SOPHIE CALLE: The rules of the game are always very strict. In Take Care of Yourself I asked the participants to answer professionally, to analyze a breakup letter that I had received from a man. The parameters were fixed. For example, I wanted the grammarian to speak about grammar—I wanted to play with the dryness of professional vocabulary. I didn’t want the women expressing sentiment for me. Except maybe my mother . . .
NERI: Yet, typically, she was one of the least sentimental! [laughs]
CALLE: I have my own sentiment—I don’t need that of others. This work was not about revenge. Even so, all the women spoke from their own points of view and, probably, many of them had been abandoned by men at some point in their lives.
NERI: Louise Bourgeois once said that art allows you to re-experience the past in a proportion that is objective and realistic. I could say the opposite about this work because one letter gave rise to an entire universe of response and nuance. It’s both a torture and a tribute!
CALLE: Yes! At the beginning, one of the titles I had in mind was “The Muse,” because this man was, in fact, a muse. Finally I didn’t, because “Take Care of Yourself” was more ironic. And, more strictly, it’s what I did.
CALLE: It’s true that when I speak in public, everyone asks me about life and I always have to bring them back to the fact that it’s a work of art. 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. It is also why I have a public beyond the art world. I don’t care about truth; I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall. For me, my writing style is very linked to the fact that it is a work of art on the wall. I had to find a way to write in concise, effective phrases that people standing or walking into a room could read.
NERI: At times, art struggles because reality can be so overwhelming . . .
CALLE: Art is a way of taking distance. The pathological or therapeutic aspects exist, but just as catalysts. I didn’t make Take Care of Yourself to forgive or forget a man—I did it to make a show in Venice. The show came to my mind because I was thinking, What can I do to suffer less? But once I got the idea, it took over, and I didn’t care about the therapeutic aspect anymore.
CALLE: I never had victims. Well, there were only three cases, twice with lovers: Exquisite Pain and Take Care of Yourself, and The Address Book.
NOTE: Calle has a history of exploring intimacy in ways that might violate one’s notions of privacy, and it’s pretty fair to call her anonymous ex a victim here.
Whether it’s revenge or a way of working through something, the exhibition feels like its meant to tug at heartstrings rather than create an aesthetic object. The artist did little more than stage a scenario and collect responses in an way that feels like overly-pointed rhetoric. Whether the exhibition is heartless manipulation or angsty literalness, it doesn’t remain visually interesting enough to keep my attention. It merely poses as art.
For myself some conceptual art is better appreciated in artists interviews than it’s visual presence. It doesn’t seem as if you think the piece overcomes Daniel Buren’s comment that Calle’s work looks to much like “open books on the wall”
Sounds as if you liked it more than I did. At least you bothered to figure out what it’s about more or less.
Like an open book that claimed to be a literal autobiography, and then featured a string of ghostwriters in a melodrama