The Show-Off, Did You See Me? Sophie Calle as Auto-Narrator and Confessor
Sophie Calle is described as a ‘first-person artist.[1]’ She acts as documenter and director of her life and its content to create narrative driven art, becoming ‘auto-narrator’ and artist combined. Alfred Pacquement writes:
‘In her works she directs herself, shamelessly, unreservedly, and even uproariously ... She turns onlookers into accomplices to her privacy, and leaves no way out ... She broadens the artist’s traditional position within the social arena, for not being content with being one of France’s most internationally recognised artists, a ranking based on her narrative and photographic body of work, she is also a writer, a film-maker and even a character in a novel.[2]’
Pacquement’s description shows Calle ability to commandeer various methods of documentation to create a distinct style. Through the utilisation and exhibition of different methods she manages to convey different facets of encounters and events – random happenings and planned occurrences. She unveils the importance of the everyday and the significance of chance but also testifies to the notion of the void or the absent in our lives. Pacquement explains that her inclusion of other’s testimonials is as important as the artist’s herself stating:
‘She is fond of getting people to do the talking, as is evident from her projects based on absent works, described from memory or imagined by people who cannot see them. Narrative and exposure thus become the narrative and exposure of the other, something that may well have an emotional effect on anyone becoming acquainted with the experience.[3]’
Sophie Calles 2003 collection of interviews, letters, photographs and texts is titled ‘M’as-Tu-Vue?’ Literally translated, it means ‘did you see me?’ The statement used in this context however alludes to vanity and self-absorption: ‘Un m’as-tu-vu: A show-off, Ce qu’elle m’as-tu-vue! She’s such a show-off! Ca fait m’as-tu-vu: It’s too flashy![4]’ Like Guston, Calle is an artist attracted to the idea of the everyday – the detritus of life and the humdrum of routines. Guston depicts normalcy and habitude being invaded/desecrated by hooded imposters and the anxieties of everyday living – habits of excess; cigarette smoking, bad food. Calle too injects crises into routines. The formulaic doctrines for living are turned on their head – banality itself comes under the microscope. She examines hotel rooms, address-books and strip clubs and obsessively collates found materials, ticket-stubs and maps, to put forward and exhibit a very different take on modern living.
Jean-François Lyotard’s formula places the sublime in a contemporary setting with its role lying in ‘presenting the unpresentable.[5]’ To understand Lyotard’s ideology we must first examine his foundation for this theory, based in his definitions of realism, the modern and the postmodern. In his book, ‘The Postmodern Condition, A Report on Knowledge,’ Lyotard proposes that capitalism has become the driving force behind human progress. He feels that this dynamic has destroyed what is known as the speculative grand narrative and the grand narrative of emancipation. As truth and freedom, rather than efficiency and profit, are the basis for these narratives, Lyotard says that their destruction will not allow for a ‘unifying identity for the subject or society.[6]’ Simon Malpas explains this position saying ‘the main threat facing postmodern society is the reduction of knowledge to a single system whose only criteria is efficiency.[7]’ In order to combat our invalidation in society, Lyotard argues for a paralogy to destabilize the ’capacity for explanation.[8]’ He sees this paralogy – a type of ‘false reasoning,’ as critical to having ‘the potential to break the rules of an existing game in such a way that a new game needs to be developed.[9]’ Calle can therefore be described as a paralogical artist. Alfred Pacquement confirms this saying:
‘it is artists who have nonetheless capsized the rules and, by enlarging the scope of their praxis and activities, managed to turn quite distinct categories inside out ... Sophie Calle has taken things further, however, by stage-directing herself through words and photographic imagery. And, above all, by conveying actual facts in a no-frills, unfiltered way, to the point of somewhat upsetting that particular applecart known as the established order.[10]’
Before we move to examine sublimity’s role in this paralogical assault, we must first look at Lyotard’s definition of realism. Rather than defining it in the traditional realm of art-historical style or period, he says instead that it is ‘the mainstream art of any culture.[11]’ It is something instantly understandable and recognisable. Our understanding of the term realism thus far has been to categorise historical treatments of form or colour in painting and the subsequent rise of photographic depictions and documentation. Lyotard takes a very different view with Malpas explaining:
‘Lyotard claims that realism “makes” the world appear to be real. What he is getting at here is that reality is not something that we know naturally, but rather that a sense of reality is generated through the beliefs and ideals of a particular culture, and that realist art or literature is one of the things that helps a culture create a sense of its reality.[12]’
We live in a world of transitory cultural immediacy. Lyotard’s realism is the reality of dealing with a culture where capitalism invests in and controls this paradigm. Although Lyotard sees the instantaneous nature of modern artistic production as flighty, he also sees the capacity for our evolution in its technology saying ‘the ready-made in the techno-sciences presents itself as a potential for infinite production, and so does the photograph.[13]’ This is the first instance of Lyotard’s sublime. He places its action in the hands of the artist rather than the spectator. By defining realism in this way, he also proposes new theories for the terms ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern.’ Malpas declares that these alternatives will ‘set out to disrupt realism by “questioning the rules that govern images and narratives.”[14]’
As with the term ‘realism,’ Lyotard makes distinctions from those commonly referred to when considering the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern.’ Where the former would generally be thought a periodic precursor to the latter, and with the postmodern always pronounced as signifying the end of the modern, Lyotard claims that this is not so. He says that they should not be expressions used solely to categorise periods of artistic development but rather should be considered as a symbiotic discourse necessary to heterogenic contemporary expression. Bill Readings writes that:
‘If classicism offers a description of the concept that would itself not be an event, whereas modernism offers to represent the concept of the event, postmodernism seeks to testify to the event without recourse to the concept that would reduce its eventhood to unity and fixity.[15]’
The postmodern’s testification to the event finds its vehicle in abstract expressionism and the avant-garde. The presentation of the unrepresentable allows artistic conception to become the sublime object, rather than the object itself. Lyotard said ‘it will be white, like one of Malevich’s squares; it will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain.[16]’ Unlike the Burkean association of pain/terror with the sublime, Lyotard puts pain in the category of melancholia (nostalgia) and the ‘novatio.’ These are two modes by which he defines our faculties of comprehension. Steurman explains:
‘One, which Lyotard calls “melancholic,” stresses the impotency of our faculty of presentation and dwells in the nostalgia of presence. The other mode, which Lyotard calls “novatio,” stresses the potency of the faculty of conceiving which is not the faculty of understanding. This mode stresses the invention of new rules, of new forms in a pictorial, artistic, or philosophical game.[17]’
Kant’s sublime lies in our failure to sensibly grasp the infinite and melancholia of our thoughts buoyed up by the comprehension of totality. Lyotard sees in the sublime ‘nostalgia for presence.’ Where the two both encounter the sublime in failure, in the case of Lyotard we see that:
‘an emphasis is placed on “the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject, on the obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything.[18]’
Calle is very much concerned with the idea of presenting the unpresentable. Her art is as much to do with the idea of ‘eventhood’ and ‘the happening’ as it is to do with its subject matter and content. In order to express this, a new set of rules concerning exhibition and presentation became necessary and it is in her work that we find Lyotard’s ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ – the representation of concept and the testification to the event. Christine Macel writes:
‘Taken as a whole, Sophie Calle’s oevre seems to be a rejection of the depressing and at times perverse assertions put forward by criticism hailing from structuralism – assertions that, in the late 1960s, announced the death of the author, an which are nowadays still being developed in the form of a glorification of non-production and a preference for the real (in relation to the work of art), demonstrating an attitude that is sometimes profoundly anti-humanist.[19]’
The term ‘novatio’ refers to the abstract and avant-garde works which strive to demonstrate the ‘infinite (and thence unpresentable) experiment and development.’ As with the ‘ready-made techno-sciences’ these works offer the possibility of the infinite. In them we see the disruption Lyotard feels is key to our continued social development. They are the epitome of what it means to be postmodern – not merely a ‘follow-on’ of modernist thought but a reworking of the unpresentable to offer something else. A work of nostalgia offers consolation to the viewer in its recognisable forms and content. The novatio offers no such solace, choosing instead to disrupt the comfortable realism of our lives. Lyotard says:
‘The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations – not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something presentable.[20]’
In Lyotard’s sublime, art has found its role in offering a paralogy of the aesthetic. Kant striving for a comprehension of totality differs to Lyotard who says that the postmodern must instead ‘wage a war[21]’ against it.
Where Jean-François Lyotard argues for a paralogy or ‘false reasoning’ to destabilize our invalidation in society, Slavoj Žižek also looks for the truth in disruption. Looking to German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he seeks truth in the contradiction/antithesis of dialectical thought:
‘In Žižek’s reading of Hegel, the dialectic does not produce a reconciliation or synthesized viewpoint but, instead, an acknowledgment that, as he puts it, “contradiction [is] an internal condition of every identity.”[22]’
Hegel proposes the use of dialectical thinking in order to understand the world around us. By presenting an idea/thesis, making an opposing argument/antithesis and synthesising a new hypothesis he gives us his theory regarding the totality of our thoughts. He says that by repeating this process continually, we as humans should form an idea of the Absolute and, in understanding the reconciliation, division and consequence of our ideas, come to understand the world and our place in it. Calle presents various artefacts and texts to enhance and illustrate different dimensions of single occurrences and happenings. She displays photographs with accompanying biographical texts or juxtaposes mundane video with wall mounted phrases - neon handwritten styled tubular lighting contrasting sharply with the recordings. Visually it is as if one single photographic scene is not enough to corroborate or explain her concepts. She produces debris as if it were evidence with an investigative-like mania to conciliate her ideas. (Fig.12) Speaking in 2009 she explains:
‘Any one version is never “true,” it just works better than another. But I can say that it did happen. True? No. It happened... The difference with many of my works is the fact that they are also my life. They happened. This is what sets me apart and makes people strongly like or dislike what I do...I don’t care about truth: I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall.[23]’
Žižek’s ideology is influenced by two other key thinkers – Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan. Where Hegelian theory encouraged him to looking for the meaning in disruption, Marx’ political praxis gave him a scaffold upon which to hang his own ideas. He felt that where Marx had an understanding of how society as a whole should work, he had little insight into the idea of the individual with Tony Myers pointing out: ‘As the instinctive and psychological processes of individuals are the very stuff on which ideology goes to work, it seemed essential to find a theory of these processes.[24]’
Jacques Lacan’s concept of the sublime lies in the process Freud originally called Sublimation. This ‘shifting of feeling’ occurs when we invest an unnatural or disproportionate amount of feeling in a material object. A reversal of Freud’s process, Lacan’s sublimation ‘indicates the void at the heart of symbolization.[25]’ Calle is an artist drawn to this type of sublimity. Alan Riding writes ‘her raw material is often her own reality but she reorganises it to put the viewer in her place. And where reality falls short, she imagines it. Indeed, she is drawn by the mystery of absence or void.[26]’ In order to understand a theory of lacking, and Žižek’s reaction to it, we must first examine Lacan’s three orders; the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. In the Imaginary, we see the formation of what is commonly referred to as the Ego. When we are born, the identification of the adult human figure gives us a sense of congruity. The anticipation of our development lies at this point with the ego being formed in infancy. However, a division lies between the reality of the infant body and it’s identification of the adult working form:
‘As the ego is formed by this identification, an identification that assumes powers the child does not yet have the ego is constitutionally sundered, riven by the division between itself and the image of itself. It is thus left forever trying to reconcile the other to the same.[27]’
The Lacanian Symbolic refers to everything that we know rather than feel. It is the society in which we live and is governed by language. Again, division is the rule of this order because, while language is the thing that shapes and defines us, what gives us the power of rational thought; the process of definition is also what enslaves us. Shaw says that humanity is ‘forced to exchange its sense of wholeness for a level of being that is, by virtue of its inscription in language and society, forever compromised by its relation with the desire of the Other.[28]’ The deification of language means that while we can now articulate feelings and label the objects around us, the process also compromises our corporeality. The third order, the Order of the Real, refers to the immediacy of feeling associated with a thing before it has been defined by language. As discussed by Myers, the Real is what precedes the Symbolic – it is everything we feel rather than know. However, its existence is made impossible in a world ‘carved up by language.[29]’ Again, the disharmony of the process is what defines us and it is at this point that Hegelian and Žižekian discourse come into play. The habit of definition shows a lack or void of feeling for an object. This process becomes what Žižek calls ‘external reflection.[30]’ As we have seen, dialectical progression synthesizes thoughts to produce new ideas. There is also conflict in this process which leads to contradictions. It is the impediments of the Orders and their workings that Žižek thinks will enlighten us. Shaw writes:
‘In Žižek’s reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the sublime is identified via Hegel, as the ‘reified’ effect of the inconsistency of the symbolic order. The fascination of the sublime is thus derived from its status as an indicator of the Thing, the emptiness at the heart of the Real without which signification could not occur. Objects are not in themselves sublime, rather they become sublime when they are raised to the ‘dignity of the Thing.’ The terror of the sublime is brought about through its relationship with the Real. In Lacan’s theory, the Real is the ultimate contradiction in terms in so far as it both precedes and succeeds the symbolic. As such, the Real is impossible and appears on as the failure or void of the symbolic. Whenever an object is made to represent this void it becomes an object of fascination, provoking love or hatred in accordance with the extent to which the symbolic order is perceived to be in harmony or in crisis. Thus the crucifixion of Christ can be explained as a reaction formation to the perception of the extreme discord, the gap, between God and the lowest form of human existence. It follows that Christ’s apotheosis, his transformation into a sublime object of desire, marks the point at which the horror of the void is sublimated as the glory of the Thing.[31]’
In 1982 Lyotard writes at length on the idea of presenting the unpresentable. He says that photography has made the profession of painting impossible as the industrial and scientific world have greater need for this new techno-science rather than the ‘optical geometry[32]’ of painting:
‘Photography achieves this programme of metopolitical visual and social ordering. It realises it in both senses of the world: it realises it, and it concludes it. The know-how and knowledge that were given substance and were transmitted in the school and the studio are now programmed inside the photographic machine. In a single click, an ordinary citizen, whether amateur or tourist, can organise his or her identifying spaces and make a picture that enriches the cultural memory-bank.’
He goes on to say that while painters have always sought to document, the laboriousness of the process meant that the time sacrificed was too great and the advent of photography allows for a new process by which to do this. Our new relationship with photography is therefore, akin to the modern idea of the death of the author – living as we do in a world desirous of journalism rather than literature. Christina Macel says that Calle has however rejected this death-of-the-author becoming instead a ‘fortiori’ – an egomaniacal artist more concerned with autobiography and the self at a time where the group or collective is more fashionably respected. She writes:
‘Calle has been developing her somewhat autobiographical factual/fictional narratives in an ongoing way since 1978, accompanying them with photographs, and thereby redefining the notion of the author, and even of fiction itself, by juggling with every possible kind of interweave and interface. Between words and pictures, it goes without saying but also between fiction and non-fiction. She has done so from different viewpoints, which cover this notion in a more or less comprehensive way.[33]’
Marcel dubs this process of juxtaposition the ‘author-issue[34]’ at the centre of Calle’s work. By putting her art in the guise of the first person she becomes auto-narrator of the pieces, guiding the viewer through the work in much the same way as a writer or director. She puts together series of texts, photographs and videos in order to say something very specific about the situations in which she has found herself but we must remember that more often than not, Calle has placed herself in these positions. There are some who call this crass and self-absorbed; others recognise it as a precursor to our fascination with reality television. As with Guston, we must assume that behind the sometimes gauche and overtly sentimental presentations (asking a blind person to recount their idea of beauty and displaying on a wall next to their portrait) Calle’s work contains an element of calculation and suggestion. Macel categorises it into three headings – surveillance, exhibitionism and absence. At times the work projects a nonchalant, throw-away attitude, a French chic irony; comments printed on cards exhibited alongside intensely personal accounts of suffering – arguments won and loves lost:
‘If your story is really unusual/Please make yourself/ known to the/ security guard.’
‘The artist is/ in the ladies’ room/ She’ll be right back.[35]’
It is as if she treats the work with the same rules as a film director or writer – there can be no humour without irony, no sympathy without cruelty. The diligence in finding this balance suggests that while Calle has done her utmost to portray work that has evolved naturally and organically she has ultimately made every decision regarding what is shown and what has been cast aside. She makes this clear in her showing of the 1998 piece ‘Unfinished’ (Fig.13) which depicts videos and photographs from a CCTV camera at an ATM machine in California. Riding writes ‘she obtained a video from the bank of people using automatic tellers. But she saw no immediate way to transform it, so she filed it away until now.[36]’ Calle’s intention in show the unsuccessful work she termed the ‘anatomy of a failure.’ For her, the voyeuristic element of the work could not be appropriated or used to make something more confessional or shocking and so she instead turns the mundane and routine into the depiction of failure and regret. It is interesting that almost as much has been written about this piece as much as any other and we must wonder how do the people being depicted feel about being called failures of art, having been used by Calle as pawns in her artistic game. She writes an accompanying series of texts about the images saying in 1994:
‘Help! I had come to a dead end. I suggested that Jean Baudrillard write captions for the photographs. He churned out four pages. He talked about the security of money, the world of automatic distribution. He compared the machine to a polling booth, a urinal, a confessional. Now I had images taken by a machine and a text written by someone else. What was my role in all this? I needed to act.[37]’
She thinks and ponders on the piece from 1998 to 2002 saying that she is overcome with doubt. She even seeks a hypnotist to help her to deal with the thoughts regarding the piece but this brings no solace apart from making her more relaxed. Eventually in 2003 she resigns herself to the eventual failure of the work and says it is akin to deliverance:
‘Just for once. Say nothing...Silent photos. SILENT. No. I am going to vamperize them, to interfere with them. That’s the thing. This is the anatomy of a failure...Talk about failure because lack is all I can talk about. Show these outstretched hands, human targets, sad faces. Stop questioning them. Fifteen years it’s been dragging on. Get rid of these people. Give them up, as they are, all on the wall, side by side. Get shot of them. MAKE THEM PAY.[38]’
It is however, her failure to manage or stage-direct the imagery that she is referring to. She cannot will it to be something else, no matter how much she invests in the work. The anatomy of failure is a failure to manipulate or coerce the viewer into reading anything apart from what exactly is presented to them. By exhibiting this work alongside other famous and successful pieces Calle strips away the facet of honesty contrived by them and instead displays herself as narrator and author of fiction as much as biographer of her own life.
Calle’s presentation of what Lyotard calls’ the unpresentable’ say something that has previously been inexpressible about banality of life. She uses a series of techniques – photographs, videos, texts and recollections, to become a type of paralogical artist. The advent of photography has allowed Calle to document in a confessional style. It is a prelude to the onslaught of reality television – intimacies made public, a type of unrestricted flirtation with the viewer appealing to our appetite for scandal and secrets. This new type of presentation allows artistic conception to become a type of contemporary sublime. Like Newman who was concerned with the idea of the happening and the not happing, Calle is interested in the exhibition of ‘the event’ and a testification to absence and void. She disrupts the realism of life by offering consolation in nostalgia but discreetly leads the viewer through her works to reveal something else – an unsettling realisation at the instability of the everyday. This type of dialectical discussion produces new ideas and definitions – the conflict of these modes of representation lead to enlightenment and revelation according to Žižekean theory with this forming the basis for a contemporary sublime. Calle’s manipulation of the viewer, with auto-narration and juxtaposition, also forges new relationships between fiction and non-fiction. By creating a new type of discourse her art lies distinct from the comfortable familiar appraisal of sublimity in religious sentiment and mountain top. It apparently creates something familiar and appealing, but in reality is uncomfortable to look at and is entirely in and of itself. Newman wrote ‘an artist paints so that he will have something to look at; at times he will write so that he has something to read.[39]’ Calle creates montages of eventhood and confessions for the same reason and in doing so, represents the realities of our experiences with calculated ease.
Philip Shaw writes that the sublime is ‘the means by which are suspends or disrupts itself in view of something other than art. (It) could be said to mark the point at which thought itself is brought into question.[40]’ From 1984 to 2003 Calle worked on a project called ‘Exquisite Pain.’ It refers to a medical term for a type of highly intense localised pain. A trip undertaken by Calle begins the countdown to the breakdown of her relationship climaxing in a New Delhi hotel room where she had arranged to meet her unfaithful and absent lover. He ends the affair via telephone completely shocking Calle who had been unaware of her lover’s intention and new feeling. She says that this moment marks the ‘unhappiest moment in her whole life’ and that she holds the trip abroad accountable:
‘In 1984 I was awarded a French foreign ministry grant to go to Japan for three months. I left on October 25, not knowing that this date marked the beginning of a 92-day countdown to the end of a love affair – nothing unusual, but for me then the unhappiest moment of my whole life. I blamed the trip.[41]’
Exhibited originally in a photographic installation the work now takes the form of a small grey missive type book with each of the first ninety-two pages marking a ‘countdown to unhappiness.[42]’ (Fig.14) They depict photographs of her trip to Japan. Various images of artefacts and documents are branded with a methodical administrative red stamp, echoing the rigidity of governmental/clerical passport approval and travel. She photographs bedsheets and pillows, Japanese tea ceremony cups and garden statues and combines them with travel documentation, passport stamps, diary extracts, letters and photo negatives. (Fig.15) All are emblazoned with the official looking stamp in an unavoidable compulsory framed countdown. ’68 days to unhappiness’ is stamped on a man’s masked face staring contemplatively at the camera, ’67 days to unhappiness’ on her hotel pillow in the next. The viewer/reader is left with a growing dread, a burgeoning peeling back of images and layers to reveal the climactic ‘happening’ of Calle’s pain. There is a desire to stop and examine each photograph in detail, to read each extract fully, but the impulse to turn the page increases with every passing stamp – a type of almanac-tic countdown to heartbreak. Nancy Princenthal writes of the project:
‘Meticulously punctual as it is, “Exquisite Pain” runs on a very odd clock. In lived experience, unappeasable misery, as Calle’s project itself demonstrates, is almost by definition unanticipated. Only hindsight permits a countdown to the kind of emotional disaster that throws the normal sense of time’s passage into disarray. The structure of “Exquisite Pain,” which rewrites history to place day one exactly at the narrative’s midpoint, seems meant to reflect the temporal confusions generated by dejection.[43]’
The second half of Calle’s project proceeds with an account of the conversation she had with her now ex-lover. It intimates small private details; the inappropriate nature of a three-year affair with a man whose age matched her father’s; his threat that he would forget her if she left coupled with her bravado and arrogance that he would not. She expresses the uncertainty and panics that he had been in an accident, combining the text with an atmospheric still shot of the red telephone on which she finally receives the call to tell her that the relationship is over. (Fig.16) The old-fashioned other worldly decor of the room alludes to her sense of displacement and loneliness. The surroundings are bleak and grimy yet bear the hallmarks of nameless hotel sterility. We are told that she has received harrowing personal news on an anonymous shiny hotel phone. Calle tells us that he has deliberately allowed her to expect his arrival, confirming flight and hotel arrangements. The security and certainty that she feels at his imminent arrival is brutally cut short by this realisation that in fact, he is not coming. She writes in the first account:
‘As soon as he picked up the phone, I knew it was over: “Have you met someone else?” – “Yes.” He hoped it was serious. I hung up. I sat on my bed for hours, staring at the phone and the moldy carpet of room 261 in the Imperial Hotel.[44]’
Each of the following left-hand pages of the book contains a retelling of this event. Calle repeats the story often but never exactly and offers new details as they come to mind. By day fifty she is becoming apathetic in her recount calling it a ‘banal love affair with a pathetic ending.’ By day ninety she is almost as effusive in her boredom with the incident as she was originally heartbroken. The sting of the event remains however:
‘He broke it off over the phone. Four questions and four answers. Not even three minutes to tell me he was in love with someone else. That’s all. As suffering goes, nothing special. Nothing worth harping on about.[45]’
As these left-sided accounts continue the image of the red bedside telephone remains intact, burning as clearly from the first retelling as in the last. In contrast the text now fades with each page turned, becoming fainter and shorter until only one account remains. We are reminded of the text accompanying her ‘Unfinished’ project – a type of giving up on useless emotions. There is a resolution through failure and a resignation to the event’s occurrence rather than hatred or bewilderment. She concludes: ‘Ninety-eight days ago the man I loved left me. January 25th, 1985. Room 261. Imperial Hotel. New Delhi. Enough.[46]’
However, it is not exclusively through her own repeated recollecting that Calle finds peace. Rather, it is through the juxtaposition of her story with accounts from friends and strangers whom she asked ‘when did you suffer most?’ She reveals their details verbatim and accompanies them with images highlighting the epitome of their pain. These fresh takes on personal suffering construct the remaining right-hand side of the subsequent pages, mirroring the layout of Calle’s own painful event. (Fig.17) She explains her motive saying:
‘Back in France on January 28, 1985, I opted for exorcism and spoke about my suffering instead of my travels. In exchange, I started asking both friends and chance encounters: “When did you suffer most?” This exchange would stop when I had told my story to death, or when I had revitalized my pain in relation to other people’s. The method was radically effective: three months later, I was cured. The exorcism had worked. Fearing a possible relapse, I dropped the project. By the time I returned to it, fifteen years had gone by.[47]’
To return to the idea of the sublime with regards to ‘Exquisite Pain,’ it is necessary to once more consult Edmund Burke’s ‘Philosophical Enquiry.’ Having spoken of a sublime based in the triumph of sympathy for mankind’s suffering, we realise that the recollections of the family and strangers in Calle’s project result in an encounter with this type of empathetic fellow feeling. Their stories vary but each describes the pinnacle of their life’s suffering – the tragedies which have most shaped their existence. They are told in a very matter-of-fact way and accompanied by one photograph, mimicking Calle’s confessional layout on the opposite page:
‘It was an image of happiness that caused me the greatest suffering. It happened in 1964. It was Springtime.[48]’
‘It was in Perpignan. In 1971. A Saturday in May. Early Afternoon. I was on my way home from boarding school.[49]’
The accompanying photographs are Polaroid style snaps enhancing the telling of the story – an image of a blue American convertible drives home the loneliness of a broken marriage. A maternity hospital sign against a brick wall background is companion to a tragic account of a traumatic birth: ‘It was November 8, 1954, 6 p.m. I had just given birth to a deformed child. A flat nose bent off to the side, with a hole for a mouth. A monster.[50]’ The baldness of the stories, page after page of them, produces feelings of revulsion and empathy from the viewer/reader. They encourage us to draw from a reservoir of sympathy verifying Burke’s theory of a compassionate sublime. The inclusion of the photographs forces the viewer to refer to the cultural memory bank Lyotard speaks of, mirroring the drawing down of feeling and emotion. The combination results in a subtle manipulation. On Burke’s treatise Shaw writes:
‘In each case, the enquiry into the source of the sublime, be it as a property of mind, of objects or of language, becomes a meditation on its harrowing effects, so that, in de Bolla’s words, the “full recognition of self-awareness, self-consciousness ... amounts to nothing less than a desire for self-annihilation.[51]’
However much we recognise the tragedy of each story-teller’s circumstances neither we nor Calle can offer consolation. While the sublime might lie in the realm of our ability to empathise we are reminded that it also lies in terror and pain (‘whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible thoughts or operates in a manner analogous to terror[52]’). Consolation is offered only through the opportunity to tell their story. One gets the impression that Calle’s experience was excruciating due to this lack of solace – bereft and alone she receives conciliation from staring at the red telephone, as if its existence offers the only verification that the event has indeed happened. By demonstrating an ability to ‘sum up’ the experiences of others in her collation of photographs and texts Calle offers the only consolation she herself received – a type of catharsis through aesthetic confession.
Considered as much an author as an artist it is important that we understand the value of the written word in Calle’s work. While the collation and documenting of images and objects place her in the category of autobiographical artist it is through her writing and the writing of others that she gives herself the role of auto-narrator. Like Longinus, the first-century Greek authority on the sublime, Burke makes a connection between words and the aesthetic of the sublime. He writes:
‘It is by words we have it in our power to make ... combinations as we cannot possibly do otherwise. By this power of combining we are able, by the addition of well-chosen circumstances, to give a new life and force to the simple object.[53]’
Longinus likens the use of various written and spoken devices to a bully ‘hitting the jury in the mind with blow after blow.[54]’ Calle’s repetition of imagery works to similar effect but it is through the use of texts and the texts of others that she persuades the viewer as to the gravitas of the events. A single image of a red bedside telephone suggests nostalgia and old-fashioned hotel charm. Combined with the additional text it turns into a signifier for heartbreak – a visual reminder never forgotten. As the years/pages pass and the text/heartache fades, the signifier remains the same. Shaw explains that ‘it is language that enables us to select and combine ideas, so as to render even the most unprepossessing object sublime.[55]’ Macel expands this theory in relation to Calle saying:
‘What matters, for her, is knowing “who’s speaking”. Her work confirms that aesthetic thought cannot do without both subject and author, and that you cannot shrug off either quite so easily... “M’as tu vue”, asks Sophie Calle, in the title of her show. “Have you read me?”, she might well remark, to complement that question posed to the viewer, dealing with the acknowledgment of her identity as person and as author.[56]’
What of the others we might ask – the friends and strangers persuaded to share their deep anguish and private suffering? Calle repeatedly announces the benefits of retelling her story – a project which became a ‘very good was of getting rid[57]’ of her pain. As to anyone else’s participation, it would be nice to think of Calle offering a service – a type of confessional absolution, storing away old hurts and tragedies to allow the participants to move forward in their lives. However, the line between absolver and manipulator now becomes blurred. She says, of her own participation, ‘the good thing about relativity is that every time they told me a very unhappy story, it was good for me, because I would think that their story was worse than mine.[58]’ One critic goes so far as to question the authenticity of the anonymous accounts wondering if part or all of them have indeed been fabricated by Calle, so unlikely she feels that people would willingly surrender their tragedy for public dissection in this way. She writes: ‘Moreover as in all of Calle’s work, there is the nagging question of whether she is deliberately embroidering this story, or even ... making it up out of whole cloth.[59]’ Calle’s explanation for their consent lies apart from the critic’s questioning of ‘why?’ and answers instead with a casual account of why twenty-nine strangers also agreed to sleep in her bed:
‘I think generally people accept to speak when the question you ask them is not a question they have learned in their life to answer yes or no. So, if I ask you if you would please help me carry my suitcase and move my apartment you can say no because you have something else to do, you’d rather change your own apartment. But if I ask you if you would please sleep in my bed, instead of saying no, you say why not?[60]’
Liz Wells writes about the idea of the photograph as testament. She says:
‘Photographs are commonly used as evidence. They are among the material marshalled by the historian in order to investigate the past. They have become a major source of information by which we picture, understand or imagine the nineteenth century.[61]’
In terms of Calle’s art the photographs serve as testification to the events taking place – as witness to lend to them a sense of credibility that she, as narrator/instigator, cannot. They give to her a modicum of impartiality and add weight to any conceptual argument she might have. They work as the proof in her investigative mania confirming what she has done and seen but also to bear witness to new ideas and concepts as a result of their inception. In 1998 Calle was invited to exhibit at the house where Sigmund Freud spent his last year. She decided to place items of sentimental value in the space – objects that she had previously used in autobiographical stories. She displays them with obvious care, draped around the austere masculine furnishings of the house, adding feminine bursts of tantalising flirtation to the heavy environment. She photographs the resulting arrangements and, rather than inviting Freud to analyse her personality through the display of such items, does so herself in a text accompaniment. This results in an exhibition and photo-book - ‘Appointment: With Sigmund Freud.’ Of one item, ‘The Bathrobe,’ (Fig.18) she writes:
‘I was eighteen years old. I rang the bell. He opened the door. He was wearing the same bathrobe as my father. A long white terry cloth robe. He became my first love. For an entire year, he obeyed my request, and never let me see him naked from the front. Only from the back. And so, in the morning light, he would get up carefully, turning himself away, and gently hiding inside the white bathrobe. When it was all over he left the bathrobe behind with me.[62]’
The robe becomes the symbol by which Calle remembers and discusses the event. Like the red telephone in ‘Exquisite Pain’ she imbues it with a sense of forlorn tragedy. It is evocative and provocative in its nostalgia and its placement, draped with an artful carelessness on the back of Freud’s study chair, provoking new sentiment. We see this idea repeated in ‘The Wedding Dress.’ (Fig.19) Arranged as if sitting, stretched out across Freud’s chaise longue, the garment echoes Romanticism and old fashioned other-worldly sentiment. It is a hopelessly feminine device – silk and frills with long buttoned sleeves, suggesting an illicit Victorian chaste thrill. It flutters at the viewer amid a sea of heavy brown carpeted plush. We get a sense that Calle is flirting with Freud – injecting blasts of feminine pique into the sombre decor with a girlish but deadly intent. She reveals the secrets of the dress with relish:
‘I had always admired him. Silently since I was a child. One November 8th – I was thirty years old – he allowed me to pay him a visit. He lived several hundred kilometres from Paris. I had bought a wedding dress in my valise, white silk with a short train. I wore it on our first night together.[63]’
We are reminded once more of Burke’s ‘Enquiry’ – his engenderment of the ‘masculine’ sublime and ‘feminine’ beauty. He argues that beauty lies in the feminine realm of seduction and desire and it used to effect by women to enchant or entice men, raising humanity’s level of consciousness ‘above the level of brutes.’ He says that the dominant masculine sublime is ‘engaged in a perpetual war with female lassitude’ and that, although we may anoint the sublime as the ultimate force, it can be undermined by the beautiful. Shaw writes:
‘For a book that invests so much in the awe-inspiring, implacable potency of the sublime it seems extraordinary that the real threat should come, not from the masculine realm of asocial (or even anti-social) self-aggrandisement, but from the feminine sphere of companionable dissolution.[64]’
Calle’s depictions of her sentimental items mirror Guston’s appropriation of the very ordinary and banal, which allowed him to categorise and place himself amongst his surroundings. She distances them from their normal environment and in doing so recognises them anew. It is as though she can now place an emotional value or worth on them. Putting them in the surroundings of Freud, she can analyse their sentimentality and categorise what they represent to her. Often, with Calle’s work, you get the impression that she would be doing this type of activity regardless of audience. Where Guston once more learned to ‘see’ the world around him by newly defining its imagery in paint, Calle’s documentation and ceremonies allow her the same rite. Williamson writes:
‘A sign is quite simply a thing – whether object, word or thing – which has a particular meaning to a person or group of people. It is neither the thing nor the meaning alone, but the two together. The sign consists of the signifier, the material object, and the signified, which is its meaning. These are only divided for analytical purposes; in practice a sign is always thing-plus-meaning.[65]’
For Calle, these ‘things-plus-meaning’ represent the entirety of her life’s experiences. Documenting their strangeness in a foreign environment serves only to highlight their essential/defining qualities. They lie in contrast to Freud’s sober furnishings – the frippery of female ‘dressing-up’ clothes, silk and lace, a single useless red patent high-heeled shoe, saying much more defined in this way than they could displayed in Calle’s own home. In one of the images Calle stands outside Freud’s front door, wearing his coat staring directly at the camera with a wry smile – ‘M’as tu vue?’ – ‘are you looking at me?’ She invites the viewer in to see what she has done – what nonsense women engage in. Calle’s systematic approach to sentimentality - the placement and description of items in such a manner allow her to don the mask of a curator as well as artist. She says for her that art is ‘a way of taking distance. The pathological or therapeutic aspects exist, but just as catalysts.[66]’ She uses her photographs as evidence of a life lived – as tributes to events that shaped and moulded her. Like a botanist or archaeologist analysing matter, Calle dissects objects and emotions as a means of verification and testification.
We have seen that Calle demonstrates empathy through her offer of consolation through confession. This double-sided arrangement also allows her to heal from her own trauma. She accomplishes these acts through collation – not only of photographs and documents but through amassing stories and encounters. Her work echoes that of Guston – the sublime of sympathy, and leads to a double-mode experience. The drawing down of emotions upon encountering the work mirrors the drawing down of signifiers to understand it. This creates a new set of signifiers and meaning but, in Calle’s art would not be possible through the exhibition of photographs alone. Of the imagery used in ‘Exquisite Pain’ it is as Evans says:
‘It is easier for us, most of the time, to recall an event or a person by summoning up a single image, in our mind’s eye we can concentrate on a single image more easily than a sequence of images. And the single image can be rich in meaning because it is a trigger image of all the emotions aroused by the subject.[67]’
László Moholy-Nagy says that photography is a ‘new instrument of vision.[68]’ Calle combines these images with text to build up a body of evidence or proof categorising an event. They allow her to verify instances of time - encounters or even experiences. Calle’s femininity also shapes the work. Using recollections of insecurities, love letters and tokens, girlish amalgamations of ticket strips and holiday mementos she places these in the austere gallery light for our consummation. Exhibited in this way she places her art in the realm of the feminine, titillating and whispering on one hand, sincere and warmly demonstrative on the other. The associative quality of her art demonstrates her ability to create a new paralogy or set of rules by which we define art and its role. Susan Sontag writes of the camera that it:
‘makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery. Any photograph has multiple meanings; indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination.[69]’
Calle’s work continually fascinates and is evocative for the reason that it investigates these mysteries. She uses rituals and observations to explore impossible theories of voyeurism and intimacy. She says ‘I’m trying to find solutions for myself. It is my personal therapy. The fact that it is art affords me protection and gives me the right to do things of this sort.[70]’ Where most would seek to cover up or hide their past indelicacies or secrets, Calle revels in them and uses their exhibition as a type of aesthetical catharsis.
[1] Pacquement, Alfred, ‘Preface,’ M’as-Vue Tue, Prestal, 2003, p.15
[2] Op.Cit
[3] Ibid p.16
[4] Calle, Sophie, M’as-Tu Vue, Prestal, 2003, Inlay
[5] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, Routledge, 2003,p.47
[6] Ibid.,p.29
[7] Ibid.,p.30
[8] Op.Cit
[9] Ibid.p.31
[10] Pacquement, Alfred, ‘Preface,’ M’as-Vue Tue, Prestal, 2003, p.15
[11] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, p.44
[12] Op.Cit
[13] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, p.154
[14] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, p.45
[15] Readings, Bill, Introducing Lyotard: art and politics, Routledge, 1991, p.74
[16] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.116
[17] Steuerman, Emilia, ‘Habermas Vs Lyotard: Modernity Vs Postmodernity,’ New Formations, Number 7, Spring 1, 1989, p.51-66
[18] Crome, Keith, Williams, James, The Lyotard Reader and Guide, Columbia University Press, 2006, p.130
[19] Macel, Christine, ‘The Author Issue in the Work of Sophie Calle. Unfinished,’M’as-Tu Vue, Prestal, 2003, p.17
[20] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, p.49
[21] Ibid.,p.50
[22] Myers, Tony, Slavoj Žižek, Routledge, 2003, p.17
[23] Neri, Louise, ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ Iwona Blazwick, p.92 – 97, January 2009
[24] Ibid., p.20
[25] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.135
[26] Riding, Alan, ‘Keeping it Together by Living in Public,’ The New York Times, 7 Dec. 2003, AR44. Academic OneFile. Web. 16 Oct. 2012
[27] Myers, Tony, Slavoj Žižek, p.22
[28] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.133
[29] Myers, Tony, Slavoj Žižek, p.25
[30] Kay, Sarah, Žižek: A Critical Introduction, Polity Press in Association with Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p.35
[31] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.147
[32] Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable,’ The Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, 2010, p.131
[33] Macel, Christine, ‘The Author Issue in the Work of Sophie Calle. Unfinished,’M’as-Tu Vue, p.18
[34] Ibid., p.17
[35] Excerts from ‘Fin De Nuit Blanche,’ (‘End of Sleepless Night’) Sophie Calle, 2002
[36] Riding, Alan, ‘Keeping it Together by Living in Public,’ The New York Times, 7 Dec. 2003
[37] Calle, Sophie, Excerpt from ‘Unfinished,’ 1988 – 2003, M’as-Tu Vue, p.418
[38] Op.Cit
[39] Schjeldahl, Peter, Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker, p.116
[40] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.148
[41] Calle, Sophie, ‘Exquisite Pain,’ M’as-Tu Vue, p.352-377
[42] Op.Cit
[43] Princenthal, Nancy, ‘The Measure of Heartbreak,’ Art in America, vol. 93 no.8 September 2005, p.138-141
[44] Calle, Sophie, ‘Exquisite Pain,’ M’as-Tu Vue, p.352-377
[45] Op.Cit
[46] Op.Cit
[47] Op.Cit
[48] Op.Cit
[49] Op.Cit
[50] Op.Cit
[51] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.55-56
[52] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.36
[53] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.52
[54] Clark, Timothy, The Theory of Inspiration, Manchester University Press, 1997, p.66
[55] Op.Cit
[56] Calle, Sophie, M’as-Tu Vue, p.28
[57] Bice, Curiger, ‘Sophie Calle,’ Talking Art, ed. Searle, Adrian, ICA, London, 1991, p.41
[58] Op.Cit
[59] Princenthal, Nancy, ‘The Measure of Heartbreak,’ Art in America, p.138-141
[60] Bice, Curiger, ‘Sophie Calle,’ Talking Art, p.41-42
[61] Wells, Liz, Photography: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, Fourth edition 2009, p.57
[62] Calle, Sophie, ‘Appointment with Sigmund Freud,’ M’as-Tu Vue, p.185-197
[63] Op.Cit
[64] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.63
[65] Williamson, J., Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and meaning in Advertising, Marion Boyans, New York, 1978, p.17
[66] Neri, Louise, ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ Iwona Blazwick, p.97
[67] Kember, Sarah, ‘The Shadow of the Object: Photography and Realism,’ The Photography Reader, Ed. Wells, Liz, Routledge, 2003, p.212
[68] Moholy-Nagy, László, ‘A New Instrument of Vision,’ The Photography Reader, p.93
[69] Kember, Sarah, ‘The Shadow of the Object: Photography and Realism, ‘The Photography Reader,’p.212
[70] Hess, Barbara, ‘Sophie Calle,’ Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Century, ed. Grosenick, Uta, Taschen, 2001, p.74
‘In her works she directs herself, shamelessly, unreservedly, and even uproariously ... She turns onlookers into accomplices to her privacy, and leaves no way out ... She broadens the artist’s traditional position within the social arena, for not being content with being one of France’s most internationally recognised artists, a ranking based on her narrative and photographic body of work, she is also a writer, a film-maker and even a character in a novel.[2]’
Pacquement’s description shows Calle ability to commandeer various methods of documentation to create a distinct style. Through the utilisation and exhibition of different methods she manages to convey different facets of encounters and events – random happenings and planned occurrences. She unveils the importance of the everyday and the significance of chance but also testifies to the notion of the void or the absent in our lives. Pacquement explains that her inclusion of other’s testimonials is as important as the artist’s herself stating:
‘She is fond of getting people to do the talking, as is evident from her projects based on absent works, described from memory or imagined by people who cannot see them. Narrative and exposure thus become the narrative and exposure of the other, something that may well have an emotional effect on anyone becoming acquainted with the experience.[3]’
Sophie Calles 2003 collection of interviews, letters, photographs and texts is titled ‘M’as-Tu-Vue?’ Literally translated, it means ‘did you see me?’ The statement used in this context however alludes to vanity and self-absorption: ‘Un m’as-tu-vu: A show-off, Ce qu’elle m’as-tu-vue! She’s such a show-off! Ca fait m’as-tu-vu: It’s too flashy![4]’ Like Guston, Calle is an artist attracted to the idea of the everyday – the detritus of life and the humdrum of routines. Guston depicts normalcy and habitude being invaded/desecrated by hooded imposters and the anxieties of everyday living – habits of excess; cigarette smoking, bad food. Calle too injects crises into routines. The formulaic doctrines for living are turned on their head – banality itself comes under the microscope. She examines hotel rooms, address-books and strip clubs and obsessively collates found materials, ticket-stubs and maps, to put forward and exhibit a very different take on modern living.
Jean-François Lyotard’s formula places the sublime in a contemporary setting with its role lying in ‘presenting the unpresentable.[5]’ To understand Lyotard’s ideology we must first examine his foundation for this theory, based in his definitions of realism, the modern and the postmodern. In his book, ‘The Postmodern Condition, A Report on Knowledge,’ Lyotard proposes that capitalism has become the driving force behind human progress. He feels that this dynamic has destroyed what is known as the speculative grand narrative and the grand narrative of emancipation. As truth and freedom, rather than efficiency and profit, are the basis for these narratives, Lyotard says that their destruction will not allow for a ‘unifying identity for the subject or society.[6]’ Simon Malpas explains this position saying ‘the main threat facing postmodern society is the reduction of knowledge to a single system whose only criteria is efficiency.[7]’ In order to combat our invalidation in society, Lyotard argues for a paralogy to destabilize the ’capacity for explanation.[8]’ He sees this paralogy – a type of ‘false reasoning,’ as critical to having ‘the potential to break the rules of an existing game in such a way that a new game needs to be developed.[9]’ Calle can therefore be described as a paralogical artist. Alfred Pacquement confirms this saying:
‘it is artists who have nonetheless capsized the rules and, by enlarging the scope of their praxis and activities, managed to turn quite distinct categories inside out ... Sophie Calle has taken things further, however, by stage-directing herself through words and photographic imagery. And, above all, by conveying actual facts in a no-frills, unfiltered way, to the point of somewhat upsetting that particular applecart known as the established order.[10]’
Before we move to examine sublimity’s role in this paralogical assault, we must first look at Lyotard’s definition of realism. Rather than defining it in the traditional realm of art-historical style or period, he says instead that it is ‘the mainstream art of any culture.[11]’ It is something instantly understandable and recognisable. Our understanding of the term realism thus far has been to categorise historical treatments of form or colour in painting and the subsequent rise of photographic depictions and documentation. Lyotard takes a very different view with Malpas explaining:
‘Lyotard claims that realism “makes” the world appear to be real. What he is getting at here is that reality is not something that we know naturally, but rather that a sense of reality is generated through the beliefs and ideals of a particular culture, and that realist art or literature is one of the things that helps a culture create a sense of its reality.[12]’
We live in a world of transitory cultural immediacy. Lyotard’s realism is the reality of dealing with a culture where capitalism invests in and controls this paradigm. Although Lyotard sees the instantaneous nature of modern artistic production as flighty, he also sees the capacity for our evolution in its technology saying ‘the ready-made in the techno-sciences presents itself as a potential for infinite production, and so does the photograph.[13]’ This is the first instance of Lyotard’s sublime. He places its action in the hands of the artist rather than the spectator. By defining realism in this way, he also proposes new theories for the terms ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern.’ Malpas declares that these alternatives will ‘set out to disrupt realism by “questioning the rules that govern images and narratives.”[14]’
As with the term ‘realism,’ Lyotard makes distinctions from those commonly referred to when considering the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern.’ Where the former would generally be thought a periodic precursor to the latter, and with the postmodern always pronounced as signifying the end of the modern, Lyotard claims that this is not so. He says that they should not be expressions used solely to categorise periods of artistic development but rather should be considered as a symbiotic discourse necessary to heterogenic contemporary expression. Bill Readings writes that:
‘If classicism offers a description of the concept that would itself not be an event, whereas modernism offers to represent the concept of the event, postmodernism seeks to testify to the event without recourse to the concept that would reduce its eventhood to unity and fixity.[15]’
The postmodern’s testification to the event finds its vehicle in abstract expressionism and the avant-garde. The presentation of the unrepresentable allows artistic conception to become the sublime object, rather than the object itself. Lyotard said ‘it will be white, like one of Malevich’s squares; it will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain.[16]’ Unlike the Burkean association of pain/terror with the sublime, Lyotard puts pain in the category of melancholia (nostalgia) and the ‘novatio.’ These are two modes by which he defines our faculties of comprehension. Steurman explains:
‘One, which Lyotard calls “melancholic,” stresses the impotency of our faculty of presentation and dwells in the nostalgia of presence. The other mode, which Lyotard calls “novatio,” stresses the potency of the faculty of conceiving which is not the faculty of understanding. This mode stresses the invention of new rules, of new forms in a pictorial, artistic, or philosophical game.[17]’
Kant’s sublime lies in our failure to sensibly grasp the infinite and melancholia of our thoughts buoyed up by the comprehension of totality. Lyotard sees in the sublime ‘nostalgia for presence.’ Where the two both encounter the sublime in failure, in the case of Lyotard we see that:
‘an emphasis is placed on “the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject, on the obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything.[18]’
Calle is very much concerned with the idea of presenting the unpresentable. Her art is as much to do with the idea of ‘eventhood’ and ‘the happening’ as it is to do with its subject matter and content. In order to express this, a new set of rules concerning exhibition and presentation became necessary and it is in her work that we find Lyotard’s ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ – the representation of concept and the testification to the event. Christine Macel writes:
‘Taken as a whole, Sophie Calle’s oevre seems to be a rejection of the depressing and at times perverse assertions put forward by criticism hailing from structuralism – assertions that, in the late 1960s, announced the death of the author, an which are nowadays still being developed in the form of a glorification of non-production and a preference for the real (in relation to the work of art), demonstrating an attitude that is sometimes profoundly anti-humanist.[19]’
The term ‘novatio’ refers to the abstract and avant-garde works which strive to demonstrate the ‘infinite (and thence unpresentable) experiment and development.’ As with the ‘ready-made techno-sciences’ these works offer the possibility of the infinite. In them we see the disruption Lyotard feels is key to our continued social development. They are the epitome of what it means to be postmodern – not merely a ‘follow-on’ of modernist thought but a reworking of the unpresentable to offer something else. A work of nostalgia offers consolation to the viewer in its recognisable forms and content. The novatio offers no such solace, choosing instead to disrupt the comfortable realism of our lives. Lyotard says:
‘The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations – not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something presentable.[20]’
In Lyotard’s sublime, art has found its role in offering a paralogy of the aesthetic. Kant striving for a comprehension of totality differs to Lyotard who says that the postmodern must instead ‘wage a war[21]’ against it.
Where Jean-François Lyotard argues for a paralogy or ‘false reasoning’ to destabilize our invalidation in society, Slavoj Žižek also looks for the truth in disruption. Looking to German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he seeks truth in the contradiction/antithesis of dialectical thought:
‘In Žižek’s reading of Hegel, the dialectic does not produce a reconciliation or synthesized viewpoint but, instead, an acknowledgment that, as he puts it, “contradiction [is] an internal condition of every identity.”[22]’
Hegel proposes the use of dialectical thinking in order to understand the world around us. By presenting an idea/thesis, making an opposing argument/antithesis and synthesising a new hypothesis he gives us his theory regarding the totality of our thoughts. He says that by repeating this process continually, we as humans should form an idea of the Absolute and, in understanding the reconciliation, division and consequence of our ideas, come to understand the world and our place in it. Calle presents various artefacts and texts to enhance and illustrate different dimensions of single occurrences and happenings. She displays photographs with accompanying biographical texts or juxtaposes mundane video with wall mounted phrases - neon handwritten styled tubular lighting contrasting sharply with the recordings. Visually it is as if one single photographic scene is not enough to corroborate or explain her concepts. She produces debris as if it were evidence with an investigative-like mania to conciliate her ideas. (Fig.12) Speaking in 2009 she explains:
‘Any one version is never “true,” it just works better than another. But I can say that it did happen. True? No. It happened... The difference with many of my works is the fact that they are also my life. They happened. This is what sets me apart and makes people strongly like or dislike what I do...I don’t care about truth: I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall.[23]’
Žižek’s ideology is influenced by two other key thinkers – Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan. Where Hegelian theory encouraged him to looking for the meaning in disruption, Marx’ political praxis gave him a scaffold upon which to hang his own ideas. He felt that where Marx had an understanding of how society as a whole should work, he had little insight into the idea of the individual with Tony Myers pointing out: ‘As the instinctive and psychological processes of individuals are the very stuff on which ideology goes to work, it seemed essential to find a theory of these processes.[24]’
Jacques Lacan’s concept of the sublime lies in the process Freud originally called Sublimation. This ‘shifting of feeling’ occurs when we invest an unnatural or disproportionate amount of feeling in a material object. A reversal of Freud’s process, Lacan’s sublimation ‘indicates the void at the heart of symbolization.[25]’ Calle is an artist drawn to this type of sublimity. Alan Riding writes ‘her raw material is often her own reality but she reorganises it to put the viewer in her place. And where reality falls short, she imagines it. Indeed, she is drawn by the mystery of absence or void.[26]’ In order to understand a theory of lacking, and Žižek’s reaction to it, we must first examine Lacan’s three orders; the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. In the Imaginary, we see the formation of what is commonly referred to as the Ego. When we are born, the identification of the adult human figure gives us a sense of congruity. The anticipation of our development lies at this point with the ego being formed in infancy. However, a division lies between the reality of the infant body and it’s identification of the adult working form:
‘As the ego is formed by this identification, an identification that assumes powers the child does not yet have the ego is constitutionally sundered, riven by the division between itself and the image of itself. It is thus left forever trying to reconcile the other to the same.[27]’
The Lacanian Symbolic refers to everything that we know rather than feel. It is the society in which we live and is governed by language. Again, division is the rule of this order because, while language is the thing that shapes and defines us, what gives us the power of rational thought; the process of definition is also what enslaves us. Shaw says that humanity is ‘forced to exchange its sense of wholeness for a level of being that is, by virtue of its inscription in language and society, forever compromised by its relation with the desire of the Other.[28]’ The deification of language means that while we can now articulate feelings and label the objects around us, the process also compromises our corporeality. The third order, the Order of the Real, refers to the immediacy of feeling associated with a thing before it has been defined by language. As discussed by Myers, the Real is what precedes the Symbolic – it is everything we feel rather than know. However, its existence is made impossible in a world ‘carved up by language.[29]’ Again, the disharmony of the process is what defines us and it is at this point that Hegelian and Žižekian discourse come into play. The habit of definition shows a lack or void of feeling for an object. This process becomes what Žižek calls ‘external reflection.[30]’ As we have seen, dialectical progression synthesizes thoughts to produce new ideas. There is also conflict in this process which leads to contradictions. It is the impediments of the Orders and their workings that Žižek thinks will enlighten us. Shaw writes:
‘In Žižek’s reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the sublime is identified via Hegel, as the ‘reified’ effect of the inconsistency of the symbolic order. The fascination of the sublime is thus derived from its status as an indicator of the Thing, the emptiness at the heart of the Real without which signification could not occur. Objects are not in themselves sublime, rather they become sublime when they are raised to the ‘dignity of the Thing.’ The terror of the sublime is brought about through its relationship with the Real. In Lacan’s theory, the Real is the ultimate contradiction in terms in so far as it both precedes and succeeds the symbolic. As such, the Real is impossible and appears on as the failure or void of the symbolic. Whenever an object is made to represent this void it becomes an object of fascination, provoking love or hatred in accordance with the extent to which the symbolic order is perceived to be in harmony or in crisis. Thus the crucifixion of Christ can be explained as a reaction formation to the perception of the extreme discord, the gap, between God and the lowest form of human existence. It follows that Christ’s apotheosis, his transformation into a sublime object of desire, marks the point at which the horror of the void is sublimated as the glory of the Thing.[31]’
In 1982 Lyotard writes at length on the idea of presenting the unpresentable. He says that photography has made the profession of painting impossible as the industrial and scientific world have greater need for this new techno-science rather than the ‘optical geometry[32]’ of painting:
‘Photography achieves this programme of metopolitical visual and social ordering. It realises it in both senses of the world: it realises it, and it concludes it. The know-how and knowledge that were given substance and were transmitted in the school and the studio are now programmed inside the photographic machine. In a single click, an ordinary citizen, whether amateur or tourist, can organise his or her identifying spaces and make a picture that enriches the cultural memory-bank.’
He goes on to say that while painters have always sought to document, the laboriousness of the process meant that the time sacrificed was too great and the advent of photography allows for a new process by which to do this. Our new relationship with photography is therefore, akin to the modern idea of the death of the author – living as we do in a world desirous of journalism rather than literature. Christina Macel says that Calle has however rejected this death-of-the-author becoming instead a ‘fortiori’ – an egomaniacal artist more concerned with autobiography and the self at a time where the group or collective is more fashionably respected. She writes:
‘Calle has been developing her somewhat autobiographical factual/fictional narratives in an ongoing way since 1978, accompanying them with photographs, and thereby redefining the notion of the author, and even of fiction itself, by juggling with every possible kind of interweave and interface. Between words and pictures, it goes without saying but also between fiction and non-fiction. She has done so from different viewpoints, which cover this notion in a more or less comprehensive way.[33]’
Marcel dubs this process of juxtaposition the ‘author-issue[34]’ at the centre of Calle’s work. By putting her art in the guise of the first person she becomes auto-narrator of the pieces, guiding the viewer through the work in much the same way as a writer or director. She puts together series of texts, photographs and videos in order to say something very specific about the situations in which she has found herself but we must remember that more often than not, Calle has placed herself in these positions. There are some who call this crass and self-absorbed; others recognise it as a precursor to our fascination with reality television. As with Guston, we must assume that behind the sometimes gauche and overtly sentimental presentations (asking a blind person to recount their idea of beauty and displaying on a wall next to their portrait) Calle’s work contains an element of calculation and suggestion. Macel categorises it into three headings – surveillance, exhibitionism and absence. At times the work projects a nonchalant, throw-away attitude, a French chic irony; comments printed on cards exhibited alongside intensely personal accounts of suffering – arguments won and loves lost:
‘If your story is really unusual/Please make yourself/ known to the/ security guard.’
‘The artist is/ in the ladies’ room/ She’ll be right back.[35]’
It is as if she treats the work with the same rules as a film director or writer – there can be no humour without irony, no sympathy without cruelty. The diligence in finding this balance suggests that while Calle has done her utmost to portray work that has evolved naturally and organically she has ultimately made every decision regarding what is shown and what has been cast aside. She makes this clear in her showing of the 1998 piece ‘Unfinished’ (Fig.13) which depicts videos and photographs from a CCTV camera at an ATM machine in California. Riding writes ‘she obtained a video from the bank of people using automatic tellers. But she saw no immediate way to transform it, so she filed it away until now.[36]’ Calle’s intention in show the unsuccessful work she termed the ‘anatomy of a failure.’ For her, the voyeuristic element of the work could not be appropriated or used to make something more confessional or shocking and so she instead turns the mundane and routine into the depiction of failure and regret. It is interesting that almost as much has been written about this piece as much as any other and we must wonder how do the people being depicted feel about being called failures of art, having been used by Calle as pawns in her artistic game. She writes an accompanying series of texts about the images saying in 1994:
‘Help! I had come to a dead end. I suggested that Jean Baudrillard write captions for the photographs. He churned out four pages. He talked about the security of money, the world of automatic distribution. He compared the machine to a polling booth, a urinal, a confessional. Now I had images taken by a machine and a text written by someone else. What was my role in all this? I needed to act.[37]’
She thinks and ponders on the piece from 1998 to 2002 saying that she is overcome with doubt. She even seeks a hypnotist to help her to deal with the thoughts regarding the piece but this brings no solace apart from making her more relaxed. Eventually in 2003 she resigns herself to the eventual failure of the work and says it is akin to deliverance:
‘Just for once. Say nothing...Silent photos. SILENT. No. I am going to vamperize them, to interfere with them. That’s the thing. This is the anatomy of a failure...Talk about failure because lack is all I can talk about. Show these outstretched hands, human targets, sad faces. Stop questioning them. Fifteen years it’s been dragging on. Get rid of these people. Give them up, as they are, all on the wall, side by side. Get shot of them. MAKE THEM PAY.[38]’
It is however, her failure to manage or stage-direct the imagery that she is referring to. She cannot will it to be something else, no matter how much she invests in the work. The anatomy of failure is a failure to manipulate or coerce the viewer into reading anything apart from what exactly is presented to them. By exhibiting this work alongside other famous and successful pieces Calle strips away the facet of honesty contrived by them and instead displays herself as narrator and author of fiction as much as biographer of her own life.
Calle’s presentation of what Lyotard calls’ the unpresentable’ say something that has previously been inexpressible about banality of life. She uses a series of techniques – photographs, videos, texts and recollections, to become a type of paralogical artist. The advent of photography has allowed Calle to document in a confessional style. It is a prelude to the onslaught of reality television – intimacies made public, a type of unrestricted flirtation with the viewer appealing to our appetite for scandal and secrets. This new type of presentation allows artistic conception to become a type of contemporary sublime. Like Newman who was concerned with the idea of the happening and the not happing, Calle is interested in the exhibition of ‘the event’ and a testification to absence and void. She disrupts the realism of life by offering consolation in nostalgia but discreetly leads the viewer through her works to reveal something else – an unsettling realisation at the instability of the everyday. This type of dialectical discussion produces new ideas and definitions – the conflict of these modes of representation lead to enlightenment and revelation according to Žižekean theory with this forming the basis for a contemporary sublime. Calle’s manipulation of the viewer, with auto-narration and juxtaposition, also forges new relationships between fiction and non-fiction. By creating a new type of discourse her art lies distinct from the comfortable familiar appraisal of sublimity in religious sentiment and mountain top. It apparently creates something familiar and appealing, but in reality is uncomfortable to look at and is entirely in and of itself. Newman wrote ‘an artist paints so that he will have something to look at; at times he will write so that he has something to read.[39]’ Calle creates montages of eventhood and confessions for the same reason and in doing so, represents the realities of our experiences with calculated ease.
Philip Shaw writes that the sublime is ‘the means by which are suspends or disrupts itself in view of something other than art. (It) could be said to mark the point at which thought itself is brought into question.[40]’ From 1984 to 2003 Calle worked on a project called ‘Exquisite Pain.’ It refers to a medical term for a type of highly intense localised pain. A trip undertaken by Calle begins the countdown to the breakdown of her relationship climaxing in a New Delhi hotel room where she had arranged to meet her unfaithful and absent lover. He ends the affair via telephone completely shocking Calle who had been unaware of her lover’s intention and new feeling. She says that this moment marks the ‘unhappiest moment in her whole life’ and that she holds the trip abroad accountable:
‘In 1984 I was awarded a French foreign ministry grant to go to Japan for three months. I left on October 25, not knowing that this date marked the beginning of a 92-day countdown to the end of a love affair – nothing unusual, but for me then the unhappiest moment of my whole life. I blamed the trip.[41]’
Exhibited originally in a photographic installation the work now takes the form of a small grey missive type book with each of the first ninety-two pages marking a ‘countdown to unhappiness.[42]’ (Fig.14) They depict photographs of her trip to Japan. Various images of artefacts and documents are branded with a methodical administrative red stamp, echoing the rigidity of governmental/clerical passport approval and travel. She photographs bedsheets and pillows, Japanese tea ceremony cups and garden statues and combines them with travel documentation, passport stamps, diary extracts, letters and photo negatives. (Fig.15) All are emblazoned with the official looking stamp in an unavoidable compulsory framed countdown. ’68 days to unhappiness’ is stamped on a man’s masked face staring contemplatively at the camera, ’67 days to unhappiness’ on her hotel pillow in the next. The viewer/reader is left with a growing dread, a burgeoning peeling back of images and layers to reveal the climactic ‘happening’ of Calle’s pain. There is a desire to stop and examine each photograph in detail, to read each extract fully, but the impulse to turn the page increases with every passing stamp – a type of almanac-tic countdown to heartbreak. Nancy Princenthal writes of the project:
‘Meticulously punctual as it is, “Exquisite Pain” runs on a very odd clock. In lived experience, unappeasable misery, as Calle’s project itself demonstrates, is almost by definition unanticipated. Only hindsight permits a countdown to the kind of emotional disaster that throws the normal sense of time’s passage into disarray. The structure of “Exquisite Pain,” which rewrites history to place day one exactly at the narrative’s midpoint, seems meant to reflect the temporal confusions generated by dejection.[43]’
The second half of Calle’s project proceeds with an account of the conversation she had with her now ex-lover. It intimates small private details; the inappropriate nature of a three-year affair with a man whose age matched her father’s; his threat that he would forget her if she left coupled with her bravado and arrogance that he would not. She expresses the uncertainty and panics that he had been in an accident, combining the text with an atmospheric still shot of the red telephone on which she finally receives the call to tell her that the relationship is over. (Fig.16) The old-fashioned other worldly decor of the room alludes to her sense of displacement and loneliness. The surroundings are bleak and grimy yet bear the hallmarks of nameless hotel sterility. We are told that she has received harrowing personal news on an anonymous shiny hotel phone. Calle tells us that he has deliberately allowed her to expect his arrival, confirming flight and hotel arrangements. The security and certainty that she feels at his imminent arrival is brutally cut short by this realisation that in fact, he is not coming. She writes in the first account:
‘As soon as he picked up the phone, I knew it was over: “Have you met someone else?” – “Yes.” He hoped it was serious. I hung up. I sat on my bed for hours, staring at the phone and the moldy carpet of room 261 in the Imperial Hotel.[44]’
Each of the following left-hand pages of the book contains a retelling of this event. Calle repeats the story often but never exactly and offers new details as they come to mind. By day fifty she is becoming apathetic in her recount calling it a ‘banal love affair with a pathetic ending.’ By day ninety she is almost as effusive in her boredom with the incident as she was originally heartbroken. The sting of the event remains however:
‘He broke it off over the phone. Four questions and four answers. Not even three minutes to tell me he was in love with someone else. That’s all. As suffering goes, nothing special. Nothing worth harping on about.[45]’
As these left-sided accounts continue the image of the red bedside telephone remains intact, burning as clearly from the first retelling as in the last. In contrast the text now fades with each page turned, becoming fainter and shorter until only one account remains. We are reminded of the text accompanying her ‘Unfinished’ project – a type of giving up on useless emotions. There is a resolution through failure and a resignation to the event’s occurrence rather than hatred or bewilderment. She concludes: ‘Ninety-eight days ago the man I loved left me. January 25th, 1985. Room 261. Imperial Hotel. New Delhi. Enough.[46]’
However, it is not exclusively through her own repeated recollecting that Calle finds peace. Rather, it is through the juxtaposition of her story with accounts from friends and strangers whom she asked ‘when did you suffer most?’ She reveals their details verbatim and accompanies them with images highlighting the epitome of their pain. These fresh takes on personal suffering construct the remaining right-hand side of the subsequent pages, mirroring the layout of Calle’s own painful event. (Fig.17) She explains her motive saying:
‘Back in France on January 28, 1985, I opted for exorcism and spoke about my suffering instead of my travels. In exchange, I started asking both friends and chance encounters: “When did you suffer most?” This exchange would stop when I had told my story to death, or when I had revitalized my pain in relation to other people’s. The method was radically effective: three months later, I was cured. The exorcism had worked. Fearing a possible relapse, I dropped the project. By the time I returned to it, fifteen years had gone by.[47]’
To return to the idea of the sublime with regards to ‘Exquisite Pain,’ it is necessary to once more consult Edmund Burke’s ‘Philosophical Enquiry.’ Having spoken of a sublime based in the triumph of sympathy for mankind’s suffering, we realise that the recollections of the family and strangers in Calle’s project result in an encounter with this type of empathetic fellow feeling. Their stories vary but each describes the pinnacle of their life’s suffering – the tragedies which have most shaped their existence. They are told in a very matter-of-fact way and accompanied by one photograph, mimicking Calle’s confessional layout on the opposite page:
‘It was an image of happiness that caused me the greatest suffering. It happened in 1964. It was Springtime.[48]’
‘It was in Perpignan. In 1971. A Saturday in May. Early Afternoon. I was on my way home from boarding school.[49]’
The accompanying photographs are Polaroid style snaps enhancing the telling of the story – an image of a blue American convertible drives home the loneliness of a broken marriage. A maternity hospital sign against a brick wall background is companion to a tragic account of a traumatic birth: ‘It was November 8, 1954, 6 p.m. I had just given birth to a deformed child. A flat nose bent off to the side, with a hole for a mouth. A monster.[50]’ The baldness of the stories, page after page of them, produces feelings of revulsion and empathy from the viewer/reader. They encourage us to draw from a reservoir of sympathy verifying Burke’s theory of a compassionate sublime. The inclusion of the photographs forces the viewer to refer to the cultural memory bank Lyotard speaks of, mirroring the drawing down of feeling and emotion. The combination results in a subtle manipulation. On Burke’s treatise Shaw writes:
‘In each case, the enquiry into the source of the sublime, be it as a property of mind, of objects or of language, becomes a meditation on its harrowing effects, so that, in de Bolla’s words, the “full recognition of self-awareness, self-consciousness ... amounts to nothing less than a desire for self-annihilation.[51]’
However much we recognise the tragedy of each story-teller’s circumstances neither we nor Calle can offer consolation. While the sublime might lie in the realm of our ability to empathise we are reminded that it also lies in terror and pain (‘whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible thoughts or operates in a manner analogous to terror[52]’). Consolation is offered only through the opportunity to tell their story. One gets the impression that Calle’s experience was excruciating due to this lack of solace – bereft and alone she receives conciliation from staring at the red telephone, as if its existence offers the only verification that the event has indeed happened. By demonstrating an ability to ‘sum up’ the experiences of others in her collation of photographs and texts Calle offers the only consolation she herself received – a type of catharsis through aesthetic confession.
Considered as much an author as an artist it is important that we understand the value of the written word in Calle’s work. While the collation and documenting of images and objects place her in the category of autobiographical artist it is through her writing and the writing of others that she gives herself the role of auto-narrator. Like Longinus, the first-century Greek authority on the sublime, Burke makes a connection between words and the aesthetic of the sublime. He writes:
‘It is by words we have it in our power to make ... combinations as we cannot possibly do otherwise. By this power of combining we are able, by the addition of well-chosen circumstances, to give a new life and force to the simple object.[53]’
Longinus likens the use of various written and spoken devices to a bully ‘hitting the jury in the mind with blow after blow.[54]’ Calle’s repetition of imagery works to similar effect but it is through the use of texts and the texts of others that she persuades the viewer as to the gravitas of the events. A single image of a red bedside telephone suggests nostalgia and old-fashioned hotel charm. Combined with the additional text it turns into a signifier for heartbreak – a visual reminder never forgotten. As the years/pages pass and the text/heartache fades, the signifier remains the same. Shaw explains that ‘it is language that enables us to select and combine ideas, so as to render even the most unprepossessing object sublime.[55]’ Macel expands this theory in relation to Calle saying:
‘What matters, for her, is knowing “who’s speaking”. Her work confirms that aesthetic thought cannot do without both subject and author, and that you cannot shrug off either quite so easily... “M’as tu vue”, asks Sophie Calle, in the title of her show. “Have you read me?”, she might well remark, to complement that question posed to the viewer, dealing with the acknowledgment of her identity as person and as author.[56]’
What of the others we might ask – the friends and strangers persuaded to share their deep anguish and private suffering? Calle repeatedly announces the benefits of retelling her story – a project which became a ‘very good was of getting rid[57]’ of her pain. As to anyone else’s participation, it would be nice to think of Calle offering a service – a type of confessional absolution, storing away old hurts and tragedies to allow the participants to move forward in their lives. However, the line between absolver and manipulator now becomes blurred. She says, of her own participation, ‘the good thing about relativity is that every time they told me a very unhappy story, it was good for me, because I would think that their story was worse than mine.[58]’ One critic goes so far as to question the authenticity of the anonymous accounts wondering if part or all of them have indeed been fabricated by Calle, so unlikely she feels that people would willingly surrender their tragedy for public dissection in this way. She writes: ‘Moreover as in all of Calle’s work, there is the nagging question of whether she is deliberately embroidering this story, or even ... making it up out of whole cloth.[59]’ Calle’s explanation for their consent lies apart from the critic’s questioning of ‘why?’ and answers instead with a casual account of why twenty-nine strangers also agreed to sleep in her bed:
‘I think generally people accept to speak when the question you ask them is not a question they have learned in their life to answer yes or no. So, if I ask you if you would please help me carry my suitcase and move my apartment you can say no because you have something else to do, you’d rather change your own apartment. But if I ask you if you would please sleep in my bed, instead of saying no, you say why not?[60]’
Liz Wells writes about the idea of the photograph as testament. She says:
‘Photographs are commonly used as evidence. They are among the material marshalled by the historian in order to investigate the past. They have become a major source of information by which we picture, understand or imagine the nineteenth century.[61]’
In terms of Calle’s art the photographs serve as testification to the events taking place – as witness to lend to them a sense of credibility that she, as narrator/instigator, cannot. They give to her a modicum of impartiality and add weight to any conceptual argument she might have. They work as the proof in her investigative mania confirming what she has done and seen but also to bear witness to new ideas and concepts as a result of their inception. In 1998 Calle was invited to exhibit at the house where Sigmund Freud spent his last year. She decided to place items of sentimental value in the space – objects that she had previously used in autobiographical stories. She displays them with obvious care, draped around the austere masculine furnishings of the house, adding feminine bursts of tantalising flirtation to the heavy environment. She photographs the resulting arrangements and, rather than inviting Freud to analyse her personality through the display of such items, does so herself in a text accompaniment. This results in an exhibition and photo-book - ‘Appointment: With Sigmund Freud.’ Of one item, ‘The Bathrobe,’ (Fig.18) she writes:
‘I was eighteen years old. I rang the bell. He opened the door. He was wearing the same bathrobe as my father. A long white terry cloth robe. He became my first love. For an entire year, he obeyed my request, and never let me see him naked from the front. Only from the back. And so, in the morning light, he would get up carefully, turning himself away, and gently hiding inside the white bathrobe. When it was all over he left the bathrobe behind with me.[62]’
The robe becomes the symbol by which Calle remembers and discusses the event. Like the red telephone in ‘Exquisite Pain’ she imbues it with a sense of forlorn tragedy. It is evocative and provocative in its nostalgia and its placement, draped with an artful carelessness on the back of Freud’s study chair, provoking new sentiment. We see this idea repeated in ‘The Wedding Dress.’ (Fig.19) Arranged as if sitting, stretched out across Freud’s chaise longue, the garment echoes Romanticism and old fashioned other-worldly sentiment. It is a hopelessly feminine device – silk and frills with long buttoned sleeves, suggesting an illicit Victorian chaste thrill. It flutters at the viewer amid a sea of heavy brown carpeted plush. We get a sense that Calle is flirting with Freud – injecting blasts of feminine pique into the sombre decor with a girlish but deadly intent. She reveals the secrets of the dress with relish:
‘I had always admired him. Silently since I was a child. One November 8th – I was thirty years old – he allowed me to pay him a visit. He lived several hundred kilometres from Paris. I had bought a wedding dress in my valise, white silk with a short train. I wore it on our first night together.[63]’
We are reminded once more of Burke’s ‘Enquiry’ – his engenderment of the ‘masculine’ sublime and ‘feminine’ beauty. He argues that beauty lies in the feminine realm of seduction and desire and it used to effect by women to enchant or entice men, raising humanity’s level of consciousness ‘above the level of brutes.’ He says that the dominant masculine sublime is ‘engaged in a perpetual war with female lassitude’ and that, although we may anoint the sublime as the ultimate force, it can be undermined by the beautiful. Shaw writes:
‘For a book that invests so much in the awe-inspiring, implacable potency of the sublime it seems extraordinary that the real threat should come, not from the masculine realm of asocial (or even anti-social) self-aggrandisement, but from the feminine sphere of companionable dissolution.[64]’
Calle’s depictions of her sentimental items mirror Guston’s appropriation of the very ordinary and banal, which allowed him to categorise and place himself amongst his surroundings. She distances them from their normal environment and in doing so recognises them anew. It is as though she can now place an emotional value or worth on them. Putting them in the surroundings of Freud, she can analyse their sentimentality and categorise what they represent to her. Often, with Calle’s work, you get the impression that she would be doing this type of activity regardless of audience. Where Guston once more learned to ‘see’ the world around him by newly defining its imagery in paint, Calle’s documentation and ceremonies allow her the same rite. Williamson writes:
‘A sign is quite simply a thing – whether object, word or thing – which has a particular meaning to a person or group of people. It is neither the thing nor the meaning alone, but the two together. The sign consists of the signifier, the material object, and the signified, which is its meaning. These are only divided for analytical purposes; in practice a sign is always thing-plus-meaning.[65]’
For Calle, these ‘things-plus-meaning’ represent the entirety of her life’s experiences. Documenting their strangeness in a foreign environment serves only to highlight their essential/defining qualities. They lie in contrast to Freud’s sober furnishings – the frippery of female ‘dressing-up’ clothes, silk and lace, a single useless red patent high-heeled shoe, saying much more defined in this way than they could displayed in Calle’s own home. In one of the images Calle stands outside Freud’s front door, wearing his coat staring directly at the camera with a wry smile – ‘M’as tu vue?’ – ‘are you looking at me?’ She invites the viewer in to see what she has done – what nonsense women engage in. Calle’s systematic approach to sentimentality - the placement and description of items in such a manner allow her to don the mask of a curator as well as artist. She says for her that art is ‘a way of taking distance. The pathological or therapeutic aspects exist, but just as catalysts.[66]’ She uses her photographs as evidence of a life lived – as tributes to events that shaped and moulded her. Like a botanist or archaeologist analysing matter, Calle dissects objects and emotions as a means of verification and testification.
We have seen that Calle demonstrates empathy through her offer of consolation through confession. This double-sided arrangement also allows her to heal from her own trauma. She accomplishes these acts through collation – not only of photographs and documents but through amassing stories and encounters. Her work echoes that of Guston – the sublime of sympathy, and leads to a double-mode experience. The drawing down of emotions upon encountering the work mirrors the drawing down of signifiers to understand it. This creates a new set of signifiers and meaning but, in Calle’s art would not be possible through the exhibition of photographs alone. Of the imagery used in ‘Exquisite Pain’ it is as Evans says:
‘It is easier for us, most of the time, to recall an event or a person by summoning up a single image, in our mind’s eye we can concentrate on a single image more easily than a sequence of images. And the single image can be rich in meaning because it is a trigger image of all the emotions aroused by the subject.[67]’
László Moholy-Nagy says that photography is a ‘new instrument of vision.[68]’ Calle combines these images with text to build up a body of evidence or proof categorising an event. They allow her to verify instances of time - encounters or even experiences. Calle’s femininity also shapes the work. Using recollections of insecurities, love letters and tokens, girlish amalgamations of ticket strips and holiday mementos she places these in the austere gallery light for our consummation. Exhibited in this way she places her art in the realm of the feminine, titillating and whispering on one hand, sincere and warmly demonstrative on the other. The associative quality of her art demonstrates her ability to create a new paralogy or set of rules by which we define art and its role. Susan Sontag writes of the camera that it:
‘makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery. Any photograph has multiple meanings; indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination.[69]’
Calle’s work continually fascinates and is evocative for the reason that it investigates these mysteries. She uses rituals and observations to explore impossible theories of voyeurism and intimacy. She says ‘I’m trying to find solutions for myself. It is my personal therapy. The fact that it is art affords me protection and gives me the right to do things of this sort.[70]’ Where most would seek to cover up or hide their past indelicacies or secrets, Calle revels in them and uses their exhibition as a type of aesthetical catharsis.
[1] Pacquement, Alfred, ‘Preface,’ M’as-Vue Tue, Prestal, 2003, p.15
[2] Op.Cit
[3] Ibid p.16
[4] Calle, Sophie, M’as-Tu Vue, Prestal, 2003, Inlay
[5] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, Routledge, 2003,p.47
[6] Ibid.,p.29
[7] Ibid.,p.30
[8] Op.Cit
[9] Ibid.p.31
[10] Pacquement, Alfred, ‘Preface,’ M’as-Vue Tue, Prestal, 2003, p.15
[11] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, p.44
[12] Op.Cit
[13] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, p.154
[14] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, p.45
[15] Readings, Bill, Introducing Lyotard: art and politics, Routledge, 1991, p.74
[16] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.116
[17] Steuerman, Emilia, ‘Habermas Vs Lyotard: Modernity Vs Postmodernity,’ New Formations, Number 7, Spring 1, 1989, p.51-66
[18] Crome, Keith, Williams, James, The Lyotard Reader and Guide, Columbia University Press, 2006, p.130
[19] Macel, Christine, ‘The Author Issue in the Work of Sophie Calle. Unfinished,’M’as-Tu Vue, Prestal, 2003, p.17
[20] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, p.49
[21] Ibid.,p.50
[22] Myers, Tony, Slavoj Žižek, Routledge, 2003, p.17
[23] Neri, Louise, ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ Iwona Blazwick, p.92 – 97, January 2009
[24] Ibid., p.20
[25] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.135
[26] Riding, Alan, ‘Keeping it Together by Living in Public,’ The New York Times, 7 Dec. 2003, AR44. Academic OneFile. Web. 16 Oct. 2012
[27] Myers, Tony, Slavoj Žižek, p.22
[28] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.133
[29] Myers, Tony, Slavoj Žižek, p.25
[30] Kay, Sarah, Žižek: A Critical Introduction, Polity Press in Association with Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p.35
[31] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.147
[32] Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable,’ The Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, 2010, p.131
[33] Macel, Christine, ‘The Author Issue in the Work of Sophie Calle. Unfinished,’M’as-Tu Vue, p.18
[34] Ibid., p.17
[35] Excerts from ‘Fin De Nuit Blanche,’ (‘End of Sleepless Night’) Sophie Calle, 2002
[36] Riding, Alan, ‘Keeping it Together by Living in Public,’ The New York Times, 7 Dec. 2003
[37] Calle, Sophie, Excerpt from ‘Unfinished,’ 1988 – 2003, M’as-Tu Vue, p.418
[38] Op.Cit
[39] Schjeldahl, Peter, Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker, p.116
[40] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.148
[41] Calle, Sophie, ‘Exquisite Pain,’ M’as-Tu Vue, p.352-377
[42] Op.Cit
[43] Princenthal, Nancy, ‘The Measure of Heartbreak,’ Art in America, vol. 93 no.8 September 2005, p.138-141
[44] Calle, Sophie, ‘Exquisite Pain,’ M’as-Tu Vue, p.352-377
[45] Op.Cit
[46] Op.Cit
[47] Op.Cit
[48] Op.Cit
[49] Op.Cit
[50] Op.Cit
[51] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.55-56
[52] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.36
[53] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.52
[54] Clark, Timothy, The Theory of Inspiration, Manchester University Press, 1997, p.66
[55] Op.Cit
[56] Calle, Sophie, M’as-Tu Vue, p.28
[57] Bice, Curiger, ‘Sophie Calle,’ Talking Art, ed. Searle, Adrian, ICA, London, 1991, p.41
[58] Op.Cit
[59] Princenthal, Nancy, ‘The Measure of Heartbreak,’ Art in America, p.138-141
[60] Bice, Curiger, ‘Sophie Calle,’ Talking Art, p.41-42
[61] Wells, Liz, Photography: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, Fourth edition 2009, p.57
[62] Calle, Sophie, ‘Appointment with Sigmund Freud,’ M’as-Tu Vue, p.185-197
[63] Op.Cit
[64] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.63
[65] Williamson, J., Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and meaning in Advertising, Marion Boyans, New York, 1978, p.17
[66] Neri, Louise, ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ Iwona Blazwick, p.97
[67] Kember, Sarah, ‘The Shadow of the Object: Photography and Realism,’ The Photography Reader, Ed. Wells, Liz, Routledge, 2003, p.212
[68] Moholy-Nagy, László, ‘A New Instrument of Vision,’ The Photography Reader, p.93
[69] Kember, Sarah, ‘The Shadow of the Object: Photography and Realism, ‘The Photography Reader,’p.212
[70] Hess, Barbara, ‘Sophie Calle,’ Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Century, ed. Grosenick, Uta, Taschen, 2001, p.74
Fig. 12