Sophie Calle: Other People's Lives

Sophie Calle pursues her interest in the human race without regard for decorum. For over a decade she has spied on strangers, leafed through diaries and asked the most awkward questions. In return, she has told us things about herself that we might prefer not to know; dark things. The fruit of her fascination is a body of words and photographs that is astonishing for the way in which it embraces life to the detriment of art.

Although often motivated by compassion, it is for her apparent cruelty that she is best known. Under the auspices of the latter, she is the eternal enfant terrible, peeping through keyholes and repeating in a loud voice the conversations she has overheard. At times she seems intent on bringing the whole social edifice crumbling. Provocatively, she has a nose for the revealing detail.

In 1981 Calle found a job as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel. With a camera hidden in her bucket, she stalked the bedrooms for evidence of unacceptable behaviour. She photographed the contents of suitcases and chronicled bathroom cabinets. She kept a journal where she looks, and looks at herself looking; a modern activity. She later presented what she found as L'Hôtel (1986), putting the contents of each room within a single frame.

The kitsch hotel rooms, oppressively over-decorated, become the standard unit of measurement by which to assess the relative sickness of each guest. Room 25 is a low-key nightmare. A young Englishman keeps oranges on the window ledge and straightens his Herald Tribune before leaving for the day. All fundamentally innocent until seen through Calle's camera. A dirty comb, missing some teeth, looks murderous against a pristine wash-basin. An absurd pair of underpants occupies an entire drawer. She finds his diary. Not only does she read it, she photographs it for us to read, and we listen for footfalls. He recounts being chatted up in a bar - it made him sick. One day she passes him in the corridor, and is, of course, revolted.

Tension builds with each room. In one she finds Jean Paul Belmondo's name on a discarded envelope. A silk night dress remains draped over a chair for days, unworn. A man keeps all his possessions wrapped in plastic bags. At times Calle's neutral prose style threatens to implode; she finds 'a tube and a jar of vaseline.' But ultimately no one is caught in flagrante ? the most disturbing thing she unearths is a marked degree of loneliness. the viewer is too implicated to take issue with her for looking in the first place.

In L'Homme au Carnet (The Man's Addressbook, 1983) Calle sought a broader audience than gallery goers. On finding a lost addressbook in the street, she set about contacting all the names listed, in the hope of building up a portrait of its anonymous owner. She would meet his friends in bars and cafés and ask them to talk about him. She then published their accounts in Libération, and one tries to imagine the victim's daily fear of the news-stand. Recounting their one meeting with him, many express surprise at being in his book at all. The newspaper's readership waited in vain for a good friend to come forward. The man turned out to be a film critic.

An earlier trip to Venice, during which Calle made full use of the city's dramatic potential, has become her best known attempt to surreptitiously enter the life of a stranger. In 1980, at a gallery opening in Paris, she encountered a certain Henri B.. Hearing that he was leaving for Venice, she set off after him, eventually locating his hotel. She spent the next fortnight on his trail. The result of this was a book of photographs accompanied by a first-person narrative, Suite Vénitienne (1980).

The photographs capture the surreal feel of the city out of season. Calle seems invisible because no one notices that they are being photographed. Excitement mounts for direct encounters with Henri B., oblivious in his sheepskin coat. 'He is alone, I become rash, I approach too close to him.' She photographs his back. His utter ordinariness in no way violates the rules of the game; the pleasure for Calle, made vicarious for the reader, lies in his ignorance of the baroque situation. The passageways of Venice are called calle.

Although photography is at the centre of her art, these works demonstrate that Calle is not a photographer in the accepted sense; she is an artist who lives her life as a series of performances, using the camera and the written word to record what it was like to be there. By implication, the work need not necessarily be seen in art galleries.

Concurrent with these pieces, in which tension predominates, are works gentler in conception, where Calle enters into the lives of strangers in a spirit of co-operation. For Les Dormeurs (The Sleepers, 1979), she invited unknown people to stay in her bed, for eight hour periods, run consecutively over eight days. She offered the participants basic hospitality - clean sheets and food - before they surrendered themselves to her notepad and camera. They exhibited their trust by falling asleep. Calle's need to know never went beyond what people were prepared to tell her about themselves. It is a work that lies somewhere between the intimisme of Pierre Bonnard and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

In Anatoli (1984) Calle records sharing a wagon-lit on the Trans-Siberian Express with a porcine 50 year old Russian who spoke no French. She spoke no Russian for that matter, but she had her camera. Anatoli grins broadly, the kind of smile recognisable from a million gauche holiday snaps, where the subject knows no more effective way to communicate. Their relationship is never exactly easy, but she shares his state-of-siege food parcels and a kind of rapport develops. She gets to know him.

Sometimes the form of this work can seem so perfunctory as to render normal artistic judgement perverse. L'Homme au Carnet is presented with all the grace of a press cuttings file. The loose pile of photographs in Anatoli will become grubby with fingerprints and dented by handling. The over-designed chair and table that fronts Les Dormeurs was clearly chosen on a whim. This helps to push away from art and back towards life, where questions of taste rarely govern behaviour.

This process continues in Les Aveugles (The Blind, 1986), where Calle asked people who had never been able to see to define what beauty meant to them. The answers make one wonder why no artist had bothered to ask before:

'Fish fascinate me. I can't say why. They don't make any noise, that's nothing, that doesn't interest me. It's their evolution in water that I like, the idea that they are not attached to anything. Sometimes I can stand in front of an aquarium for minutes. Standing there like an idiot. Because it's beautiful, that's all.'

Next to each answer is hung a framed photograph of the blind person, and below it, on a small white shelf, rests a photograph - or two or three - that illustrates the definition. Again, these photographs are neutrally descriptive; but the ocean has never looked so calm, nor grass so lush. The definitions re-vivify the jaded vision of those that can see. They also allow us to enter a previously unknown imaginative realm. It is Calle's most successful expedition into other people's lives.

'Sixty kilometres from Cardiff, on the cliff is a desert-like hill. Terrible weather, steep terrain, thin grass - the flowers worry me, I'm scared to tread on them. I was struck by the beauty of this desolate landscape. I took a photograph of it. You won't feel the wind from the photo, but it will perhaps give the impression of vastness.'

The series is large, fills the gallery, but ends with a small empty shelf: 'I have already grieved for beauty. I do not need beauty, I don't need images in my mind. As I can't appreciate beauty, I have always fled from it.' And somehow this recalls the empty white spaces of the art world, where beauty is the last card-carrying taboo, and a different kind of artist has eloquently stated: 'The idea of beauty is dead, and this is its beauty.'¹

Calle's work is remarkably resistant to the -isms that people use to account for the art that disturbs them. One does however come to mind, but it is the most hopelessly déclassé; humanism. A word normally condemned to death by a thousand qualifying adjectives. It is a sign of the poverty of current art criticism that there is no adequate language for the discussion of work devoted primarily to human interests. No wonder Calle once walked around Los Angeles asking strangers 'where are the angels?' Les Anges, (The Angels, 1984).

Notions of journalistic responsibility need not pertain in art. Calle has admitted that 'in most of my work there is one lie', and it is the explicitly autobiographical pieces that beg the question. The Autobiographical Stories (1988-89), mostly drawn from her childhood, combine with photographs of objects from this period. Nostalgie de l'enfance proves to be as fugitive as the man she once believed to be her real father. She found a letter from him to her mother in which she read 'My darling, I hope you are seriously thinking of sending our Sophie to boarding school...' But then people started to tell her how much she resembled her own father, and that was that. A lodger sets fire to himself in the bed she had slept in for 17 years; she photographs the discarded mattress from an upper story window. Real lost childhood.

Some stories are definitive Calle, told purely for the mischievous pleasure of telling. She once had a job as a life model in an art class. At the end of each session, one member of the group would take a blade to his drawing of her, peremptorily slashing it. She proudly exhibits what we are asked to believe is one of the drawings, a slightly sweet rendering in pencil, marred by gashes. It is clearly the portrait she always wanted.

Over the last two years there has been a change in tone. Les Tombes (The Tombs, 1990) has an unprecedented monumentality. Large black and white photographs, taken in a Californian cemetery, show disturbingly generic gravestones; 'Father', 'Mother', 'Brother', 'Sister'. For the first time Calle adds no narrative of her own, positing death as the natural limit of her need to know. The stones run full-bleed to their welded metal frames. Of all her work it looks the most like art, the best suited to the norms of an art gallery.

But in an another recent piece she cast an ambivalent eye across her given context, regaining the bite of Les Aveugles in the process. Invited to participate in an exhibition at MoMA in New York - the institution that gave the world modern art's first robust genealogy - she responded by removing a number of works from the walls of the permanent collection². In their place she hung descriptions of the absent paintings, solicited from the memories of invited art experts. Piquantly, she asked them to make little mental drawings. The subjectivity of their observations - the points at which they diverge - inevitably questions the striven-for objectivity of the institution. Faced with a painting, an individual response is plainly as valid as the body of ideas upon which MoMAs are founded. In full subversive flight, Calle leaves it to those involved with art professionally to demonstrate this truth.

Unpredictably, The Cash-Machine Work (1991) sees a return to messy life, albeit with a sacred dimension. Using the security cameras operated by banks to watch over their clients, Calle has photographed the participants in that most urgent of daily rites; drawing money from a hole in a wall. Her fascination with human behaviour in controlled situations returns to the fore. The methods, however, have changed. Where once she spied through keyholes she now employs the paraphernalia of the national security state. This is bound to provoke misunderstandings, but it is clear, as ever, that her motives are no more sinister than those of a too curious child. The brutality of the medium protects her from the sentimentality that stalks those endeavouring to make art about people. And besides, like any enfant terrible, the last thing she wants is to be liked. I imagine her picking through my shredded notes with more than usual distaste.

^{l. Orshi Drozdik, catalogue for Stendhal's Syndrome: The Cure, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, 1990}

^{2. Dislocations, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1991}

^{Main image: Sophie Calle, The Hotel, Room 26, 1983, photograph (from diptyque), 38 x 55 cm. Courtesy: © the artist}