Ever get the feeling you're being followed? If so, watch out, artist Sophie Calle's about. She tells Aidan Dunne, Art Critic, about the stories behind her work
Sophie Calle first thought of herself as an artist when she saw her work hanging on the wall in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris in 1980.
"I first entered the Museum of Contemporary Art the day I showed in it," she says with a smile. An art critic had chanced to see a personal project she'd been working on and invited her to exhibit it in a group show. So she became an artist by chance? Yes and no. As with everything about her, the reality is more complex than the bare facts might suggest.
Not that she sets out to mislead or prevaricate. As her exhibition at IMMA makes abundantly clear, she is exceptionally candid about pretty much everything to do with her life and her work and, in her case more than practically any other artist you could think of, her life is her work.
When she showed in Paris in 1980 she was in her late 20s. She had returned to the city after travelling for about seven years. During that time she'd lived in a commune in the south of France and spent time in Mexico, the United States, the Middle East and Greece.
"I followed the fashions of the time. I lived as a hippie when it was fashionable to do so," she explains self-deprecatingly. She became a feminist, then a Maoist, in the same conformist spirit, but "I stopped with the punk movement".
Settled back in Paris, she was bored, aimless and depressed. She decided to follow people in the street, to see where they led her, as a means of exploring and discovering the city for herself anew, and as a way of not making decisions. She covertly photographed the people she followed.
A girlfriend helped her to print up the photographs. One night, having worked late, the girlfriend asked if she could sleep in Sophie's bed. It gave her the idea of inviting strangers to sleep in her bed, and be photographed on the hour as they did so.
Her documentation of this process was seen by an art critic, the boyfriend of one of the sleepers, who invited her to exhibit. Serendipity. But, as she elaborates, also several layers of calculation. For by making a photo-text piece she hoped also to please her father. Then a retired cancer specialist, he was director of Nimes Modern Art Museum, and a collector who was at that time interested in . . . photo-text works. He and her mother had divorced when she was just a year old. She wanted his approval. He came to the exhibition.
"He liked it, and bought one of the pieces," Calle says. Yet, she adds, although this may sound calculating, it was not consciously so on her part at the time.
"For me it was a game. It was the critic's decision to call it art," she says. When she was following people in the street it so happened that, at a social gathering, she was introduced to a man she'd followed and lost earlier in the day. He mentioned he was going to Venice, "so I decided to follow him". She did, and surreptitiously recorded his trip, in photographs and diary entries, as though she were a private detective.
Back in Venice a couple of years later, she took a temporary job as a chambermaid in a hotel. As she worked, she recorded details of the absent guests. Once, in Paris, she found an address book. Over a period of time, she built up a portrait of its owner by contacting names listed in it and asking them their views on him, publishing the results in the form of a series of newspaper articles. Stung by criticism of the intrusive nature of this project, she decided to place herself in the position of subject. Twice she has had herself followed, and her movements documented, by private detectives.
She made several other pieces that take the form of autobiographical confessions, often involving painful emotional experiences.
But her subjects have by no means all been unwitting or unwilling. In the the south Bronx, she approached strangers and invited them to take her wherever they liked, recording the results. She came to no harm, she explains, and somehow felt that she wouldn't. One man asked her for her money.
"I gave it to him," she says. "I mean, I was realistic, I didn't go there dripping with jewellery and wearing a fur coat . . . He turned up at the opening, that man."
She found that "if you ask people something completely unexpected, they tend not to say no immediately. They tend to think about it, to wonder why they shouldn't say yes".
In Los Angeles, for example, she asked people where the angels were, and generally they tried to come up with answers.
When it comes to the many projects that document her break-ups and periods of unhappiness, she is quite clear about her motivation - "It's therapeutic". When she felt that her relationship with American artist Greg Shephard was on the point of collapse, she came up with the idea of their making a video together - No Sex Last Night - about travelling across the US as a way of keeping him with her. They separated, but remain friends.
Or, at the point which she still regards as the unhappiest in her life, when another man she loved told her - at a distance - that their relationship was finished, she devised Exquisite Pain.
"I asked myself, how can I suffer less?" she says. "I decided that if I told my story over and over again I would become sick of it. And I asked people about their worst memories, which were terrible, much more serious than mine. I thought that would give me a sense of proportion about my own unhappiness." And it worked.
"After three months I felt fine, I was in perfect shape," Calle says. "But what I did was therapeutic; it become art much later, when I came back to it."
In the event, the juxtaposition of her own repetitious tale of heartbreak, and accounts of desperately sad experiences is both funny and moving.
There is a fascination in her work with disappearance and absence, which is perhaps why she is so obsessed with confirmations of presence, with material evidence and precise, forensic documentation. Several projects have hinged on descriptions and recollections of things gone missing. She was so terrified of being forgotten on her birthday that, every year until she was 40, she invited to dinner the number of people corresponding to her age. She kept and catalogued the presents they brought, never using them, and eventually exhibited them in vitrines as an artwork.
On one level this, and many of her other projects, are hugely self-indulgent and self-obsessed.
"If I am suffering, I don't ask myself how I can make a work of art about it, I ask myself what I can do to help myself get out of that situation, how can I make it better," she says.
But her work is also curiously engrossing, not least because it addresses, with disarming honesty and considerable narrative skill, areas of experience that are common to most people. And it has to be said that not everyone would find her strategy of concentrating directly on the source of her unhappiness as therapeutic as she clearly does, although her anxieties and sufferings are ordinary anxieties and sufferings. She concurs with this.
"It's true. Nothing awful has really happened to me," she admits.
Something awful may have happened to Benedicte Vincens, a young photographic artist, a fan of Calle who worked as a guard at the Pompidou Centre. She disappeared after fleeing into the night from a fire in her Paris apartment in February 2000. Approached by her mother, Calle made A Woman Vanishes about the case, printing up some of Benedicte's fire-damaged negatives and photographing her flat, with hopes of prompting information about what happened to her. She is still in touch with Benedicte's mother, though there has been no breakthrough.
"It was unusual for me, to have my name linked directly to something real like that," Calle says. She means that, although everything she deals with is real, it is not so potentially grave and it often has an inventive, fictional quality.
"Is it true? Did it happen? Yes, it happened, but once youmake choices, make a narrative, it is also a fiction," she says. Her liking for arbitrary rituals and games attracted the attention of novelist Paul Auster, and he included her as a fictional character in Leviathan - which prompted further collaborative projects.
Because of the way she works, her art is linked to unhappiness. She is ruefully amused by this, remarking that, throughout a satisfactory seven-year relationship, the tenor of her work did change.
"Then, when things went bad again, I did something more radical, different," she says. "But, you know, I think, in a way, I've been getting better at it. Three weeks ago, something sad happened to me. Within a week I had an idea for a project. I started and immediately felt better. So I cried for a week, then felt fine. Maybe it's because I'm getting older."
Sophie Calle's exhibition is at IMMA, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin, from June 23rd to August 15th (tel: 01-6129900)