Sophie Calle:
Take Care of Yourself
Exhibition
article and photos by Martyn Conterio
“Art is seduction, not rape.”
- Susan Sontag
13.32 p.m. 13th November, 2009
It was a rather cold day and ever so typical of London in autumn. Dreary and dull. This can affect one’s mood and mindset given the task at hand. Whitechapel High Street is a busy thoroughfare and a place of notoriety: most famous for the Jack the Ripper killings of 1888. Other things, too, like the Battle of Cable Street where the Jews took on the fascists and won.
Captured Death: Marie Jeanette Kelly, 9th November 1888
The film director Donald Cammell once wore a t-shirt with the statement: “Murder is Art” printed upon it. Other artists have pondered this question. It is the question of a madman. Cammell committed suicide in the 1990s.
Whitechapel lies under the shadows of the tall gilded castles of capitalism. Immense wealth and poverty: jewelled knuckle to bare knuckle. To those in the financial district people below moving on the streets are tiny ants: moving specks. Fruit and vegetable stalls, newsagents, cheap clothing stalls, takeaways and Chinese immigrants selling counterfeit DVDs pockmark the long crowded pavements. It is a fine place for an art gallery.
The Whitechapel Gallery has hosted exhibitions from the likes of Frida Kahlo. In 1938, it housed Pablo Picasso’s piece of political art – Guernica – and much like Buñuel admitted, I would gladly piss on it too. Designed by Charles Harrison Townsend and opened in 1901 the gallery was one of the first publicly-funded venues in the UK. It was a space that wished to bring art to the masses: whether they wanted it or not. It is a grade II listed building.
Art For Art’s Sake
I have often been fascinated by questions surrounding the act of attending an art gallery. Do we look to art to provide absolute values and spiritual nourishment? Is art for everybody or the privileged few? Is it wrong to not have an opinion or not give a damn?
To do away with questions of elitism and snobbery, art galleries across the world have become increasingly interactive and family-orientated. We no longer have the honour of staring sheep-like at art works. Now we are encouraged to hold, touch and press things (when allowed) and dress up in period clothes, play games and buy merchandise on the way out made by peasants in China or India. Can Stendhal Syndrome be achieved in such controlled environments? If so, is it an artificial delirium: a great con! Alas, we have been complicit in its inception. How did we get to such vileness? Art galleries can seem like prisons. Do we take on the role of prisoner in a commercial house? There are guards and security cameras, no? In the Uffizi gallery in Florence, one must pass through metal detectors before entering the exhibition rooms. Some objects and paintings are considered so priceless that they are placed behind glass wired with alarms. Who would dare to say a painting is worthless? It is rather obvious, no? We have built solitary conditions to protect utterly worthless objects. Alas, there are other considerations.
Directions
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7QX
Aldgate East
Liverpool St, Tower Gateway DLR
The arch above the entrance reminds me of a cow’s eye or an image of a rising sun.
Pavement Report
Every day thousands of people tread on it with little thought or care. It is laid out in rectangular slabs of grey filthy concrete. It is a doormat. A barrier between the outside world and the inner organs of the building. Liver, heart, brain, veins and stomach.
Gallery Floor
Inside: smooth, cold tiles. A clattering sound caused by shoes reverberates around the place.
Venice
Let me take you to warm climes: to Venice, Italy, August 2007. I stood outside the French Pavillion at the Venice Biennale. A grim, pungent stink drifted off the Adriatic Sea into my nostrils. I saw three toilet cubicles.
Prenez soin de vous
I first saw Sophie Calle’s exhibition in Venice back in 2007. Presented at the Whitechapel Gallery was the English-language translation. Extracts from a leaflet:Acclaimed for her photographic and film installations, Sophie Calle’s work reports on encounters and situations that she sets in motion. Whether asking strangers to sleep in her bed, or inviting an author to take charge of her destiny, she documents social interactions that require a pact of complete trust. This exhibition brings together major works from the 1980s to the present. Image and text, presented in compelling narratives, have since formed the basis of her work. Poised between private and collective experience, they allude to journalism, anthropology and psychoanalysis, as well as to literature, the diary and the photo novel. The exhibition premieres the English language version of Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself), a highlight of the 2007 Venice Biennale. Calle invited 107 women from a ballerina to a lawyer to use their professional skills to interpret an email in which her partner breaks up with her. The poignant, amusing and poetic result forms a large-scale installation that transcends the personal to provide a monument to the women involved.
Review
I first saw the exhibition in Venice in 2007. But I don’t remember too much. The pavillion was very nice, but nothing compared to the British pavillion and Tracey Emin’s work. That seemed less whimsical, more confrontational…less cute. At this time Sophie Calle was unknown to me. My trip to Venice mostly consisted of drinking beer and walking around the city at night. Venice is like a great outside museum itself. Same rules apply. For some of the time, I photographed and chased Japanese tourists as part of my friend’s film project involving Nietzschean pigeons, continental philosophers as spies and Japanese analytical philosophers masquerading as tourists. Something like that.To Calle: her exhibition is clearly about exhausting an emotion. Taking it to an extreme length until it becomes perhaps something else. How much can one get out of it? This time it is a response to hurt. Calle plays the role of wounded animal with aplomb. In “Couldn’t Capture Death” she filmed her dying mother. As a person who watched his father die ever so slowly from pulmonary fibrosis, Calle’s ceaseless questioning and analysis is most striking and sincere. Her camera lingers over her mother’s face and upper body as if waiting for something “magical” to occur. It fails. There is a softness. Those expecting something harrowing and life-affirming would be mistaken. It is exquisite, morbid, soft, distancing.
Foyer Report
It is not very interesting. A typical space: modern, clean, smooth. Several workers come and go. Talking of Michelangelo?
Inside
The gallery space is modern and clean with high white walls. In the foyer, donation boxes are prominently placed. Another reminder we need to pay for the privilege. A teenager is asking about part-time jobs here. Don’t make me laugh! You’re local. It may be a local venue, but they’ll be damned if anybody local works here!In the far corner a woman is breast-feeding her baby: Madonna and child. Such laissez-faire
exhibitionism need not be so astonishing. People notice the woman and her rather prominent, exposed breast. They pretend not to see.
Exhibition Hall
Inside the exhibition hall. It is slightly chilly. I stand next to a guard with a walkie-talkie and deliberately make it known I have my mobile phone. He is staring at a video screen in which a ballerina is dancing “a response” to the e-mail sent by Sophie Calle’s ex-boyfriend. All the walls are adorned with scrawled text in all kinds of fonts and sizes. The exhibition should be re-titled: Anal Text.I took a photograph of people by the entrance. There is a woman sitting down by the entrance doors. What is she thinking? I almost want to ask her (in keeping with the spirit of Calle).
The Spanish Woman
I decided to spy upon individuals and watch them as they went about the gallery. It was primarily to wonder about the lives and what they did for a living. All I see are people staring. What goes on behind their eyes is another world. A great kingdom of the unknown. I called her “The Spanish Woman.” She looked Spanish. Maybe she wasn’t at all. She does not follow the gallery in any logical progression and flits from one eye-catching piece to another. She does read the captions placed next to the artworks with intent. They are presented in white boxes with black text. I cannot tell what font it is. However, it seems elegant and graceful. Like the Spanish woman. I tried to take a photograph, but she moves away every time I hover close enough. A disaster.The Security Guard
He has red hair and bad skin. He’s leaning against a partition. Half-watching people, half watching the video screen of Peaches offering a musical interpretation of Calle’s e-mail: all electronic squeals and guitar distortion. At least, it looks like he’s watching it. The walkie- talkie is gripped tight in his right hand. He holds it close to his chest. Perhaps the vibrations give a pleasant tickle. After a few minutes, he walks to the bottom of the exhibition room, where a series of books are gathered on a table. The security guard looks around at the people.People of the exhibition:
The exhibition on the second floor.
“Tell me about money?”
Sophie Calle stands by an ATM in Paris and asks strangers a variety of questions. She asks them how much they earn a year. She gets no response, only the wave of a hand and “non”. Not once do I see the faces of the four people sat on a bench in front of their faces, their eye colour. the screen. I stand by the back wall photographing them.
The Whitechapel Gallery Men’s Bathroom
It is clean and tidy. I check the cleaning roster and see hand scrawled dates and times. The cleaner’s name is Tony. Obviously, he cleans this toilet and perhaps others like it for a living. Maybe part-time, maybe full-time. Nevertheless, I am quite taken with the design of the sinks. They remind me of chalky, white lozenges or mints. Notice Duchamp’s fountain in the mirror’s reflection. Art piss.
Arrête!
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