Calle has taken the tag at the end of the letter, “Take Care of Yourself,” as an ironic imperative as well as a sincerely therapeutic prescription. In taking care, she invites others to provide explanations for the inexplicable rupture, or just lamentations in the spirit of lyric drama. By circulating the letter to women of all ages, artistic and otherwise, Calle transforms the breakup into a survey of interpretation. The format of the show, with the names of responders, their photographic portrait, and their framed accompanying artifact of interpretation, places the work somewhere between the realms of legal exhibit and time capsule. Calle’s formal distance, and her deliberate choice of all female subjects, remasters the gendered bias of emotion as feminine privée and woman’s wile. We are given a series of privileged interpretations, translations of reality—as linguistic as they are visual—rather than pure fact. Dead seriousness gives way to comic relief when French lawyer Caroline Mécary determines in her brief that on the basis of Constitutional Law, “X is punishable” for up to two years in prison or a fine of 37,500 Euro. The response of a children’s book author sublimates the break-up into a tale that children and adults can understand—a translation, as it were, of the obscure world of adult malaise. A schoolgirl astutely observes that “X’s” break-up letter uses complicated words like “ irrémediable” and “ masquerade,” and simply concludes that Sophie is sad. Despite the technical layout of the show I did find the responses intricate and clever as the ‘communal disembowelling’ of text began to decode and unmask the ambiguities of language as they second guess X’s (Calles former lover) intentions. The simple use of a particular word or a comma and quote unravelled a new dimension of meaning and reality as they were all explored from a collective of perspectives. 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. As if to further complicate the history of this of this piece, graffiti artists broke into the gallery in the Bronx the night before the exhibition opened, and tagged the gallery, adding another layer to the series, which now resides (and still bearing the graffiti marks) in the permanent collection of the Bronx Museum.

CALLE: First I asked two girlfriends, one of whom happens to be a journalist, the other a writer. And that’s how I got the idea. I told them, “Speak from where you are.” I began to think about the more obvious jobs whose work it is to analyze words—the psychoanalyst, the corrector—then I tried to specialize: the philosopher, who then gave me the philologist, who in turn gave me the moral philosopher, and so on. Each one said, “Did you think about this person or that person?” After a while, the process became more distant from me: I found a crossword writer because she works with words, a markswoman because she works with targets, and so on. Initially I wanted only one actress and one singer, just as I had chosen only one psychoanalyst. I ended up with 33 actresses, singers, and dancers, from Camille to Nathalie Dessay to Sussan Deyhim. As with much of the artist's work, perhaps L'Hôtel says more about Sophie Calle than it does about the anonymous hotel visitors. It is a prime example of her contribution to Conceptual art with her mode of taking a nominal proposition and carrying it out through the production of a work. It highlights her synonymous incorporation of photography, documentary, and chance and posits the artist in a role similar to an anthropologist, seeking clues and exploring mysteries about specific specimens of humanity. This pointed study of strangers and herself would inject a "confessional" vein into the world of Conceptual art, in which personal lives and their ephemera were considered worthy fodder for exploration. A similar strategy was adopted by other contemporary women artists, perhaps most notably, Tracey Emin. The result of this exercise is a microscopic look at a breakup, carefully dissecting each possible meaning of the different parts of a farewell note, by means of photographic portraits, written studies and video performances expressing different ideas on love, pain, sex and identity. NERI: Nonverbal meaning performance, like the Indian classical dancer, the Bunraku, and the ballerina? Jessica Lott (2009), Sophie Calle, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, USA, Frieze , retrieved 2010-04-27

MARCH 2022 | ArtSeen

Calle has created elaborate display cases of birthday presents given to her throughout her life; this process was detailed by Grégoire Bouillier in his memoir The Mystery Guest: An Account (2006). According to Bouillier, the premise of his story was that "A woman who has left a man without saying why calls him years later and asks him to be the 'mystery guest' at a birthday party thrown by the artist Sophie Calle. And by the end of this fashionable—and utterly humiliating—party, the narrator figures out the secret of their breakup." [15] 1990s [ edit ] Rachel Monique. Couldn’t Capture Death’ (2007). Photograph: Sophie Calle/Adagp, Paris & ARS, New York, 2017, Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery and Galerie Perro

A prime example of Calle turning pain into art is another piece for the Biennale. Calle says that when she was told last year that she would be showing at Venice, another call came through: her mother saying she had a month to live. Calle nursed her at home. But she had heard that people who are dying often wait for the two minutes when their relatives leave the room to slip away. In Take Care of Yourself, the artist invited different professionals to interpret the letter, each from the point of view of their field of expertise. Altogether, she gathered 107 conclusions drawn by women in the fields of journalism, style correction, acting, singing, dancing, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, among many others. NERI: What was it like to work simultaneously on Take Care of Yourself and Pas Pu Saisir la Mort [ Couldn’t Catch Death, 2007], the film you made of your mother’s death—one a very sociable work, the other deeply introspective? NERI: Have you ever made a work where you regretted taking something from life and using it in your art?CALLE: He began by telling me that he loved my work but that many of my shows looked like open books on the wall. Sophie Calle is internationally renowned for using aspects of her personal life as a source of inspiration. Her work is about exploring human relations using provocative, sometimes even controversial methods, since her narrations —often told through photographs, videos and text— reveal, or at least seem to reveal, the artist's very own intimacy and that of those surrounding her.

Calle: That’s precisely why he could be my curator. He could be objective about the work. It would have been impossible if our work were too similar. Our differences were what made us get along. And he took his job very seriously, right down to the detail of each work. I thought that would be enough, I thought that loving you and your love would be enough so that this anxiety – which constantly drives me to look further afield and which meens that I will never feel quiet and at rest or probably even just happy or “generous”- would be calmed when I was with you, with the certainty that the love you have for me was the best for me, the best I have ever had , you know that. I thought that my writing would be a remedy, that my “disquiet” would dissolve into it so that i could find you. But no. Infact it even became worse, I cannot even tell you the sort of state I feel I am in. so I started calling the “others” again this week. Demonstrating this variance in how the accounts panned out is that a writer commented on the style of the letter, a justice issued an objective judgement, a lawyer acted in defence of the ex-lover, a mediator attempted to build a path to reconciliations, and a proofreader provided a literal edit of the text, with it investigated in every way possible. Sophie Calle: Take Care of Yourself – Installation Views | Paula Cooper Gallery". www.paulacoopergallery.com. An Enquiry Concerning Questionable Practices within the Scientific Methodologies of the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum By Kurt Gottschalkurn:oclc:record:1359391282 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier takecareofyourse0000call Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s27ksc4x23x Invoice 1652 Isbn 2742768939

She began to spend time following strangers and recording their movements, even to the extreme of following one unsuspecting French man all the way from Paris to Venice, all the while building up a dossier of images and notes about his travels. Fabian Stech, J'ai parlé avec Lavier, Annette Messager, Sylvie Fleury, Hirschhorn, Pierre Huyghe, Delvoye, D.F.-G. Hou Hanru, Sophie Calle, Yan Pei-Ming, Sans et Bourriaud. Presses du réel Dijon, 2007.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.