Bibliography

1. Dugid, Hannah. "Up Close and (too) Personal: A Sophie Calle Retrospective." The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, 23 Oct. 2011. Web. 12 Nov. 2015. <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/up-close-and-too-personal-a-sophie-calle-retrospective-1809346.html>.

2. Ulin, David L. "Sophie Calle Investigates the Distance between Us in 'Suite Vénitienne'" Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 24 Mar. 2015. Web. 12 Nov. 2015. <http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-sophie-calle-suite-venitienne-20150324-story.html>.

3. Morgan, Stuart. "Frieze Magazine | Archive | Suite Vénitienne." Frieze Magazine RSS. Frieze, 1992. Web. 12 Nov. 2015. <http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/suite_venitienne/>.

4. Caligans, Marco. "Sophie Calle L'Hotel." People and Place. 18 May 2014. Web. 12 Nov. 2015. <http://peopleandplaceatoca.blogspot.com/2014/05/sophie-calle-lhotel.html>.

5. Jeffries, Stuart. "Sophie Calle: Stalker, Stripper, Sleeper, Spy." The Guardian. The Guardian, 23 Sept. 2009. Web. 12 Nov. 2015. <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/sep/23/sophie-calle>.

6. "The Address Book - Siglio Press." Siglio Press. Siglio Press, 2012. Web. 12 Nov. 2015. <http://sigliopress.com/book/the-address-book/>.

7. O'Neill-Butler, Lauren. "The Savage Detective: On Sophie Calle’s “Address Book” - The..." The Los Angeles Review of Books. Los Angeles Review of Books, 24 Oct. 2012. Web. 12 Nov. 2015. <https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-savage-detective-on-sophie-calles-address-book>.

8. "Sophie Calle: Blind #14" (2000.409a-d) In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2000.409a-d. (October 2006)

9. Dubin, Zan. "Insights of 'Blind' in Eye of the Beholder : Art: Sophie Calle Lets Those without Sight Speak of Beauty and Lets the Resulting Exhibition Speak for Itself." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 20 Oct. 1995. Web. 12 Nov. 2015. <http://articles.latimes.com/1995-10-20/entertainment/ca-59024_1_sophie-calle>.

10. Wilson, Megan. "Sophie Calle: Public Spaces-Private Places." Stretcher. Stretcher, 2001. Web. 12 Nov. 2015. <http://www.stretcher.org/features/sophie_calle_public_spaces_-_private_places/>.

11. Dixon, Tim. "Open File: Sophie Calle & Paul Auster - Gotham Handbook." Open File: Sophie Calle & Paul Auster - Gotham Handbook. Blogger, 1 Feb. 2011. Web. 12 Nov. 2015. <http://openfileblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/sophie-calle-paul-auster-gotham.html>.

12. Gentleman, Amelia. "The Worse the Break-up, The Better the Art." The Guardian. The Guardian, 13 Dec. 2004. Web. 12 Nov. 2015. <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/dec/13/art.art>.

13. Chrisafis, Angelique. "He Loves Me Not." The Guardian. The Guardian, 15 June 2007. Web. 12 Nov. 2015. <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/16/artnews.art>.

Latest Works and Conclusion

Sophie Calle's later pieces were primarily about her romantic entanglements and the resulting heartbreak. Her two-part exhibition Exquisite Pain (2003) was about a long journey she took from Moscow to Japan, hoping to meet up her lover on the way. She documented her travels with photography and wrote about how badly she wanted to see him, but he called her saying that he had found someone else from a hotel room in New Delhi. The photographs, letters, and other mementos in Part I of the exhibit are stamped with "91 days to unhappiness," "90 days to unhappiness," and so on counting down their eventual break-up.

Part I of Exquisite Pain (2003) by Sophie Calle

Part II of the exhibition was about dealing with the misery that came from Calle's abandonment. She recounted her story to 99 friends, family, and strangers, then asked them to relay the worst moments of their lives in return. She recorded all of their tragic stories and juxtaposed them with her break-up, which made it seem trivial and helped her cope with the situation. In her own words, "At the time, I took on this project more for therapeutic than for artistic reasons. I can't remember whether I was planning to use it all later on as material - I think I must have been because I conducted the process seriously and with rigour. I knew the project would stop when I got bored with talking about my pain or when I became disgusted and ashamed of the way that my banal love affair was nothing compared to the stories of greater unhappiness they were telling me." (source)

In 2004, Calle's text Exquisite Pain was adapted into a performance by theatrical company Forced Entertainment based in Sheffield, England.

Part II of Exquisite Pain (2003) by Sophie Calle

While Calle has created smaller pieces since then, her largest recent exhibition was Take Care of Yourself at the 2007 Venice Biennial. This project chronicles a painful split with her boyfriend that involved him breaking up with her via email. She asked friends, strangers, linguistic experts, an etiquette consultant, a copywriter, a chess player, a forensic scientist, and several other women to analyze and criticize the letter, which ended with the words "take care of yourself." She said that "The idea came to me very quickly, two days after he sent it. I showed the email to a close friend asking her how to reply, and she said she'd do this or that. The idea came to me to develop an investigation through various women's professional vocabulary." (source) Photographs of women reading the email are displayed with their assessment of its contents, giving them the power and adding new meaning to the dismissive nature of the break-up. 

Take Care of Yourself (2007) by Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle's most recent work provides a clear image of her maturation as a person. She's graduated from stalking one-night stands to analyzing and tearing down long-term relationships, giving herself agency in the process. Sophie Calle is simultaneously straightforward and confusing, endearing and alarming, powerful and weak. She is so closely tied to her pieces that many of them are autobiographical in nature and she's unashamed to air her dirty laundry for all to see. Calle's legacy is so enduring that in 2001 Australian art student Vienna Parreno legally changed her name to Sophie Calle and displayed recreations of her work for her senior thesis. According to her artist statement she "didn't know what to do with herself." One has to wonder what the real Sophie Calle would think, as her entire career is based on the changing identities of those around her and knowing exactly who she wanted to be. 

Portrait of Sophie Calle

Further Works and Worldly Travels

While Sophie Calle continued to explore documentation of people's lives throughout her career, her work matured in many ways after publication of The Address Book. For her 1986 project The Blind, Calle photographed several people born without sight and asked them to describe their "image of beauty." (source) Answers ranged from one boy's imagining of the color green to a girl's description of running her hands over a Rodin's statue of a voluptuous woman. Calle also revealed that she didn't take all of the pictures herself, saying "For example, a woman spoke of a countryside in Cardiff and the woman took the photograph herself. She pointed the camera in the direction of where she thought the beauty was and took the photograph herself. The man who said the most beautiful thing he had seen was his son took the picture of his son himself." (source) This particular body of work is a poignant and touching look at our individual ideas of beauty.

The Blind (1986) by Sophie Calle

During the 1990's, Calle traveled to various parts of the world and recorded her experiences and those of the people she met there. In 1996 she visited Jerusalem and based an entire exhibit on the Orthodox Jewish tradition of the eruv, calling it Public Places-Private Spaces. The description of an eruv is as follows:

"The eruv is a physical and symbolic enclosure created by stringing galvanized steel wire from poles in and around a Jewish community. This practice is used as a way of stretching the Talmudic law that prohibits the transfer of objects outside of the home on Sabbath (every Friday at sun down until the following day at sun down) by defining the space within the eruv as “home.” The ritual of honoring the eruv is quite involved and in Jerusalem it includes a weekly assessment by an “eruv inspector” to insure that the lines have not been damaged. If any gaps are spotted, the repairs must be completed before the beginning of Sabbath, otherwise an announcement is made by rabbis throughout the city that the space is not protected." (source)

In addition to photographing the giant eruv in the middle of the city, Calle asked both Palestinian and Israeli residents to take her to places that were meaningful to them and describe why. Despite massive conflict between these two groups, this frames the locations in a personal context rather than a hostile and political one. The anonymous descriptions were displayed alongside a map of Jerusalem in the Collection of Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme, Paris.

eruv (1996) by Sophie Calle

In 1992, Calle traveled across America in a collaboration with the photographer Gregory Shepard. No Sex Last Night is a film about the experience of traveling with a stranger and begins with Calle's burial of her close friend Herve Guibert. The journey ends at a drive-through wedding window in Las Vegas, where the two artists are married. The odd dissonance in their relationship can be seen in the following video clip, where they speak aimlessly to each other through the camera.

The two lived together for a short time after the marriage, but broke up when Calle discovered letters addressed to another woman called "H." The movie is an uncomfortably close look at the relationship between Shepard and Calle and displays two different viewpoints on the meaning of the journey and where they think they will ultimately end up. 

Calle traveled to New York and developed a friendship with writer and filmmaker Paul Auster, who came up with a guide for her to live by during her time in the city. The sarcastic title was Personal Instructions for SC on How to Improve Life in New York City (Because she asked...), which later resulted in The Gotham Handbook (1999). Instructions included are "smile at and talk to strangers, distribute sandwiches and cigarettes to the homeless and to 'cultivate a spot.'" (source) Calle accepted the challenge and commandeered a phone booth on the street, painting it green and providing friendly services to random passerby. Calle cleaned the booth and restocked it with water bottles, cigarettes, flowers, cash, and notepads on which strangers could write their opinion of the project. She documented the entire experience and compiled it to create The Gotham Handbook. 

Image from The Gotham Handbook (1999) by Sophie Calle

In my opinion, these later pieces are her most interesting. As Calle grew older, she relied less on shock value and exploitation and created work that was both sincere and concerned. While still self-centered, her work reflected on the disenfranchised and gave a voice to people who are often overlooked.