Sophie Calle, born in Paris in 1953 as the daughter of the art dealer Robert Calle and the surgeon Monique Sindler, is one of the most important contemporary artists. She worked as a bartender, dancer and photographer, living in Mexico, the United States and Lebanon. Since her return to Paris in 1979, she has become known for numerous art projects. So she had a detective follow her and put together a book about her life from his notes.
The story goes like this: Sophie Calle's grandfather fled Poland in 1910. On the way to America he stopped in Paris at the Gare de L'Est. Without speaking a word of French, he walked to the nearest restaurant and quickly pointed to some word on the menu. When an artichoke was served to him a little later, he looked at the strange piece somewhat puzzled and took the cutlery in his hand in embarrassment, not really knowing how to proceed. Then the waiter came to help. He showed him how to pick off the leaves one by one until you get to the heart of the vegetable. The grandfather imitated him, adopted the stranger's cautious movements, which he had taught him, a foreigner, a Jew, and said to himself: “I'll stay here!”
And he stayed. “And that’s why,” says Sophie Calle with a grin, “that’s why I’m French.”
She included the anecdote in the latest edition of her book “True Stories.” Because she likes to accompany the stories with pictures, she illustrated the story with a photo of an empty theater dressing room, perhaps because she saw it as a reference to the beginning of a story or to its end, depending on whether the performance is just beginning or has already ended. “Premature!” she says now and refers to a suitcase in her large and magnificent presentation in the Picasso Museum, for which she had almost emptied the house for a good quarter of a year and then filled it to bursting with her own works the entire hodgepodge that normally fills her house on the outskirts of Paris to the roof. “The suitcase,” she says, “fits so much better.”
No secrets between artist and audience
A kind of suitcase was one of the last things to be done on the tour through three floors of the house. The exhibition was an ingenious arrangement that began with revelations, namely photographs of Picasso's paintings packed away for dust, which might have left the visitor a little frustrated, and continued with revelations, namely her own paintings, which the visitors had to look at now could and had to open curtains. And as if from now on there should be no more secrets between the artist and the audience, she laid out all her belongings on the second floor, the furniture and the pictures, the sculptures and the toys she had accumulated, her dishes, her cutlery and so on her dime novels, lots of clothes and many, many stuffed animals, from tiny birds to giraffes.
She specifically commissioned the Drouot auction house to inventory, pack and transport all of this, and there is a film in which she watches impassively as the house became increasingly empty. There is now a catalog in which the property is shown with 482 numbers, as if it were coming up for auction. It's difficult to say whether this was still eccentric or already egocentric and whether Sophie Calle, probably the most prominent and celebrated artist in France at the moment, really exposed her most private things to the public or whether she didn't rather mystify herself with this show.
“Oh, no,” says Sophie Calle. The way she says it sounds frightened, and behind her dark sunglasses her eyes widen a little, “neither nor.” It is a reflection on the objects, on their possessions and the question of what should happen to them after her death. On the wall she quoted Picasso, who is said to have said that he did not want to throw away anything that had once entrusted itself to his hands. But unlike Sophie Calle, he didn't even want to talk about death because he feared it would attract evil spirits. Death always seems to be taken into account in Sophie Calle's works.
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