Sophie Calle: Take Care of Yourself – Installation Views | Paula Cooper Gallery". www.paulacoopergallery.com. The artist's observations dated over three days, record details of the unseen hotel guests: their belongings, their activities, and their correspondence. For example, in the entry for Sunday February 22 nd, Calle writes: " At night, he wears light cotton green pajamas, and she, a blue flannelette nightie. There's a suitcase on the floor. Inside I find several plastic bags filled with medications and a book, Venise et ses trésors d'art." Separately, the photographs in the lower section of the work document the guests' suitcase, slippers, the towels as they left them in the bathroom, their luggage, their clothes hanging in the wardrobe, and a postcard ripped up and put in the waste paper basket that the artist has read. The images suggest an objective detective-like stance by Calle. Greenough, Sarah; Nelson, Andrea; Kennel, Sarah; Waggoner, Diane; Ureña, Leslie (2015). The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art. National Gallery of Art. ISBN 978-0-500-54449-5.

a b O'Hagan, Sean (1 March 2017). " 'The cat in the coffin almost steals the show' ... the Deutsche Börse photography prize". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 2 March 2017.

JUL-AUG 2022 | ArtSeen

Wittgenstein once proposed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” If that is the case, then Calle’s work translates the broader feminine experience into a formalized world of possibilities. The “answers” are less important than the forms of engagement and investigation, the invitation to construct meaning. Another of Calle's noteworthy projects is titled The Blind (1986), for which she interviewed blind people, and asked them to define beauty. Their responses were accompanied by her photographic interpretation of their ideas of beauty, and portraits of the interviewees. [14] Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-12-15 01:09:53 Associated-names Biennale di Venezia (52nd : 2007) Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Boxid IA40791402 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier CALLE: Yes and no. At one moment I thought to work with a psychiatrist on memory problems, but I never did it. In theory, I could be tempted to work with anybody if the idea is good. This led to another fixation. "The obsession of always having a tape in the camera, changing the tape every hour, was so great that instead of counting the minutes left to my mother, I counted the minutes left on each tape."

She doesn't use her all boyfriends as work, she insists. Her current partner has asked her not to do anything based on him and she has agreed.The essential unknowability of other people haunts all of Calle’s work, as both the greatest inducement to curiosity and the greatest threat to creativity. In “The Hotel,” the details that we think of as the most intimate—stained sheets, used tissues, a bloody sanitary pad on the edge of the sink—turn out to be the least interesting: everyone’s dirty towels look the same. Such barriers to real intimacy are most obvious, and most ominous, in Room 45, where a “Do Not Disturb” sign hangs on the doorknob for six consecutive days. “I begin to wonder if anyone is really staying in there,” Calle writes. Exhibitions - Louisiana Museum of Modern Art". Archived from the original on 2011-09-28 . Retrieved 2017-07-21. Sophie Calle, Take Care of Yourself, 2007 (installation view of French Pavilion at 52nd Venice Biennale). Courtesy Perrotin Calle says death is part of her life. As a child she lived on the edge of Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. She would cross it four times a day to and from school, invent families on the tombstones and take them food. Her mother would enact elaborate funeral rituals for her pet goldfish and cats. The view out of her kitchen window is a pseudo-cemetery of funeral plaques she built herself.

CALLE: I have my own sentiment—I don’t need that of others. This work was not about revenge. Even so, all the women spoke from their own points of view and, probably, many of them had been abandoned by men at some point in their lives. The humor, expertise, and empathy of the women manage to uplift and entertain the viewer, while fairly unanimously deciding that “X” is a sham. In each of these exhibits of text and image, Calle’s interpolates the evidence, but with no conclusive results, only silk-screened echoes: important data is circled in red, or words from the document underneath plate glass are lifted out and printed on top of it, hovering above the artifact. Here too, as in “X’s” treatment, the hand is distanced by the medium of silk-screen, so that responses never get too touchy.Originally published in French as an artist's book in 1980 and reissued in 2015 by Siglio Press in English, Suite Vénitienne epitomizes Sophie Calle's idiosyncratic, documentary-style text and photography in an eloquent blend of fact and fiction. The artist writes: "For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them. At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him." In 1996, Calle asked Israelis and Palestinians from Jerusalem to take her to public places that became part of their private sphere, exploring how one's personal story can create an intimacy with a place. Inspired by the eruv, the Jewish law that permits to turn a public space into a private area by surrounding it with wires, making it possible to carry objects during the Sabbath, the Erouv de Jérusalem is exposed at Paris's Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme. Calle has been interviewed thousands of times and she’s interested in the process, in what she chooses to withhold. Which is why I ask her to repeat what she says next, a story she’s never discussed before. “When I was 18, I did abortions. It was illegal, so we had to learn to do it ourselves before the law passed. We learned the Karman method.” Harvey Karman designed a tiny cannula, making it possible to perform early abortions safely and painlessly – later I scroll through photos online, of a tiny glass straw that’s still used today. I go to make some coffee, forget to put coffee in the machine, try again. While the journalist pulls a notebook from his bag I have another go at the kitchen floor. I’m not paranoid, I assure him. Or obsessive-compulsive, he says. I ask if he intends to write our conversation up as a set of questions and answers. I dislike that style; when I read these interviews, I never know myself: it’s not my language. He says his preference is for a proper narrative, though the magazine sometimes favours the Q&A approach. We can always pretend, I tell him, that I insisted on a real text, that that was the first rule of the game. He laughs, says it won’t be necessary: he will find a form. Eva Wiseman (2 July 2017). "Sophie Calle:'What attracts me is absence, missing, death...' ". The Observer . Retrieved 11 September 2017.

One of France's leading Conceptual artists, Calle's life and work redefines the role of the artist or author. Her influence can be seen in the work of later "first-person" artists, whose lives and art are also intertwined, including Chris Kraus, Tracey Emin, and Amalia Ulman. As journalist Mary Kaye Schilling notes: "Even Taylor Swift's boyfriend-dishing pop songs owe something to Calle. Consciously or not, her influence is everywhere." CALLE: Art is a way of taking distance. The pathological or therapeutic aspects exist, but just as catalysts. I didn’t make Take Care of Yourself to forgive or forget a man—I did it to make a show in Venice. The show came to my mind because I was thinking, What can I do to suffer less? But once I got the idea, it took over, and I didn’t care about the therapeutic aspect anymore.After reading the novel, Calle decided, in a characteristic mixing of reality and fiction, to respond by literally embodying the fictional Maria and to recreate parts of the character per the novel. Calle then photographed these recreations for her book Double Game, including Maria's "chromatic diet." In the book she wrote, "To be like Maria, during the week of December 8 to 14, 1997, I ate Orange on Monday, Red on Tuesday, White on Wednesday, and Green on Thursday. Since Paul Auster had given his character the other days off, I made Friday Yellow and Saturday Pink." The photograph in the book for Saturday shows a meal of ham, taramasalata, and strawberry ice cream with rosé wine from Provence. CALLE: He began by telling me that he loved my work but that many of my shows looked like open books on the wall. NERI: In the story The Mermaids in the Basement, Marina Warner describes a scene where a dying girl is weighed before death and after, to try to determine the tangibility of the soul. I was reminded of this in Pas Pu Saisir la Mort, although you deal with this elusive moment in terms of time rather than substance. urn:oclc:record:1359391282 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier takecareofyourse0000call Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s27ksc4x23x Invoice 1652 Isbn 2742768939 The Hotel features a series of twenty-one diptychs comprising photographs and text on paper. Evoking the aesthetic of earlier Conceptual art, the work documents details of the lives of others, or more precisely the lives of anonymous guests of a Venetian hotel as seen by the artist herself, posing as a chambermaid at the hotel for several weeks in the Spring of 1981. In the upper piece, the color photograph shows a bed and headboard which elicit the faded grandeur of Venice, the carved wood, modestly patterned wallpaper, and sober yet satin bedcovers suggestive of the nostalgic time-worn wanderlust and romanticism that continue to draw countless visitors to the city. The text underneath confirms our sense of temporary absence and voyeurism hinted at by the empty hotel bed.