Calle me, Calle me any, anytime

The Sophie Calle exhibition that was on at the Whitechapel. Bit late on blogging about this, as it has now been and gone from London, and onto the Netherlands.

The centrepiece exhibit is the installation 'Take Care of Yourself', a collaborative exploration of male-female relations triggered by the artist receiving a break-up letter (in fact an email) from her lover, ending in the words 'Take care of yourself'. In Calle's words:

"I asked 107 women... chosen for their profession or their skill, to interpret this letter. To analyse it, comment on it, dance it, sing it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me. Answer for me. It was a way of taking the time to break up. A way of taking care of myself."

So what we get from Calle, and her all-female collaborators is a multi-faceted dissertation on the "It's not you, it's me" break-up line; a mass of different readings from a mass of different women, dissecting, expanding, shooting holes through, and in some cases physically digesting the letter.

Calle has previous of course, in turning her life into art, and other works are shown here too. These often involve her ceding control of her life to some extent: letting others write rules for her to live by - fiction writers, tarot card readers - but she, certainly her collaborators are in control here. They slice through this unnamed man, his every word is picked apart, becomes evidence in the case against him. Not just every word but even every letter - the email is signed off with an X. Is this a kiss, an initial, or a code-name, a sign for 'ex', a symbol of mystery?

Was strangely reminded of this exhibition again while reading 'Rabbit at rest' (the fourth and last in Updike's Rabbit Angstrom series) where the Angstrom family, having been laid bare by Updike for over 30 years, play out the last strains of group attachments and individual isolation, male ego, female scorn. Both Calle's work and Updike's novel are comedies, rich in detail and insight, and human, both take the mundane and make it sublime. No spoilers here, but this from 'Rabbit at rest', on a family trip to a nature park staring out at flamingos on a lake, their odd one-legged stances, their upside-down-drinking scooped bills:

And they stand marvelling, the four human beings, as if the space between farflung planets had been abolished, so different do these living things loom from themselves. The earth is many planets, that intersect only at moments. Even among themselves, slices of difference interpose, speaking the same language as they do, and lacking feathers, and all drinking the same side up.

For me this excerpt gets at that self-reflective instinct with which art of any kind scores its deepest points. You look at a context outside of you and you think about yourself, it speaks to you. It’s different, the distance makes you think about togetherness. Distance (and togetherness) you feel when looking at something wholly (sacredly) weird and separate, how that can’t help but reflect back on what you do recognise in and among your own weirdly separate but connected existences. You feel the weight of ingrained (genetic?) impulse to recognition of something you don’t entirely trust or would ever consciously choose to belong to, but deeper down you know you do. Feeling part of a broader collective through pondering the granular specifics of someone else’s private life.

It is probably consistent that the insights of literature are brought to mind at this exhibition, (oh hang on, it’s vice versa ain’t it), as Sophie Calle is a literary artist. It is an exhibition you have to read, is about reading (interpreting), as well as the less tangible sensation that this apparent glimpse into someone else’s private world is like getting to know characters in a book. The overlapping layering up of readings creating a distilled essence of a moment, not everyone’s idea of a good read, but there are lovely insights here.

A schoolgirl’s reading of this worldly man’s words includes this veneer slicer:

He says he would have like things to have turned out differently.
That means they are going to turn out badly.

Haunted somewhat by the exhibition, as I am now by Updike’s Rabbit, I bought the catalogue – it is more than any other really the book of the exhibition, every word and performance reproduced in a chunky 40cm of glossy hardback.

I re-read ‘Exercises in Style’ by Raymond Queneau, a gift from a friend, destined to be recommended to other friends, present and future. Another comedy, and like Calle’s ‘Take Care of Yourself’ a succession of readings and treatments from a single starting point. ‘Exercises in Style’ is an odd read: 99 different versions of the same rather pointless story, entertaining and instructive; it is either a more trivial work than Calle’s or a more profound one, (or both), depending on your mood at the time.