“Hers is a chess-playing art, one of timing and artfully mobilised viewer psychology,” Martin Herbert once wrote about artist Trisha Donnelly. In a similar sentiment I start to envision the artist persona as a rightful medium. For French conceptual artist Sophie Calle it is a conceptually transgressive strategy and a tool to reflect and observe gazes of hers and of others. I quickly search her name on Google and her portraiture comes up before images of her work: a French woman with dark hair, a fringe and black cat-eye glasses. In the popular imagination, she is a character from the New Wave. Calle’s work frequently takes form of scenario-based projects that provide a set of rules, choices, and risks of their own, documented in photographs and writings. On many occasions these are odd queries into strangers, but also into herself. Although Calle is deemed as having detective tendencies, really her artistic persona lingers throughout her oeuvre as conceptual acts, in which we interpret the fragments provided. Inevitably, interpretation equates to almost no truths.
I see Calle’s work The Blind at Rencontres d’Arles. It is the last showing of the series due to the damage caused by a storm that hit Calle’s storage. The damaged work, installed underground in the Roman cryptoporticus, is maintained in its damp state, as the water from the ceiling steadily drips onto the photographs. At the entrance there’s a note scribbled under the text provided by Rencontres d’Arles: “Warning: For those of you thinking of ‘borrowing’ one of the works in this exhibition, if I let them decompose it’s because they are extremely toxic and will contaminate your home. S.C.” The exhibition is composed of black and white portraits of the people Calle interviewed at the institute for the blind in 1986, in Paris, the images of the things that they considered beautiful, and the definitions hanging inside a frame. One of the portraits is a young boy, for which the text reads: “Christmas wreaths, Saint Lucie, a nice dog, railroad stations, the Eiffel Tower, all of that is beautiful.”
The clear power dynamics of Calle’s interest in the blind was first noted when deaf artist and professor at Gallaudet University, Joseph Grigely, sent her a series of postcards reflecting on the work. Grigely describes the work as “not so much the voices of the blind as the voice of Sophie Calle.” Others disagreed, including Alyssa Grossman, who considered Calle’s practice to be one from which investigative or anthropological practices could learn. Yet with The Hotel (1981), which Calle admitted to the staging and constructing of the images, she often fails to speak about what actually happened. The paradox of her work is that the complete knowledge is never allowed, nor desirable. Happy accidents cultivated by the artist are easily read as failures or betrayals by the viewers. I get this feeling from the Christmas wreaths, Saint Lucie, a nice dog, railroad stations, and the Eiffel Tower. The strong sense of staging feels untrustworthy and the representations of beauty are clichéd. I think of a passage from I Love Dick in which Chris Kraus (the character) states that she is a lover of bad art because it offers “a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it.” And that, “Bad art makes the viewer much more active.” I start to think that Calle might be talking about a restless longing for naïve reaction.
In Calle’s work, formal experimentation gets in the way of documenting facts. She willingly offers the causality or responsibility of the work to the viewer, thereby deconstructing the idea that the artist is considered the primary agent and cause of the artwork. The audience is invited to construct a fantasy, contribute to the storytelling. In one interview, Calle says that she thinks that museums are made up of the works on show and personal impressions, reflections, and recollections. The complexities in conjunction of her persona, the exhibition space and the artwork, it can seem less like an invitation than a way for Calle to distance herself. All I have are fragments, an anecdote, a picture. It was never meant to be a representation of blind people. It’s a scant, mystifying bricolage. The absence of subjectivity is a large presence that can look beyond the matter of exactly what or who is identified. I guess it was already anticipated that we would fall in the safety net of clichéd narrative in these hackneyed images, inevitably shaping our fantasy by what we wished to find.
Ultimately, Calle’s images prove to be utterly selective and controlled. Yet, I agree with Lili Owen Rowlands when she said “each image may be no more or less true than it was to begin with.” The Blind emphasises the orchestrated approach Calle takes towards her images and our willingness to be seduced by those myths. Her attention to the “management of information” and the role of our fantasy is the art medium itself. The ideas, details, spaces, and emotions provoked by the works are a “thrilling yet simultaneously chilling brush with the (Lacanian) Real.” As Jacques Lacan would say, there is no desire without law.
