Art

Sophie Calle was an artist, a French writer, an installer, a photographer as well as a conceptual performer. She places herself in circumstances that reveal her functionality characters which her people adopted. The work of Calle has been distinguished because she used arbitrary situations and almost overdid the French movement of the year 1960s which was known as Oulipo. She puts her living styles in public which creates personal narrative, where she plays a role as the main character and an author. Human vulnerability is portrayed by her work and she tries to examine personal intimacy and identity. A voyeur and a detective are the names that she was given. Also, her acting involved natural investigations and curiosity (European Graduate School, 2008). Her ability to act as a detective as well as the ability to follow procedures and carry investigation concerning the lives of strangers has made her be recognized. Her own writing about text panels included her work in photographic.

After she completed schooling, she took seven years to travel. In 1979, she came back to Paris where she started several projects to familiarize herself with the people living in Paris and wanted to know more about that city. These assisted her to gain identity through offering documentary proof which she put them in photograph form. She based her work on a traditional background in form of art which was conceptual. She emphasized on artistic ideas instead of emphasizing on finished objects. In 1988, Jean Baudrillard, a French writer, wrote down an essay describing this project in reciprocal loss terms on both sides of the pursuer and of the pursued. The Shadow, which was another project (1981), showed how Calle had been followed by a certain private detective for a whole day (Whitechapel Gallery, n.d). He was hired by her own mother at Calles request. Calle continued in the leading of an unwitting detective in all Paris cities. This seemed important according to her opinion, which helped in revising expected subject post which she observed. With such suggestions concerning the projects intimacy, they questioned the spectators role while the viewers became a little bit uncomfortable. The people were collaborators who were unwitting in the violation of privacy. However, Calles work used documentary evidence and led to the arising of many questions concerning the nature of the entire truth. Calle has been caught between private selves and public lives, which has led to her carrying out investigation patterns using various techniques in order to understand human behavior specifically like that of a psychologist, private investigator, or that of a forensic scientist. This led also to the investigation of her personal behavior which has led to the awareness of general public concerning her work which was largely interesting.

Calles early works
In the year 1980, Calle composed a piece that was named as Suite Venitienne where she met a man and ended up following him while she had attended a party held at Venice. She followed and photographed him for a period of two weeks. This was Calles first work, which involved following people around Paris who she did not know. The intention behind all this surveillance initially was an attempt to make herself reacquaint with Paris city since she had spent some years abroad. Consequently, she came with a discovery that observation of the strangers actions and behavior, gave her the information to help in construction of their identities. Calles surveillance concerning that man identified as Henri B., included white and black photographs which were accompanied by a text (Arts Curriculum, n.d).

In the following year, she organized the The Sleepers. This was a project that invited 24 people to sleep in her bed for a period of eight days continuously. Some of these people were friends, strangers and some were friends of friends. She fed them and used to photograph them more often, actually after every hour.
Address Book (1983), was yet another project among Calles work with the intensions of generating controversy publicly. Liberation was a daily newspaper in French offering her an invitation of publishing 28 articles series. She found this book from the street which she returned it to the owner after photocopying it. She then decided to give some calls to several people whose contacts were written on that book and spoke with them about the owner. To the conversations transcript, Calle put photographs of the favorite activities of the man, creating portrait of the unknown man basing it on his acquaintances. The publication of the article was made but just by the time which they discovered them, the book owner who was a filmmaker gave threats of suing the artist in charge of piracy and invasion (Alex, n.d). According to Calles report, the owner of the address book discovered Calles photograph and in return demanded that the newspaper should publish it retaliating that it was an intrusion into his privacy.

The Hotel (1981), was yet another artistic project by Calle. In order for her to execute it, she was hired at a hotel located at Venice. She played the role of a chambermaid which gave her an opportunity to explore objects and writings of the guests who came to that hotel. Her process insight and resulting aesthetic could be achieved through her project account she says, I spent one year to find the hotel, I spent three months going through the text and writing it, I spent three months going through the photographs, and I spent one day deciding it would be this size and this frameits the last thought in the process (Out of Context, 2009).

Calle in 1981 requested her mother to hire a private detective to watch and follow her without her conscience and also to put in record every movement that she made. In Calles words, It was an attempt to provide photographic evidence of my own existence. This was entitled as The Shadow which later was displayed in the museum of Guggenheim in Bilbao- Spain. However, she used to spend a whole day being aware that she was been under monitoring of her private detective. Calle based her writing in journals on a frequent entry for the whole day. In her writing about this unknown man, she writes it with much love imagining herself showing him the places in Paris that were her favorite.

The Blind (1986), is Calles another noteworthy project. She used to interview blind people asking them to give an appropriate definition of what beauty was. The responses that they gave were accompanied by interpretation using photographs of their beauty ideas and the interviewees portraits.

Calle has also done a creation of displays elaborating cases of presents that were given during birthdays in her entire life. Gregoire Bouillier detailed this process in his reign, The Mystery Guest An Account (2006). Bouilleirs story premises according to him, A woman who has left a man without saying why calls him years later and asks 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, (Alex, n.d)

Sophie Calles late works
Calle, in 1996, she released a film titled No Sex Last Night which she created in an agreement and collaboration with a photographer from America called Gregory Shephard. The film contained the discoveries got from a trip that they took touring across America, which led to a chapel wedding in Las Vegas. This film was designed in a way to document a womans and mans results who were strangers, taking intimate journey in unison instead of following romance or road trip genre conventions.

Calles works involved the combination of photographic images and texts in a cool presentation style which made her famous. The Ceremony that took place during her birthday was her first main sculptural installation that has been conceived for Art Now 14. Her work had its root from the years 1980 till 1993, despite the fact that it was made in the year 1998, when Calle sustained and invented a number of shared rituals and private series all over her birthday. These were examples and manifest of art, which demonstrated how her art and life were closely intertwined. In every celebration, groups of relatives and friends were invited (Out of Context, 2009). The invitees numbers were corresponding precisely with her age, with an additional of one nominated guest, to symbolize her unknown future. Calle held these parties for dinners in order to ensure the remembrance of her birthday every year. These dinner parties were most ambitious among ritual series Calle invented in order to override the insecurity considered as obsessive that she experienced during her early adulthood. These guests gave her many gifts like that of affection and love tokens, which Calle put in a cabinet made of glass at the front to act as a reminder for this affection. The objects were put away and boxed up at every end of the year and were replaced with other gifts given during the other birthday parties. Calle unpacked these gifts at times when she felt stressed and reassured herself of support from networks (European Graduate School, 2008). In 1993 when she reached the age of forty, she realized that her obsessive insecurity has been cured. Therefore, she never needed to remember her formed friendships and ties in her family in a formal manner.

These birthday ceremonies brought in fifteen cabinets from original design in medical, which Calles father had given her. One pair and thirteen individual cabinets each had the gifts symbolizing each year. The gifts were wrapped from banal to bizarre. They included art work, letters and books, affection token made by hand, trivia made of plastic, restaurant stolen items, antiques and junk, chocolates and wine. When they were stored behind the glass, they had frustration and magnetic desire. This was to those who used to view them since they were not a position to touch, unwrap or even taste them. A list of every item was placed on the glass. Since there was no naming of the person who had donated, it was not possible to tell if the art work was an original from the artists. However, in some circumstance like from her mother, it was reasonable that she got clear, sensible and substantial gifts (Alex, n.d). This contained domestics that arrived every year- which were large to be displayed behind the glass- and those represented by warranty from manufacturers. In some cases, where a certain theme came out with time, someone could give hats, while others could offer different gifts as a mark for that time. On certain occasions and especially with fabulous angel wood-painted during her year when she was turning forty, guests who shared a gift joined together.

This ritual work was first explored by Calle using a photograph which depicted the contents of a cabinet. Here, the ceremonies were reduced annually together with its objects associated to documentary records. The realization of the subject and development as installations series actually creates perplexing and poignant work. These Ceremonial Birthdays drew the intension in the way that identity is constructed within rituals. These were secret and also involved activities and objects that gave substance and meaning to public and private lives. The Birthday Ceremony, in the transformation of personal ritual to public display raises several questions concerning the meaning of those objects while everyone was removed away from the original customary realm. Everyone was sure of a transaction and relationship of a certain kind (Arts Curriculum, n.d). These were normally laid out depending on the criteria that do not involve techniques in traditional museum of display or classification.

At one time Calle request her friend Paul Auster, a filmmaker and a writer to Invent a fictive character which she would attempt to resemble. He used to serve as a model for a character with the name Maria, who his found in Austers novel called Leviathan (1992). Calle later was challenged by Austerto in New York, to maintain and create public amenity. The response of this artist involved augmenting a telephone booth using flowers, cigarettes pack, note pad, cash and water in a bottle. For each day, she used to restock items and to clean the booth, till the time when the telephone firm discarded and removed them (Whitechapel Gallery, n.d).

In the year 2007, Venice Biennale and Sophie Calle published a piece called Take Care of Yourself. This was given a name from the last lines message that was left by her ex-partner. Sophie Calle was recently awarded the Writers Prize 2009 for her work Take Care of Yourself which entailed a break-up letter that her boyfriend sent through e-mail. Calle read and took that e-mail, and developed a paralyzing confusion accompanying the failure in her mind in order to comprehend the heartbreak. She distributed it among 107 women from different professions, talents and skills so that she could be helped to examine, interpret, perform and analyze it (Out of Context, 2009). Several artists admired Calle all over the world and paid homage together with retrospectives for her work. In addition, a text written by Calle called Exquisite Pain got adapted by Forced Entertainment in 2004, which is a theatrical firm normally based in Sheffield, England.