Take Care of Yourself

Product Information

Calle's work frequently depicts human vulnerability, using her self and others to examine situations and interactions that blur the lines between personal identity and intimacy. This oftentimes conjures reflection surrounding absence, presence, longing, hope, and other primal emotions. Calle has also inspired artists and writers who use rules as a game or a trigger for ideas, inspiration, and unforeseen outcomes. Because of this, her work is sometimes linked to the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo. The acclaimed novelist Paul Auster has thanked Calle "for having authorized him to mingle fact with fiction." 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. With such a dramatic and eclectic family, it's no surprise that Calle's life and relationships would become the central subject of many of her works. The artist's childhood disregard for social and personal boundaries would evolve and become evermore evident in her art projects.

In 1996, Calle asked Israelis and Palestinians from Jerusalem to take her to public places that became part of their private sphere, exploring how one's personal story can create an intimacy with a place. Inspired by the eruv, the Jewish law that permits to turn a public space into a private area by surrounding it with wires, making it possible to carry objects during the Sabbath, the Erouv de Jérusalem is exposed at Paris's Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme. Installation. Coproduced by Centro Cultural Kirchner - Argentine Ministry of Culture with the support of the French Embassy in Argentina, and the Institut Français Sophie Calle. 2009 Russel Lecture. University of California, San Diego. Visual Arts Department and MCASD. January 15, 2009 NERI: Have you ever made a work where you regretted taking something from life and using it in your art?Jessica Lott (2009), Sophie Calle, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, USA, Frieze , retrieved 2010-04-27 Sophie Calle: Take Care of Yourself – Installation Views | Paula Cooper Gallery". www.paulacoopergallery.com. CALLE: For the French Pavilion, the rule is that the artist chooses a curator. Normally for a one-person show it isn’t really necessary, but the Venice Biennale is a complex situation. What I needed was not so much a curator as a complice, someone to stand by me. Daniel did much more than that. He protected me, and, more importantly, he helped me to think about the work. Remember those times when critics could simply barge into an artist’s home and talk to them about their work? In person and not on Zoom? Yeah, it’s a bit hazy for ArtReview too. Which prompted another trip to its archive bunker to remind itself of times gone by, times to come again, and times when trying to get close to people was an artform, not a crime. CALLE: This was largely because of the situation in Venice: The work had to be in French, because it was the French Pavilion, but most people visiting Venice don’t speak French. So I faced the problem of translation that I face all the time with my work, but in Venice this would have meant translating the texts into 20 or more languages. So I introduced nonverbal responses to make things easier.

Nicol, Yann (September 2, 2006). "Experiential Lit: Grégoire Bouillier with Yann Nicol Translated by Violaine Huisman and Lorin Stein". The Brooklyn Rail.

SEPT 2023 | Books

Take Care of Yourself (2004-2007), in which Calle sent a break-up text from a former lover to 107 women. Photograph: Sophie Calle Calle was born in Paris in 1953. Her father, Robert, was a Camargue Protestant, an oncologist, and a respected collector of contemporary art; her mother, Monique Sindler, was Jewish, a journalist who wrote very little but smoked a lot. An improbable pair, they divorced when Sophie was three. As a teen-ager, Calle joined a Maoist group, and then briefly trained with Palestinian fedayeen in Lebanon—for the struggle but also, she has since said, to impress a boyfriend. In Paris, she began organizing with an underground abortion network and pursued a degree in sociology, before travelling for several years—selling vacuums, waitressing, cannabis farming, and working in a circus. Calle first tried photography at twenty-six, as a kind of compromise: it pleased her father but wasn’t really “art,” which had long felt incompatible with her militant commitments. Originally published in French as an artist's book in 1980 and reissued in 2015 by Siglio Press in English, Suite Vénitienne epitomizes Sophie Calle's idiosyncratic, documentary-style text and photography in an eloquent blend of fact and fiction. The artist writes: "For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them. At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him."

In his novel Leviathan, American author Paul Auster based a character, Maria, on Sophie Calle. He was inspired by her work and when he sent her his manuscript to ask permission to fictionalize her, Calle says, "I never thought about saying no." Maybe he’s already decided how he’s going to write about me, how to explain me. Maybe he hopes it will be like the time my writer friend Hervé Guibert interviewed me, and asked me if I was born in 1953, and I told my whole life story, spoke for five hours straight, gave him everything. Or perhaps he has in mind a tale, a fiction, in which case it will be as though he were never here at all.Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.7409 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l fra+eng Old_pallet IA-NS-0001493 Openlibrary_edition Jobey, Liz (10 January 2020). "The artist Sophie Calle: 'People think they know me. But they know nothing' ". Financial Times . Retrieved 2020-03-26. Double Game [English translation and revision of Doubles-Jeux]. With Paul Auster. London: Violette, 1999. ISBN 9781900828062. Sophie Calle was born into an intellectual and creative household in 1953 Paris, where she experienced an unconventional childhood. Her oncologist father, Robert Calle, was a renowned art collector and former director of the Nimes' Carré d'Art, a contemporary art museum. Her mother, Monique Sindler, was a book critic and press attaché, later described by Calle as "the wildest mother, who was always center stage." In fact, she would later become a huge subject of her daughter's work, as in the installation Rachel, Monique, (2014) which was a tribute to the life and loves of her mother, featuring a video of the final moments of her life. After reading the novel, Calle decided, in a characteristic mixing of reality and fiction, to respond by literally embodying the fictional Maria and to recreate parts of the character per the novel. Calle then photographed these recreations for her book Double Game, including Maria's "chromatic diet." In the book she wrote, "To be like Maria, during the week of December 8 to 14, 1997, I ate Orange on Monday, Red on Tuesday, White on Wednesday, and Green on Thursday. Since Paul Auster had given his character the other days off, I made Friday Yellow and Saturday Pink." The photograph in the book for Saturday shows a meal of ham, taramasalata, and strawberry ice cream with rosé wine from Provence.