle herself had written all of the interpretations of the e-mail for Prenez soin de vous. She replies by saying that he is the one who has to answer that question. He insists: “Reassure us that it’s true” (Rassurez-nous que c’est vrai).^[81] Calle asks: “Would you like it to be true?” (Voulez-vous que ce soit vrai?).^[82] To which he responds: “I would prefer that it were true . . . it would be more amusing if it were true” (Je préfère que ce soit vrai . . . ce serait plus amusant si c’est vrai).^[83] She reassures him: “Well then, it’s true, it’s true” (Ben, c’est vrai, c’est vrai).^[84] Taddeï sees through her game: “And if I had said that I would prefer it to be false, you would have told me that it was false” (Et si j’avais dit que je préférais que ce soit faux, vous m’auriez dit que c’était faux).^[85] Calle avoids an answer: “I don’t know” (Je ne sais pas).^[86] She then tries to explain her narrative choices:

On one hand, Calle is merely stating the obvious methodology of all artists or authors, that of choice and the narrative that arises from certain choices, from elimination of certain details to an emphasis on others. She, however, is playing with the reader’s desire for truth and refuses to be pinned down, since the interest of her work lies in this compelling wish to believe in her stories that are by definition, stories.

Calle continues to engage in projects that emphasize her relationship with others, especially with her mother, and highlight the ambiguity between the intimate and the public, between fact and fiction. In 2010, she exhibited Rachel, Monique in Tokyo and redesigned it for the Église des Célestins in Avignon in June 2012. The exhibit features photos, videos, personal objects, and short texts of Calle’s mother, who had multiple monikers: Rachel, Monique, Szyndler, Calle, Pagliero, Gonthier, Sindler.^[88] The proliferation of her names reflects a familial multiplicity that Calle exploits in her work. In her usual fashion, Calle’s live presence at the exhibit in Avignon is key and demonstrates an interactive approach to her art: she read from her mother’s journal at random moments. Her mother bequeathed sixteen notebooks to her daughter that cover sixteen discontinuous years from 1981 and 2000 with full awareness that Calle would probably use them in her work.^[89] This ongoing engagement with her absent mother reveals the important place in Calle’s art that this disparue holds.

In Moi aussi (2012), Calle, who references herself in the title, links herself to a famous other, former French president François Mitterrand, which I contend is an attempt to raise the stakes of her authority by establishing a parallel with a world leader. This project demonstrates an excessive accumulation of objects and traces of events: Calle’s birthday presents and gifts Mitterrand received during his presidency. In her usual fashion, Calle publishes a book based on the exhibit at the Musée du Septennant. She explains her project:

Calle boldly makes a parallel between herself and a highly visible former president and world leader through objects, presents that they both received over a fourteen-year span. This project is another iteration of her “Rituel anniversaire” published in Doubles-jeux in which she put her birthday gifts in a glass casing for each year. Calle encases daily objects to bracket them as art, establishing a curatorial framework for these objects. The project, Moi aussi, takes up the original premise of the first project, but connects the established artist with one of the most influential French presidents: she employs the other to bolster her artistic status.

Conclusion

Throughout Calle’s body of work, she employs orchestrated reflexivity purposely to confound her art and her life. The body of the artist that is produced through her artistic projects therefore differs from the other artists in this study, since her artistic body is in constant flux and formed by the stories she tells. At the interstices of text and image, her narrative body is chameleon in form, changing with each idea she has.^[91] The innovation of Calle’s art suggests that by weaving stories, provoking experiences, and using others in convoluted ways, an artist can forge her way in the world, albeit with very specific premises.

Moreover, throughout Calle’s career, the other, the disappearing or dying other in her later work in particular, gives purpose to her art. She adds a macabre twist that reveals an oversaturation of meaning—an intense intimate moment that needs to be distilled by art. The dying other, soon to be absent, illustrates a physical separation and loss that mirrors a general emptiness and void in her work.^[92] Calle’s subsequent projects about her mother, her excursion to the North Pole and the 2012 exhibit, demonstrate that the absent other gives shape to her work through the interplay between the other and storytelling.

Notes

See Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham, “Introduction” in The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture, ed. Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham (New York: Berghahn, 2005): 18–24.

Ginger Danto, “Sophie the Spy,” ARTnews, May 1993, 100.

Sophie Calle, “In Conversation with Bice Curiger,” in Talking Art 1, ed. Adrian Searle, (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1993), 29.

“Sophie Calle,” directed by Ben Lewis, Art Safari, on ARTE, Paris, March 30, 2010, originally aired in 2006.

Danto, “Sophie the Spy,” 101.

Ibid., 101–2.

Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross, eds., “Introduction,” to Everyday Life, edited by Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross, Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 2.

Sophie Calle, Les dormeurs (Arles: Actes sud, 2000).

Kathleen Merrill, “Proofs: The Work of Sophie Calle,” in Sophie Calle: Proofs, ed. Kathleen Merrill and Lawrence Rinder (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1993), 12.

10.

Sophie Calle, Suite vénitienne (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1983).

11.

Pierre-Jean Valentin, Il n’y a proprement parler une histoire . . . (Rennes: Maison de la Culture de Rennes, 1983), n.p.

My translation.

12.

Sophie Calle, Suite vénitienne, trans. Dany Barash and Danny Hatfield (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1988), 76.

Translation modified.

Calle, Suite vénitienne, 82.

See Jean Baudrillard, De la séduction (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1981).

13.

Shirley Ann Jordan, “Exhibiting Pain: Sophie Calle’s Douleur exquise,” French Studies 61, no. 2 (2007): 196.

14.

Ce soir (ou jamais!), narr. Frédéric Taddeï, on France 3, Paris, May 22, 2008.

15.

Ibid.

16.

Calle, “In Conversation with Bice Curiger,” in Searle, Talking Art 1, 38.

17.

In a later text, Des histoires vraies (1994, 2002), she includes this story and explains that she had to undress eighteen times a day from 4:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.

18.

La filature was first exhibited as a large format piece consisting of two tableaux, 1m60 by 1m20, composed of photographs and texts.

19.

Sophie Calle, Double Game (London: Violette, 1999), 124.

Published translation here and throughout.

Sophie Calle, Doubles-jeux, Livre IV (Arles: Actes sud, 1998), 113.

20.

Ibid., 128.

Ibid., 121.

21.

Ibid., 126.

22.

Sophie Calle, M’as-tu vue (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2003), 161–18.

Published English translation here and throughout.

Sophie Calle, M’as-tu vue (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, Éditions Xavier Barral, 2003), 116-118.

23.

Ibid., 118.

Ibid.

24.

Ibid.

25.

Ibid.

26.

Ibid., 118–19.

Ibid., 119.

27.

Ibid., 119.

Ibid.

28.

Calle, “In Conversation with Bice Curiger,” in Searle, Talking Art 1, 37.

29.

Danto, “Sophie the Spy,” 100.

30.

Johnnie Gratton, “Sophie Calle’s True Stories: More of the Same?” Paragraph 26, no. 3 (1992): 114.

31.

Calle, Double Game, 2.

Calle, Doubles-jeux, Gotham Handbook, Livre VII, 5.

32.

Calle, Double Game.

Calle, Doubles-jeux, De l’obéissance, Livre I, 6.

33.

Ibid., 1.

Ibid., 4

34.

Paul Auster, Leviathan (New York: Viking, 1992), 61, and Calle, Double Game, 24.

Calle, De l’obéissance, Livre I, Doubles-jeux, 89.

35.

Calle, Double Game, 14.

Ibid., 25.

36.

No Sex Last Night, directed by Sophie Calle (New York: Electronic Arts Intermix, 1992), DVD.

In this video, a significant portion, however, incorporates still images in the style of Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962), since the poor filming technique left a great deal of material unusable. Since the handheld cameras produced very bouncy images, the choice of freeze frames were used in the editing of some scenes. These images rely on the style of photographic presentation used in her other work.

37.

Danto, “Sophie the Spy,” 103.

38.

Pascal Mérigeau, “Au départ, ce n’était pas un film, mais un piège d’amour,” Le monde, January 18, 1996, 24.

39.

No Sex Last Night.

40.

Sophie Calle, Des histoires vraies +10 (Arles: Actes sud, 2002), 23.

41.

One of Greg’s New Year’s resolutions was to stop lying.

42.

No Sex Last Night.

43.

Sophie Calle, Des histoires vraies (Arles: Actes sud, 1994) and Des histoires vraies +10. (Arles: Actes sud, 2002).

44.

It is important to note that the first version was entitled Récits autobiographiques—both titles prompt the reader to believe these stories are based on life events. In fact, in an interview, Calle explains that she grew tired of people asking her if her stories were true, so she created Des histoires vraies to answer that question.

45.

Calle, Des histoires vraies +10, 69.

46.

The project features her narrative of sharing a train compartment with a Russian man named Anatoli on the Trans-Siberian railroad and photos of him. Until this exhibit, it was not understood as part of a larger voyage or project. In the context of Douleur exquise, it is only the beginning of her trip to Japan.

47.

Calle, M’as-tu vue, 353.

48.

Ibid.

49.

Letting others tell stories as part of the project also served as an integral part of Chambre avec vue (2002), Calle’s sleeping and storytelling project atop the Eiffel Tower for the nuit blanche. She created a bedroom in one of the observation rooms on top of the Eiffel Tower and had people tell her a five-minute story to keep her awake for a citywide all-night art festival.

50.

Calle, M’as-tu vue, 415.

51.

Gratton, “Sophie Calle’s True Stories,” 157.

52.

Richard G. Tansey and Fred S. Kleiner, Gardner’s Art through the Ages (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996), 1160.

53.

Merrill, “Proofs,” 5.

54.

Sheena Wagstaff, “C’est mon plaisir,” Parkett 24 (1990): 6.

55.

Ibid., 18.

56.

Calle, M’as-tu vue, 418.

57.

Ibid., 418–19.

58.

The interview sequence in the street when she asks people about money, specifically how much they make and whether they have enough, is reminiscent of the sequence in Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Paris 1960) when two women, who are part of the film project, ask people in the streets of Paris if they are happy.

59.

Ibid., 1.

60.

Calle, M’as-tu vue, 136.

The last line was included in the M’as-tu vu exhibit.

61.

“Parcours artistique le long du tramway à Paris,” Journal de la culture, on ARTE, Paris, December 16, 2006.

62.

Sophie Calle, Take Care of Yourself, trans. Charles Penwarden (Arles: Actes sud, 2007).

Sophie Calle, Prenez soin de vous (Arles: Actes sud, 2007).

63.

“Rencontre avec Sophie Calle,” 19h20 Édition nationale, on France 3, Paris, June 28, 2007.

“L’homme que j’aime m’a quittée, et j’ai commencé à raconter cette rupture ou plutôt comment ça s’était déroulée.”

64.

Emma Wilson, “Mortality, Art and Disguise: On Sophie Calle’s ‘Pas pu saisir la mort’ (2007),” in Display and Disguise, ed. Manon Mathias, Maria O’Sullivan, and Ruth Vorstman (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), 170.

65.

Ibid., 167.

My translation.

66.

Ibid., 169–70.

67.

“Noémie Lvovky, Sophie Calle, Rodophe Dana, Takana Zion, Sandrine Piau, Manjul,” Des mots de minuit, on France 2, Paris, November 15, 2007.

68.

Wilson, “Mortality, Art and Disguise: On Sophie Calle’s ‘Pas pu saisir la mort’ (2007),” 175.

69.

Ibid., 178.

70.

See Helle Brøns, “Sophie Calle: ‘Où et Quand?’” in Sophie Calle (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2009): 158–59.

71.

Sophie Calle, Où et quand ? Berck (Arles: Actes sud, 2008), 83.

This is my translation, here and for the remainder of the chapter.

72.

Ibid., 95.

73.

Ibid., 117.

74.

Sophie Calle, Où et quand ? Lourdes (Arles: Actes sud, 2009).

75.

Ibid., 143.

76.

Sophie Calle, Où et quand ? Nulle part (Arles: Actes sud, 2009), 73.

77.

Ibid., 79.

78.

L’édition spéciale, on Canal+, Paris, June 18, 2009.

79.

Calle, Où et quand ? Nulle part, 75.

80.

Ce soir (ou jamais!), narr. Frédéric Taddeï, on France 3, Paris, May 22, 2008.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

“Sophie Calle, ‘maman in memoriam,’” accessed September 24, 2012, http://toutelaculture.com/arts/sophie-calle-maman-in-memoriam.

See the published book, Sophie Calle, Rachel, Monique . . . (Paris: Editions Xavier Barral, 2012).

89.

JFP, “Rachel, Monique: Presentation,” accessed October 22, 2012, http://www.festival-avignon.com/en/Archive/Spectacle/2012/3361.

90.

Sophie Calle, “Description,” Moi aussi, accessed October 22, 2012, http://www.editions591.com/english/books/moi-aussi-normal-edition/.

Sophie Calle, “Description,” Moi aussi, accessed July 20, 2013, http://www.editions591.com/fran%C3%A7ais/livres/moi-aussi-%C3%A9dition-courante.

91.

See Anne Sauvageot, Sophie Calle, l’art caméléon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007).

92.

Another series of projects, “Last Seen” (1991) and “What Did You See?” (2012), is based on the stolen and missing painting at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. She investigates loss and memory by asking other people what they remembered about the missing paintings in the first project and what they saw when they looked at empty frames in the second project. Carol Vogel, “Loss That Lingers in Memory and Place,” New York Times, July 26, 2013, C17.

Orchestrated Reflexivity: Sophie Calle’s Narrative Body as Artist

The Strange Quotidian

The Experimental as Experiential

Creating Fictions with Paul Auster

The Role of the Other

M’as-tu vue Exhibit: Narrative Showing Off

Storytelling through the Other as an Established Contemporary Artist

Conclusion

Notes