Experiment and Experience in the Phototextual Projects of Sophie Calle

Experiment and experience in the phototextual projects of Sophie Calle Born in , Sophie Calle is both a writer and a photographer, and rarely one without the other. This double focus is accommodated in two main forms. The first, and the one that usually appears first, is the installation exhibited in an art gallery or museum, where photos hung at eye level or sometimes simply leaning against a wall are juxtaposed with framed printed texts. But Calle has also found a rewarding outlet in the form of book publications based on the same kind of text–photo juxtaposition – and, given the scope and objectives of this particular volume of essays, it is above all on the published work that I focus here. By virtue of being com- pacted into and redistributed across a sequence of pages, the published work tends all the more strongly to bear out the description of herself that Calle is said to favour: that of ‘narrative artist’ (which neatly sidesteps the more frequently bestowed label of ‘conceptual artist’).1 Calle’s work has become renowned for the stimulating and often controversial ways in which it crosses the boundary lines between public and private, detach- ment and involvement, life and art. In crossing such lines, Calle’s work comes to bear a high degree of self-implication, a quality it shares with the work of many other contemporary artists, such as Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager and Orlan.What does it mean to be ‘implicated in’one’s work, as opposed, say, to being ‘expressed by’ it? In order to address this question, we first need to set Calle’s work in its historical context: that of the shift from the modernist project of art to a postmodernist art of the project. The term ‘project’may be used to describe the activities providing the raw material of Calle’s installations and published works. A project involves thinking up and then setting up a situation that will be allowed to Johnnie Gratton - 9781526137999 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 11:51:33AM via free access Transgressions and transformation run its course under certain conditions.The external boundaries of the situation will be defined by preordained limits of time and/or space, while its internal dynamics will be defined by a further set of ground rules or protocols. The photographer remains acutely aware of limits, for delimitation accounts for every photograph, being a condition at once imposed (by the rectangular edges of the shot when first taken,edges themselves dictated by the format of the film in the camera) and assumed, changed into something chosen (by framing, trimming, cropping, etc.). In this respect, Calle may well be a postmodernist, but in her work thus far she has remained stead- fastly pre-digital, an artist who likes to play with evidentiality rather than virtuality or computer-manipulated imagery. As something ‘set up’ or staged, the project–situation is artificial, a quality reflected in Calle’s use of terms such as rituel (ritual) or pseudo- enquête (pseudo-inquiry) to describe certain of her projects. By the same token,more or less all of her projects may also be described as experiments: experiments run not with a view to testing any particular hypothesis, but, far less teleologically,in order to ‘see what happens’.This I take to be a sud- denly resonant phrase as applied to Calle,given both her status as a photographer (‘to see. .’) and her self-definition as a ‘narrative’ artist (‘. .what happens’).I shall argue in this chapter that,for Calle,‘seeing what happens’ always includes seeing what happens to herself,tracking her own experience as primed and prompted by the context of the experiment.Her ‘own’experience here is, we might say,an ‘experimental experience’, an experience of the kind made accessible in and through the promotion of what Celia Lury calls ‘experimental individualism’. Conceived as a contemporary alterna- tive to the norm of ‘possessive individualism’, this is a mode in which the individuality,identity or biography of the person can be prosthetically dis- assembled and reassembled using various forms of technological medi- ation.2 As Lury herself remarks, in a comment that sounds tailor-made to evoke the case of Sophie Calle: ‘the prosthetic biography requires signifi- cant new forms of authorisation and, in this respect, the image is combin- ing with narrative to produce techniques of the self in new ways’ (p. ). Calle’s most compelling projects have typically taken the form of experiments in approaching the other,in ‘entering into the life’of the other, as she herself put it when writing in La Filature about the private detective who tailed her around Paris on April – a detective she had per- suaded her mother to hire for this purpose as part of another engineered, experimental situation.3 The book includes not only her own notes taken over the course of the day as she was being followed, but a copy of the Johnnie Gratton - 9781526137999 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 11:51:33AM via free access Calle’s phototextual projects detective’s report and reproductions of the photos he had been instructed to take as evidence of his subject’s movements and activities while under surveillance. Thus the auto-portrait is counterpointed by a kind of allo- portrait. Calle’s own notes record how she recurrently found herself won- dering whether the detective felt attracted to her: a show of affect which nods knowingly towards the romanticism of the mass-market photo-roman. Contrary to the scripts and scenarios of the photo-roman, however, there is never any question in La Filature of wanting actually to meet the man.The experience of feeling a ‘personal’ connection with him, to the point where the day in question is described by Calle with hollow poignancy as ‘notre journée’ (p. ) (our day), is a product of the experiment, an ‘experimental experience’, which, as such, remains tied to the provisional, prosthetic identity of the woman under surveillance, and cannot therefore be trans- ported outside the limits and protocols of the experiment. By constantly making us unsure about the face value of her textual and photographic statements, Calle seems to encourage in those who read and view her work a sense of its own incipient fictionality,even where its most overt claims are documentary or, in photographic terms, indexical. At the same time, however, it continues to sound as though it could still be ‘true’: the effect of truth, whether autobiographical or ethnographic in its generic force,is not cancelled out.We are thus left suspended,uncertain.There are many reasons one could adduce for both the suspicion of fictionality in Calle’s work and the sense of its ultimately uncertain status. I would like to suggest here that one of the most pervasive triggers of both responses is the recurrent instance of what I have chosen to call ‘experimental experience’. Experimental experience takes the form of feelings, emotions, reactions, etc., which are not so much in and of an underlying self as signs announc- ing what Celia Lury,echoing Roland Barthes, calls the ‘advent’, indeed the ‘adventure’, of oneself as other (p. ). And this sense of a self coming into view as other, at a remove from what it was, is easily – and often accurately – construed as a process of generating a fictional character out of autobiographical material. The principle of uncertainty is restored, however, if, along Barthesian lines, the strategy of ‘experimental experience’ is under- stood to offer a more self-protective way of reconstituting the division between public and private.In other words,might this strategy not provide Calle with a technique for fulfilling what was also Barthes’s desire as a writer in La Chambre claire: ‘Je veux énoncer l’intériorité sans livrer l’intimité’ (I want to utter interiority without yielding intimacy)?4 Another way of making the same point might be to say that the subject of Johnnie Gratton - 9781526137999 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 11:51:33AM via free access Transgressions and transformation ‘experimental experience’ in La Filature is not in fact the one I referred to earlier as the woman under surveillance, but, more precisely, the woman who knows she is under surveillance, the woman with the upper hand. In ethnographic terms,the ‘observer’has merged with the ‘participant’.What I call ‘experimental experience’, therefore, may well involve stepping into a role, but does not escape the self-implication of the one playing that role. And, ultimately, the romantic script which Calle finds herself reading aloud, and which superimposes an image of vulnerability onto that of the woman with the upper hand,must probably be read as something that joins the role to the player, something that is not played out in a purely ironic spirit. More generally,this is one example of the way experimental experience implicates Calle herself as the subject of certain fantasies, indeed as the subject of a certain kind of madness. Since the late s, Calle has explored more open, empathic and col- laborative ways of ‘entering into the life’of the other,notably by using inter- views in order to garner raw material for the textual component of certain projects. Surprisingly, however, this more recent vein was illustrated by only one of the eleven phototextual projects included in ‘Doubles-jeux’, a major exhibition of Calle’s work shown in at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris. A boxed set of seven books representing the exhibited works, and bearing the same title, was published simultaneously by Actes-Sud.5 The exhibition was itself the fruit of a kind of meta-project inspired by the activities of Calle’s fictional double, Maria Turner, the eccentric character from Paul Auster’s novel, Leviathan ().

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