Sophie Calle, a French conceptual artist, is an intriguing combination of humour and ironic vision of real life. She makes conceptual art that is unusually accessible, you are in on the joke, and has a genuine willingness to interact with her audiences.
Sophie Calle, Untitled, 2012, follows Sophie on her trips in the United States (including to Las Vegas to get married and to choose a burial site), as well as to the small town where she spent her summers as a child in France. There are also sequences in her home/studio in Paris. Between those sections, we have her attending and explaining various exhibits as well as flashbacks to earlier works and her thoughts about them today. That said, all these jumps between locations, timelines and activities makes the video’s content challenging to process at time.
She has been incredibly imaginative in her topics. For instance, her reputation started with a series of projects focused on following strangers, including a man who travelled from Paris to Venice whom she saw on a train. Then she became a hotel staff member in Venice to photograph people’s rooms. Another iteration was to have a private detective follow and photograph her to see what her life looked like from the perspective of someone following her. Intimacy, the fragility of relationships, and death are themes to which she returns frequently. The voyeurism of her work adds an edge of uneasiness when engaging her work, the question comes up – should I really be looking at this.
Her work often involves people she does not know beforehand, for instance a series of strangers slept in her bed every night over the course of several weeks. She flipped that project by sleeping on top of the Eiffel Tower but asking people to tell her a five-minute story to keep her awake all night. 16,000 people turned up to watch her or tell her a story.
The video did succeed in providing an insight in how her lively imagination starts with every day, mundane experiences, but then finds a way to stretch them to an extreme artistic expression. Her art relies on photography and video to capture her projects, but I always felt a sense of ‘I never thought about that way of looking at the world’ when looking at her work.
Overall, she is a rare visual artist who can explain her work, does not take herself too seriously, and appears to be comfortable engaging with people. Nevertheless, her frankness combined with her humour also leads to a sense that she is also manipulating the interviewer. It is one more game for her to be interviewed. Some more incisive lines of questioning could have pressed her to go deeper than some of the answers she gave that she has clearly been using for a long time. Given she is someone who enjoys living in ambiguity, that would have been an added challenge for the filmmaker, but could have added greater understanding of her work.
ere to edit.
Sophie Calle, Untitled, 2012, follows Sophie on her trips in the United States (including to Las Vegas to get married and to choose a burial site), as well as to the small town where she spent her summers as a child in France. There are also sequences in her home/studio in Paris. Between those sections, we have her attending and explaining various exhibits as well as flashbacks to earlier works and her thoughts about them today. That said, all these jumps between locations, timelines and activities makes the video’s content challenging to process at time.
She has been incredibly imaginative in her topics. For instance, her reputation started with a series of projects focused on following strangers, including a man who travelled from Paris to Venice whom she saw on a train. Then she became a hotel staff member in Venice to photograph people’s rooms. Another iteration was to have a private detective follow and photograph her to see what her life looked like from the perspective of someone following her. Intimacy, the fragility of relationships, and death are themes to which she returns frequently. The voyeurism of her work adds an edge of uneasiness when engaging her work, the question comes up – should I really be looking at this.
Her work often involves people she does not know beforehand, for instance a series of strangers slept in her bed every night over the course of several weeks. She flipped that project by sleeping on top of the Eiffel Tower but asking people to tell her a five-minute story to keep her awake all night. 16,000 people turned up to watch her or tell her a story.
The video did succeed in providing an insight in how her lively imagination starts with every day, mundane experiences, but then finds a way to stretch them to an extreme artistic expression. Her art relies on photography and video to capture her projects, but I always felt a sense of ‘I never thought about that way of looking at the world’ when looking at her work.
Overall, she is a rare visual artist who can explain her work, does not take herself too seriously, and appears to be comfortable engaging with people. Nevertheless, her frankness combined with her humour also leads to a sense that she is also manipulating the interviewer. It is one more game for her to be interviewed. Some more incisive lines of questioning could have pressed her to go deeper than some of the answers she gave that she has clearly been using for a long time. Given she is someone who enjoys living in ambiguity, that would have been an added challenge for the filmmaker, but could have added greater understanding of her work.
ere to edit.
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