Unexpected beginnings, the compulsion to continue and the difficultly of knowing how to end: Sophie Calle's Talking to Strangers
Talking to Strangers is a dense exhibition containing several pieces of work by French artist Sophie Calle at the Whitechapel Gallery in East London. Throughout the exhibition a biographical approach (or the ways she uses and diverts biographical strategies) is evident. The subject matter is often potent - love, death, relationships - and reaches beyond the circumference of what could be considered purely artistic or academic concerns. In this way, it is difficult to view (or review) this exhibition purely in a critical or academic way.
Sophie Calle’s work has occupied an unusual place in my mind ever since I learned of her practice as an eager 18 year old art student. Her pieces opened up worlds of possibilities in relation to ‘being’ an artist and how one generates work. Her texts and photographs seemed to me to stem from an instinctual desire to follow and search out, to openly display her (female) identity and experiences and to rejoice in narrative games and ludic uncertainties.
Being obsessed by notions and processes of documentation, by fact and fiction and narrative structures, her work had a specific resonance for me. I enjoy the way she positions the artist in the various roles of director, protagonist, narrator, editor, participant and viewer. She is/we are always searching to pin her down in an arduous yet urgent process that feels like trying to heal a gaping wound between subjective and objective experience.
In a way that befits her work, I had never actually seen any of it first hand before visiting Talking to Strangers and so it had taken on a mythic quality, skewed through various re-presentations in books and the net and retellings by past tutors, artists and friends. So, how does the mythical Calle relate to the actual Calle I found in 2009?
‘Look After Yourself’ is a nebulous work dominating the large ground floor gallery of the Whitechapel. On entering we are faced with a wall of photographic portraits and sounds that seep from various sources. A myriad of frames fills the walls and a large video installation inhabits the central space of the room. The gallery is a wunderkammer and today it is full of spectators; gazing, absorbing, pondering.
I received an email telling me it was over
I didn’t know how to respond
It was almost as if it hadn’t been for me
It ended with the words, ‘take care of yourself’
And so I did
(Excerpt from wall text, Calle)
This piece consists of the interpretations, translations, images and performances undertaken by 107 women in response to an email sent to Calle by her (now ex-) partner in order to end their relationship. In essence, it is exactly the kind of work I dislike; self-indulgently personal, threatening to be emotional or psychoanalytical and overtly female (in a Beyonce ‘Independent Woman’ kind of way); but in its realization, I think the piece works.
It works because of the extreme, compulsive process of rationalization that Calle has employed in order to try and comprehend what language can’t represent, to solidify the intangible and essentially to come to terms with something beyond her control. It is rationality applied beyond sense. In this exhaustive, expansive approach it reminds me of Rosalind Krauss’ interpretation of Sol Lewitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes:
It has the loquaciousness of the speech of children or of the very old, in that its refusal to summarize, to use a simple example that would imply the whole, is like those feverish accounts of events composed of a string of identical details, connected by “and”. ... There is... a method in this madness. For what we find is the ‘system’ of compulsion, of the obsessional’s unwavering ritual, with its precision, its neatness, its finicky exactitude, covering over an abyss of irrationality.[1]
Yet in Calle’s case, the ‘given problem’ has no finite sequences or set answers, and belongs to a different cultural context than that of 1970s conceptual art.
The women who have responded to Calle’s email were chosen because of their interpretative professional roles; from actresses, dancers and a clown to a sub-editor, Police Captain and a researcher in Lexicometry. My favourite interpretation was supplied by the proof reader, Valerie Lermite:
Short repetitious text. I have joined up all the repetitions, highlighted in orange the conjugations of the verb ‘to know’, in yellow the conjugations of the verb ‘to tell’, in pink repetitions of ‘this’ and ‘that’ and in green the repeated use of inverted commas.
Above this functional description we are presented with a large page containing her highlighted analysis of a now invisible text. This page becomes a map that reductively (and pejoratively) charts the linguistic traits of the author whilst critically dissolving the emotive value supposedly carried in its words.
Bringing the personal into a professional domain is interesting from many angles. I am not sure how Calle intends for this decision to be read but in my mind it raises issues of gender roles in relation to work, relationships and social stereotypes.
Women artists had to fight against a strong 19th Century suspicion of their activities as amateur, as their art only being seen as a leisure activity, something unserious, a hobby to fill her little leisure time between the hard work of caring for home and family. Women artists were forced to prove their ‘professional’ status to escape such definitions or assumptions about a feminine practice, a feminine role or a feminine stereotype.[2]
If discussed in the context of contemporary gender discourses, this work emphasizes the professional status of women across society whilst dealing with a subject matter that is traditionally feminine. This establishes a tension (almost a paradox) between the professional and the emotional, the analytical and the interpretative, the public and the personal (or the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’). As is visible from the numbers of engaged viewers (of all genders and ages, I add) this work is absorbing on many levels (emotional, narrative, conceptual, aesthetic) and resists simple categorization. Is it catharsis, revenge, research or a game? Is it personal, universal, political or superfluous?
Returning to Calle’s early work (and to the context of 1970s conceptual art), ‘The Sleepers’, 1979, is installed in one of the upstairs galleries. In ‘The Sleepers’ Calle invited people to sleep in her bed whilst she documented the ongoing project. Formally, this piece consists of photographs and typewritten text displayed in a grid. At first glance it relates to conceptual practices; I think of Susan Hiller’s ‘10 months’, 1977-9 and Martha Rosler’s ‘The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems’, 1974-5, or perhaps to the photographic grids of John Hilliard or Michael Snow. Yet beyond formal qualities, Calle’s piece lacks the conceptual tautology, rhythm and rigour of these works. In the screened discussion between Calle and Iwona Blazwick, Calle states that she began her artistic activities in order to impress her father, who was a collector of conceptual art. On acknowledging this, her early work is re-situated in a personal context: of relationships, love and imitation.
The grid is a not an artistic strategy as such, it is a facade. Rather than the form of the grid, her works feel more comfortable adopting the form of the algorithm: a series of units or episodes that link to one another in specific but non-exclusive ways to imply a narrative, yet reserve the potential for redirections, repetitions and endless loops.
‘Antoli’, made in 1984, demonstrates the abandonment of the grid format of presentation in favour of offering a more ‘open’[3] interpretation to an audience. A text on the wall written by Calle describes a journey across Russia with a chance cabin mate named Antoli. Calle recalls the journey and Antoli’s eccentric behaviour in a humorous and sentimental way. In front of the text rests a table piled full of photographs taken of Antoli on this journey. Viewers can sit at the table and sift through the photographs as they wish. This profusion of images displays a lack or rejection of editing on the part of the artist. This task is given over to the viewer, which, in practical and conceptual terms, requires an element of trust in the viewer to both respect and realize the work.
Calle’s images play with (and against) the connotations of photographic form and genre. She often present us with journeys: geographical, psychological and narrative. Do we view her photographs as documents of a journey, or as fragments of a (fictional) narrative edited into a journey? These images allude to the varying practices of the flaneur, the documentary photographer, the performance artist and the filmmaker.
Two serial photographic works that I enjoyed were ‘The Bronx’, 1980 and ‘The Detachment’, 1997. In these works there is an effort made to render apparent something that is not publically represented, despite its obvious presence. As a result of being asked to show ‘The Sleepers’ in Fashion Moda gallery in the Bronx, Calle decided to embark on a different project that both reflected on and related to the local audience. She stopped people she encountered in the area and asked them to take her to a place that they would never forget, even if they managed to get out of the Bronx. In the gallery we are faced with a series of portraits and anecdotal texts written by Calle detailing the journeys her chosen subjects lead her on, the places they went to and her feelings about the whole experience. The potentially stoical monochrome photo / text format is broken up by haphazard marks of graffiti (added to the piece one night when unknown ‘contributors’ broke in the gallery with spray cans). In this instance, Calle’s use of fantasy, exploration and journeys takes on a culturally complex dimension, revealing a local reality that could have easily been glossed over within the confines of a gallery space.
Also adopting a socio-historical position, ‘The Detachment’ is a series of images that document the absence of particular monuments in East Germany, such as a bust of Lenin outside the Russian Embassy. Accompanying these images of empty spaces and altered street names are a series of texts taken from conversations with local people about their memories of these spaces. I like the way this piece addresses notions of the monument in relation to public and private memory. This piece begs questions such as: why should we have monuments, whose function do they serve, what needs to be remembered or celebrated? By erasing images, words and forms that allude to a difficult past are those in power encouraging a state of public amnesia? Calle’s photographs and interventions yet again address boundaries between the public and the personal, whilst in this case also taking on the weighty subject of history and how it is constructed.
One criticism of Talking to Strangers is its sheer density: Calle and the curators have been very generous, and in one way it is a fantastic experience to be able to access this much work at once. Alternatively, the spread of visual and textual information is overwhelming, and verges on negating itself. Due to the serial, narrative nature of her works and her use of the image / text format, a lot of ‘reading’ and interpretation is required to appreciate her pieces fully. People have told me that they spent over two hours looking at ‘Take Care of Yourself’, and never made it upstairs. I had to return twice to ensure I had seen everything in advance of writing this.
In defence of the Whitechapel, entrance to the gallery is free and they probably aim to encourage multiple visits from audiences. The main victim of this curatorial overloading is Calle’s work itself; which would perhaps benefit from some space and relative isolation. I even feel that in many instances a book format may suit her work more than an exhibition, as the book is a medium that lends itself to narrative and seriality, establishes a personal relationship with a viewer and allows an individual to engage with a subject at his / her own pace and depth.
One piece that definitely belongs in gallery space is the set of photographs called ‘Cash Machine’, taken by bank security cameras of people at cash points, and the relating video installation ‘Unfinished’, made with Fabio Balducci (both 1988 – 2003). ‘Unfinished’ is a reflexive, occasionally humorous, narrative about Calle’s inability to resolve a work that somehow uses the bank security images. The failed work being discussed in the video is the video itself; which attempts to salvage a meaning, a purpose from years of thought about this series of found images. By presenting her working process and ideas around these unexplainably compelling images she reveals the struggle of making work as an artist; of negotiating a route between curiosity and purpose, instinct and logic. Calle shows that making art is a practice of unexpected beginnings, the compulsion to continue and the difficultly of knowing how to end.
[1] Krauss. R.E. The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 1986, The MIT Press, Cambridge: Massachusetts, London: England. Pp. 253 – 254.
[2] Deepwell, K. Work / Labour in ‘Arbeit*, A: 'aml. - E: work, labour. - F: travail. R: trud, rabota. - S: trabajo. - C: laodong’, ed. Silvia Eiblmayr, Galerie im Taxispalais, 2005, Revolver.
[3] I use the term ‘open’ in relation to Umberto Eco’s The Poetics of the Open Work first published in 1962, which discusses the role of the audience in relation to the formation and reception of art works.
