Sophie calle's art of following and seduction

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 12, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 463-484

  Hand, Janet ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ART; CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY; THEORETICAL STUDY;

EID: 26944456342     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1191/1474474005eu344oa     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. The hotel is documented in S. Calle, Double game (London, Violette Editions, 1999).
2. Calle's work often brings to the fore the relation of performance, as a mode of artifice, to the etiquettes of everyday social performance. The latter have been famously analysed in Erving Goffman's 'micro-sociology', with its use of performance idioms and extended analogy to theatrical conventions; see The presentation ofse6(in everyday life (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990).
3. All the projects listed here are documented in S. Calle, Sopbie Calle: M'as-tu vue (Munich, Prestel, 2003).
4. A. Alberro, Conceptual art and the politics of publicity (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2003).
5. Ibid., p. 39.
6. A. Alberro and B. Stimson, eds, Conceptual art: a critical anthology (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2000), pp. 13-14.
7. See e.g. J. Wall, 'Marks of indifference: aspects of photography, in, or as, conceptual art', in A. Goldstein and A. Rorimer, eds, Reconsidering the object of art (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1995), p. 266. I am grateful to Virginia Nimarkoh for alerting me to this essay.
8. See L. R. Lippard, Six years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996). Lippard's original essay was published in Art international 12 (1968); the quotation is from p. 31.
9. In discussing Calle's work and this dynamic, I will prefer the terms 'perspective' or 'crafting' to 'expression', owing to the historical baggage that 'expression' comes with.
10. Exquisite pain was first exhibited in Sophie Calle: M'as-tu vue?, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 19 Nov. 2003-15 Mar. 2004, and is documented in the catalogue of the show.
11. See e.g. S. Langer, Feeling and form: a theory of art developed from a new key (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953).
12. J. Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. B. Singer (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1990).
13. Ibid., pp. 81-2.
14. Ibid., p. 180.
15. Both Guy Debord and Michel de Certeau have contributed to and influenced discussion of the minutiae of public life and taken issue with the regulatory principles of its dominant systems. De Certeau is by far the more influential on the present writer, in his development of the idea of a 'poiesis' (creation, invention) that takes varied scattered forms and is associated with the various uses to which people put external 'systems' of production. Although Debord, on the other hand, fully acknowledges the problem of studying 'everyday life', understanding that critiques of cultural production are bound to the same alienating predicament as other cultural formations, he proceeds by employing a mode of critique that distinguishes 'critique of and society of spectacle'. His 'radical critique' of a society' scandalously' impoverished by having emptied the gestures of work of all meaning' insists that revolution must take an oppositional form, pitching 'conscious choice and gamble' against the 'repetitive' and regulated patterns of work most citizens are obliged to follow. Debord is both an influence on Jean Baudrillard and seduced by a similar melancholic circularity. See G. Debord, Society of the spectacle (Detroit, Black & Red, 1983);
16. M. de Certeau, 7-be practice of evetyday life (Berkeley, University of California, 1984).
17. See 'The shadow (1981)' and 'Twenty years later (2001)', in Sophie Calle: M'as-tu vue, pp. 101-12, 113-24; quotation, p. 116.
18. See Calle, Double game, pp. 34-43.
19. Cited in J-L. Chalumeau, 'Photography to the rescue of art?', in Ninety 9, (1991), p. 12.
20. J. Miller and J. Wall, 'Digital phantoms', Creative camera (Feb. 1994).
21. 2, 2001), in which this citation is reproduced.
22. In 'Documentary and corporate violence' Allan Sekula writes that, in the hands of artists who work with 'the social ordering of people's lives', documentary must be disentangled from 'the authoritarian and bureaucratic aspects of the genre, from its implicit positivism'. He goes on to ask, 'How do we produce an art that elicits dialogue rather than uncritical, pseudo-political affirmation?' Although Sekula's essay was written in 1978, and thus should be read bearing in mind the historical context of the 'culture wars' in the US at this time, his essay goes on to say that the romantic idea of the artist as a liberal humanist is a continuing problem for artists working with documentary fornis. He writes that in the context of a gallery the documentary photograph is generally judged in subjective and mannerist terms that continue to distance the artist and artwork from 'the 'ordinary' humanity of those who have been photographed'. In stark contrast to this generality, Sekula cites the work of Fred Lonidier, making general claims for his specific practice. He writes that Lonidier photographs and displays his work in 'case study' form - already an authoritarian form for Sekula, but with the additional element of 'telling the story from below'. In so doing Lonidier subverts his own use of the case study and the evidential aesthetic of the images. Although Sekula is critical of the hierarchy of high and low forms of cultural production, in attempting to represent the lives of workers 'from below' in the manner his essay affirms, he reinforces the exact logic of opposition he is himself critical of. See Alberro and Stimson, Conceptual at, pp. 360-4.
23. This recent history of ethnographic fetishism by the political left, as well as the fetishism appertaining to the romantic liberal artist Sekula describes, is more fully discussed by Hal Foster, 'The artist as ethnographer', in The return of the real (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996), pp. 171 - 204. This is a not unproblematic book in which Foster insists that through the process of framing the framer, art can indeed maintain its critical cultural force.
24. See 'The detective', in Calle, Double game, p. 122.
25. S. Calle, Suite vénitienne, p. 2;
26. J. Baudrillard, Pleasefollow me (Seattle, WA, Bay Press, 1988).
27. See L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading capital (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1979);
28. M. Foucault, Discipline andpunisb: the birth of the prison (Harmondworth, Penguin, 1982).
29. Suite vénitienne has also been exhibited as a photo-text and in the form of a confessional box. For the latter, see R. Storr, Dislocations (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1991), p. 53.
30. Calle, Suite vénitienne, p. 8.
31. See C. Lévi-Strauss, 'Relations of symmetry between rituals and myths of neighbouring peoples', in Structural antbropology, vol. II (Hamondsworth, Penguin, 1977), pp. 238-55.
32. Calle, Suite vénitienne, p. 22.
33. Baudrillard, Please follow me.
34. J. McCarthy and J. V. Monaco, 'You made me love you' (1959), recorded by Judy Garland;
35. Joy Division, 'Love will tear us apart' (Factory Records, 1980).
36. See R. Barthes, Camera lucida (New York, Hill & Wang, 1981).
37. Baudrillard, Please follow me, p. 124.
38. Baudrillard, Seduction, p. 103.
39. Ibid., p. 105.
40. A. Breton, Nadja (1928), (New York, Grove Press, 1960).
41. As one of a series of artists' talks at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, in 1993 titled Talking art, Calle spoke of Baudrillard's express wish to be followed by her and she told us at this time that her answer was no.
42. Calle, Double game;
43. P. Auster, Leviatban (London: Faber & Faber, 1992).
44. Calle, Double game, p. 1.