There is something equally compelling and unnerving about Sophie
Calle’s insistence on maintaining what seems to a partially interrupted
practice. Her work has often been heavily indebted to input from others,
whether this is in specific instructions given to her, such as those
written by Paul Auster in his Gotham Handbook, or an address
book found in the street that allows Calle to construct a cumulative
portrait of a stranger (and more specifically an artwork out of, or as,
that process. Wandering around her current exhibition in the Whitechapel
gallery, I was trying to think about this kind of relinquishment at the
heart of her work – I wondered if it could be said to belong to an
admirable selflessness, a generosity of spirit, or something else.
Rather than seeing her practice as being partially interrupted, might we
call it simply partial? There is often a reliance on people (including
the artist of course) being put in-the-service-of – as if contributing a
small component of a larger machine – in order to generate unforeseen
circumstances, or to force the project into a certain position, of
varying degrees of fixity.
One of the pieces I spent most time with concerned a the
documentation of a 15-year struggle to find a way out of a project that
had already been committed to – one that had started from a series of
beautiful black and white images taken by the security camera in a cash
machine. A wall was covered with clusters of these images, and an
accompanying film was projected in a nearby corner. Moving through
various possible ‘escape routes’ – trying to make the focus of the
ongoing work the idea of money, making it about faces, about solitude,
creative investment, etc. – the project seemed to speak most loudly
about both partiality (in the sense of not being in control of
everything, or rather of this not being possible or even permitted as an
option. Of course, it could be argued that this is a condition for
creative work in general, but here it became something else, something
more pronounced and excited – as if there were no possibility of Calle
being able to impress herself on the material at hand, as if she could
gain no ‘purchase’… so to speak) and exhaustion. One wonders how much of
a danger, or perhaps how much a feature of Calle’s work this sense of
unwieldiness is – if one is always giving up ownership in some way, this
is always to promote the risk of not being allowed back into the work.
This could very well be Calle’s intention of course – to not be able to
find a way into the work except on others’ terms, or in a way that is
not pre-determined, could be precisely the generative input she hopes
for from her collaborators. By permitting the interventions of others
(in another piece Calle follows directives from her astrologer, a trip
organised according to the cards…) and colluding with chance in this
way, Calle’s practice is a forced engagement with the conditions of
fiction, even when the ‘source material’ is from the so-called real
world.
The main piece on show was based on the dissection of a email
received by Calle from a lover – a break up letter that is subjected to
various processes by a series of women, for the most part according to
their professional field. The letter is criticized, measured, refuted,
translated, and so on, by fellow artists, dancers, actresses, singers,
translators, criminologists, lawyers, sharpshooters, teenagers,
designers, historians, etc. which amounts to an obsessive dissection
that was absolutely fascinating. The installation (if that is what it
could be called…) presents these ‘interpretations’ on the walls and on
videos playing in random sequence. For me, the most interesting response
to the task Calle had clearly given to her associates was from another
writer. Her text announced that, while her first response had been to
pick apart the man’s message (identifying its arrogance, its
manipulativeness, etc.), she had, on reflection, chosen to warn Calle of
the dangers presented by the group of women she had gathered around her
– a coven of witnesses that she described as a “choir of death”. This
warning seemed fascinating, both in the context of the rest of the
exhibition and in relation to the nature of Calle’s working method in
general. Aside from the particulars of this piece, such as the failed
relationship, the complexities of gender politics, etc., I wondered if
this warning about the risks of allowing others into your practice would
hold for other instances – for surely what occurs here is not any
straightforward collaboration. What would ‘death’ mean here though – the
removal of the ‘artwork’ from Calle’s jurisdiction in some sense? The
removal of the letter from her proximity, so that it no longer belongs
[to anyone]? There is a form of dispersal at the heart of a practice
that relinquishes something of itself – it is an approach to a dismissal
of subjectivity that is, at the same time, something of a artificial
heightening of that subject. Calle gives up something of her influence,
her input, by asking for assistance, guidance, specific instructions
from others – yet, somehow, especially in this recent piece, this serves
to extract another, rarefied experience of Calle’s activity, Calle’s
exercise of choice, and Calle’s claims on what emerges from the entire
process.
The video that documented the 15-year search for a project’s
conclusion, as well as constituting part of the resolution in itself,
featured Calle’s eloquent and sonorous voiceover. The voice traced her
various frustrations and false starts as the project went on. This
retrospective summation, however, seemed to be too precise, too neatly
reflective, to really tackle what was mentioned in the last few moments
of the film: making the project be about failure, or the success of
failure, or the failure of success. If the video served as Calle’s only
available opportunity to reestablish the control needed to finish the
work (and indeed to find the right way to present it), I wondered why it
seemed that the uncertain status she that had run through the whole
story – the hesitations, uncertainties, attempts to project the work
onto others, to get them to assume some kind of responsibility for it –
seemed absent from the final piece. I suppose that in the process of
relinquishing responsibility and then reclaiming it can just as often
result in staid, unconvincing work as delicately fashioned
confabulations of fact and fiction.
