Strangers, secrets and desire: the surreal world of Sophie Calle Sean O'Hagan Saturday 4 March 2017 07.00 EST Sophie Calle is France’s most famous – and the world’s most quintessentially French – conceptual artist. She once said that she became an artist because she wanted to seduce her father, who was an avid art collector. In the pursuit of her art, she has become a stripper, a stalker and a thief, famously finding a stranger’s address book on the street and, instead of returning it, contacting everyone in it and asking them for a description of the owner. Calle, 63, has been using photography as well as text, video, film and performance in her work since the late 1970s. In 2003, Paris’s Pompidou Centre staged a retrospective of her work and the Whitechapel Gallery, London, followed suit in 2010. In 2007, she represented France at the Venice Biennale. Somewhat belatedly, then, she has made it on to the shortlist of the 2017 Deutsche Börse photography prize for what is, in her terms, a rather traditional publication. Sophie Calle: My All is a retrospective photo-book comprising postcard-style photographs documenting all 54 of her artworks thus far. What Do You See? (2013). Facebook Twitter Pinterest What Do You See? (2013), one of Calle’s Deutsche Börse prize‑nominated photographs. Photograph: Sophie Calle Confusingly, she has created an exhibition of new work for the show entitled My Mother, My Father, My Cat, which deals with the recent deaths of all three in a characteristically playful and self-revealing way. Accusatory extracts from her mother’s diary are displayed opposite a portrait of her cat, Souris, laid out in a small coffin. She is also planing to release a concept album about the cat, which will include a piece by Laurie Anderson and another by the French singer Camille. From the beginning, Calle’s work has merged elements of fiction, fantasy, performance and documentary in its ongoing investigation of the increasingly blurred boundaries between the private and the public, the voyeuristic and the theatrical. Sometimes she utilises elements of chance; other times, she imposes often bizarre rules on her everyday life in order to document the results. The Sleepers (1979). Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Sleepers (1979), in which Calle’s bed was occupied by 29 people. Photograph: Sophie Calle In 1979’s Sleepers, she invited 29 people to occupy her bed for eight hours as she observed them sleeping, waking and eating breakfast served by her. That same year, she created what was, perhaps, her first signature piece, Suite Vénitienne, which began when she met a stranger at a party and decided to somehow follow him to Venice. What followed was part theatrical performance and part noir detective thriller. Having found him, she somehow convinced the woman in the room opposite to let her use it to clandestinely photograph his daily comings-and-goings while disguised as a maid. Like much of what was to follow, Suite Vénitienne depends for its power on the evocation of desire and obsession as well as the artist’s willingness to make work that relies on intrusion and surveillance. But Calle’s approach is more mischievously complex than that. The postmodernist French thinker, Jean Baudrillard, in an essay for the resulting book, pointed out the wilful contradiction at the heart of the undertaking. “Nothing was to happen, not one event that might establish any contact or relationship between them.” Her seeming obsessions are played out, first and foremost, in the creation of her art. In Voir la Mer (2011), Calle captured the reactions of elderly residents of Istanbul after they had seen the sea for the first time. Facebook Twitter Pinterest In Voir la Mer (2011), Calle captured the reactions of elderly residents of Istanbul after they had seen the sea for the first time. Photograph: Sophie Calle In 1980, however, for her project, The Bronx, she placed herself at the centre of her art in a different and more vulnerable way by walking around the economically deprived streets of New York’s South Bronx and asking strangers to take her to what they considered a special place. The result is an uneasy portrait of a beleaguered neighbourhood and its people through her encounters in a single day. It is the closest she has yet come to documentary portraiture, though, in 2010, she made an installation piece, To the Sea, in which she recorded on film the reactions of elderly residents of Istanbul who had never seen the sea. Take Care of Yourself (2004-2007). Facebook Twitter Pinterest Take Care of Yourself (2004-2007), in which Calle sent a break-up text from a former lover to 107 women. Photograph: Sophie Calle This merging of chance and order, randomness and ritual in her work caught the attention of Paul Auster, and he recreated her in his 1992 novel, Leviathan, as Maria, an artist whose “activity didn’t stem from a desire to make art so much as from a need to indulge her obsessions”. In 1994, they collaborated on a project during which she spent days smiling at every stranger she met and set about personalising a public phone box with a new coat of paint flowers, snacks and note pads. Calle’s work is at its most powerful when it transgresses social codes. For Take Care of Yourself, which she showed at the 2007 Venice Biennale, she sent a curt break-up text she had received from a lover to 107 women requesting their reactions. She received advice in the form of songs, drawings and even a copy of the letter with three bullet holes though it. This is art not so much as self-therapy, but as a way of holding up a mirror to human behaviour as it is tested and sometimes unmoored by desire and obsession – and indeed any rupture in the fabric of the public rituals we construct to mask our deeper selves. As our lives become more public on social media and the border between the private and the public ever more politically contested, Calle seems increasingly like an artist whose provocations are more like premonitions. The Deutsche Börse photography foundation prize 2017, featuring Sophie Calle’s new work, is at the Photographers’ Gallery, London W1F, until 11 June. thephotographersgallery.org.uk. Copied from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/04/strangers-secrets-and-desire-the-surreal-world-of-sophie-calle?CMP=twt_gu