"My courage is to follow you."
In today's Internet, all the software is trying to grab people's attention. To reduce cognitive costs, people are accustomed to labeling each other simply and rudely, rather than trying to understand each other's complexity. We're used to looking for the right people on social media like Tinder, but we are indifferent to real-life people, holding our phones when we eat together, one side sharing interesting things in our lives, and the other side is not listening seriously.
Sophie Calle, Venetian Suite, 1979
We are briefly fascinated by new people or things, but are rarely willing to make an effort to explore deeply. People are getting bored more and more easily because we are losing our curiosity about others.
French artist Sophie Calle has been constantly searching for connections with strangers through her works. With a gentle and persistent curiosity, she explores the privacy and emotions between people through interesting "game practices" such as photos, texts and videos, while constantly testing the boundaries between public space and private spheres, reality and fiction, art and life. Although this series of taboo-breaking behaviors has made her controversial, Karl has not stopped creating.
Sophie Street
Sophie Carr was born in Paris in 1953. During her school days, she was a very maverick girl, selling vacuum cleaners, working as a waitress, growing marijuana, working in circuses, and even dancing strips to earn tuition.
For some time after leaving school, she was depressed and bored, so she started a game about "stalking". "I feel lost in the city, I don't know anyone, I don't know where to go," she said. So I decided to follow the others and let them decide my route for the whole day. ”
She followed strangers on the streets of Paris like a detective and took pictures. At one point, she even followed a man named Henri B. to Venice. She followed him from morning to night and took a lot of pictures. Including the bridges he had crossed in Venice, the inns he had stayed in, the shops he had entered, and even the places where he had taken pictures.
Karl also asked for information from people who had been in contact with Henri B. so she could rush back to Paris before he could capture the moment he got off the train back to Paris. Unlike the other stalkers, Karl had no interest in the stalkers, nor did she have any intersection between them, but she observed with a fanatical obsession, fascinated only by the "stalking" itself and the hidden stimuli that the act brought about. And to have someone's privacy is to have a part of that person.
For Carl, "stalking" is a projection of her personal desires, as if she were in an attached relationship, as if she were not. In 1981, Karl went on a secret quest as a room attendant in a hotel. In addition to cleaning and tidying up the room, she uses this identity to photograph guests' personal belongings. She rummaged through customers' closets, suitcases, consulted their letters, diaries, used their personal belongings, even eavesdropped on their conversations, and took many photographs.
Sophie Calle, The Hotel, 1981
There is no one in these black-and-white photos, which intuitively gives the impression of a crime scene. It makes one wonder what was really going on in these rooms. For example, while inspecting room 30, Karl cleverly pieced together a series of clues (a wedding photo, an old bill from the same room, and a pajama that had never been worn, placed on a chair next to the double bed). She imagined a slightly sad story based on the photos: "Two years ago, M.L. and his wife spent the night in a hotel, and now he's back alone. In his suitcase was an embroidered pajama (perhaps his wife's). ”
Carr's work constitutes an extreme sense of intimacy that seems a little unreal. The French postmodernist thinker Jean Baudrillard said: "To peek at another person is to give him a double life, a parallel existence." This kind of behavior can make any ordinary existence glorious, and anything extraordinary will become ordinary. It is this double effect that makes things appear surreal from its banality. ”
Like Karl, we always "track" other people's daily routines on the web, understanding strangers' likes and dislikes. Across a screen, people are more closely connected than ever, but so distant. We spy on others and we are spied on by others. Sometimes, he even takes the initiative to ask others to spy on him. In Carr's 1979 work, The Sleepers, she invited friends and strangers, each in her bed for eight hours, while photographing and documenting them, including whether they snored or what dreams they had.
Sophie Calle, The Sleepers, 1979
Her photograph conveys a calm and restrained sense of intimacy, and we can see the curves of bare hips, pale knees under the quilt. And her handwritten short text descriptions remove the erotic connotations from these photos. "At 6:45 p.m., he fell asleep," she described as a man, "who kept lifting the quilt." While Karl gazes at others with infinite curiosity, he also shows a certain sense of contradictory coldness, and this is the most fascinating thing about these works.
In 1984, Carl fell in a passionate relationship between her father's friend, someone she had had a crush on since childhood. When she finally grew up and became his lover, she got a chance to go to Japan for an internship. They agreed to meet in an inn in New Delhi, India, three months later. In her days in Japan, she wrote a love letter every day, about all the thoughts that had been deposited because of loneliness, and also counted down the days when she could see her lover again. When she came to New Delhi anxiously for three months, she received a call from her lover who told her she had fallen in love with another woman.
Sophie Calle, Untitled, 1983
Feeling that she could not bear such pain, Carl decided to ask her friend or a stranger she met in order to tell and ease her grief: "What was the most painful time in your life?" While getting the corresponding answer, she also went out of her way to recount her painful loveless experience. By constantly repeating the betrayed feelings to others, she gradually engaged in meticulous and emotional dissection and gradually became short and plain. At the same time, after communicating with many people, she finally gained healing and liberation. The work was eventually titled Exquisite Pain.
Sophie Calle, Exquisite Pain, 2000
There was a follow-up to this work, and Carl spawned a second similar work in 2007, "Take Care of Yourself", which began when she received a breakup letter from her ex-boyfriend telling her that "it's all over". The letter ended with the words "Take care of yourself." She didn't know how to understand and respond, so she invited 107 women in different professions to help her interpret the letter from their respective perspectives, asking for their opinions on the letter, hoping to help her respond.
Sophie Calle, Take care of yourself, 2007
The psychologist told Karl: "In 40 sentences, he used 23 'I', which means that he is very narcissistic and self-centered. The language teacher analyzed the grammatical errors in the letter and the message behind the use of each French word. Go experts analyze the logical thinking, and the designers of the crossword puzzle designed a crossword puzzle for the breakup letter. The performing artist cried and read the man's breakup letter to Carl about how beautiful they had been and how precious the relationship was to him, but the letter still ended with a sentence of "take care of yourself." As a period of the relationship.
Karl asked the 107 women to read the letter aloud and then filmed the entire process. In the video, everyone's interpretation and reaction are different, sometimes they laugh together, sometimes they cry together. They constantly clarify how to face their own heartbreak, how to understand their loved ones to end a relationship in this way, and learn to understand each other and understand themselves in the face of repetition over and over again. Through this series of simple and sincere exchanges, the women worked together to eliminate the pain conveyed by this letter like magic.
On February 15, 2006, Carl received two simultaneous phone calls, an invitation to the Venice Biennale and news that her mother had only one month left to live. She finally decided to record her mother's last breath before she died as a farewell to each other. When Karl put the camera on the edge of the bed, her mother was surprised: "Finally to shoot me." Carr said: "Mothers always want to be the focus of attention. She wanted to be the subject of my work, and she expressed that desire many times. ”
Sophie Calle, My Hands, 2018
In the video, Karl's mother is always asleep, death comes so quietly that it cannot be captured in any form. This makes one wonder what death really is. It was so ethereal and light that it seemed to be a brief moment of silence in a conversation, after which everything would continue. Karl was in the room when his mother died. She asked Karl to play a Mozart tune after she had choked. And her last words were, "Don't worry about me." "Worried" was the last word she said. Her last breath stopped between about 15:02 and 15:13.
Sophie Calle, Rachel, Monique, 2006
It is often said that Carr's artwork revolves around intimacy, but she claims that it is a kind of thinking about "missing" that drives her to create, such as what is lost, the death of a mother, the departure of a lover, and an unformed idea. In Carr's work, love and curiosity are intertwined, and through words, photos and videos, these loves are transformed into voyeurism, even obsession. For her, love is a game of curiosity, like a set of clothes hanging neatly on a stranger's hanger.
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What kind of unforgettable lovelorn experience have you had?
Written by/Kiki
Editing/Kuding Tea
Typography/Left
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