Does the man in question know about the project? Yes, of course; I told him. He liked the idea, though it’s a little frightening for him. Anyway, he couldn’t imagine stopping me. He is a man of some intelligence and resourcefulness; he’s far from feeble. He can reply if he likes, and in public too. Also, he has a sense of humour. Much of Calle's work is comprised of actions, sometimes taking extended periods of time to enact, absorb, and analyze. The physical evidence of the actions becomes the "artwork" - usually documentary photographs and explanatory texts presented with a coolly detached analyst's eye. Hanhardt, John G. et al., Moving Pictures: Contemporary Photography and Video from the Guggenheim Collection. (Hardcover) Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (2003) For this work, Sophie Calle's destination moved from the romance of Venice to the economically depressed streets of New York's South Bronx. This time, Calle's project involved asking strangers to take her to a place special to them. The result was a series of photographs taken over a day, featuring portraits of residents of the city in their chosen destinations including a grammar school, a bank, and a patch of land blessed by the Pope. The photographs are each accompanied by a text written by the artist. The work offers a portrait of hope in the face of visible economic and social poverty.

Program of the festival Centre Pompidou in the State Hermitage Museum. Hermitage 20/21 Project. October/November 2010Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-12-15 01:09:53 Associated-names Biennale di Venezia (52nd : 2007) Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Boxid IA40791402 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier The sheer variety of responses, from the potentially illuminating to the absurd, all adhere to Calle's use of a conceptual constraint. In this instance, it involved the artist taking the letter's advice at its word - to take care of her self - via 107 different interpretations. The constraints, or rules, that Calle uses as starting points often allow for chance results, and as here, often make public the artist's emotional life. In this instance, Calle turns a humiliating rejection into a liberating celebration of feminine solidarity. Demonstrating this variance in how the accounts panned out is that a writer commented on the style of the letter, a justice issued an objective judgement, a lawyer acted in defence of the ex-lover, a mediator attempted to build a path to reconciliations, and a proofreader provided a literal edit of the text, with it investigated in every way possible. Take Care of Yourself’ (2007) in which musician Laurie Anderson was one of 107 women who responded to a note left by Calle’s ex-boyfriend. Photograph: Sophie Calle/Adagp, Paris & ARS, New York, 2017, Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery and Galerie Perrotin

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. Sacred or Sensually Profane? Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet’s Dust and Light and Rasa at the Joyce, May 5-10 By Dalia Ratnikas Sophie Calle, Take Care of Yourself, 2007 (installation view of French Pavilion at 52nd Venice Biennale). Courtesy Perrotin An Enquiry Concerning Questionable Practices within the Scientific Methodologies of the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum By Kurt Gottschalk Calle also took on the role of a stripper in a club in the seedy Pigalle district of Paris, which resulted in the work La Striptease ( The Striptease) (1979). The piece was comprised of a book of photographs of the adult Sophie stripping alongside cards her parents had received from friends when Sophie was born. The work was made against the wishes of Calle's father and her relationship with him continues to be both touching and distant. After her mother died, Calle took her jewels to the North Pole where she buried them in a ceremony with a friend who sang a verse of "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" by Marilyn Monroe.Appointment with Sigmund Freud. London: Thames & Hudson; London: Violette, 2005. ISBN 9780500511992. 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." Jessica Lott (2009), Sophie Calle, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, USA, Frieze , retrieved 2010-04-27 Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself is a body of work (letters, writings, videos) created for the French Pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale – curated by Daniel Buren.

As with much of the artist's work, perhaps L'Hôtel says more about Sophie Calle than it does about the anonymous hotel visitors. It is a prime example of her contribution to Conceptual art with her mode of taking a nominal proposition and carrying it out through the production of a work. It highlights her synonymous incorporation of photography, documentary, and chance and posits the artist in a role similar to an anthropologist, seeking clues and exploring mysteries about specific specimens of humanity. This pointed study of strangers and herself would inject a "confessional" vein into the world of Conceptual art, in which personal lives and their ephemera were considered worthy fodder for exploration. A similar strategy was adopted by other contemporary women artists, perhaps most notably, Tracey Emin. I go to make some coffee, forget to put coffee in the machine, try again. While the journalist pulls a notebook from his bag I have another go at the kitchen floor. I’m not paranoid, I assure him. Or obsessive-compulsive, he says. I ask if he intends to write our conversation up as a set of questions and answers. I dislike that style; when I read these interviews, I never know myself: it’s not my language. He says his preference is for a proper narrative, though the magazine sometimes favours the Q&A approach. We can always pretend, I tell him, that I insisted on a real text, that that was the first rule of the game. He laughs, says it won’t be necessary: he will find a form. The closer Calle came to capturing Henri B., the more anguished she felt that he wouldn’t match up to the chimera she had conjured of him. “I’m afraid that the encounter might be commonplace. I don’t want to be disappointed,” she writes. In “The Hotel,” traces of Calle show up in little asides that trouble the project’s patina of neutrality; of a pair of pants drying in the shower, she writes, “Symbolic, they reflect the tedium that prevails in this room. Unless it’s just my own weariness.” Throughout, she takes care to show us that she is closer to the center of this story than she may seem. A chance encounter with a handsome guest in the hallway inspires a new plotline in which she is no longer the invisible maid but the protagonist: “For the first time, I imagine for a few seconds a patron taking an interest in my plight.”Calle has created elaborate display cases of birthday presents given to her throughout her life; this process was detailed by Grégoire Bouillier in his memoir The Mystery Guest: An Account (2006). According to Bouillier, the premise of his story was that "A woman who has left a man without saying why calls 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." [15] 1990s [ edit ] This led to another fixation. "The obsession of always having a tape in the camera, changing the tape every hour, was so great that instead of counting the minutes left to my mother, I counted the minutes left on each tape." Here is something she bonded with the actor Kim Cattrall over, later inviting her to read excerpts from her late mother’s diary (December, 1985: “Sophie’s selfish arrogance! My only consolation is, she is so morbid that she will come visit me in my grave more often than on Rue Boulard”) to be played alongside the video of her last breath. Despite the technical layout of the show I did find the responses intricate and clever as the ‘communal disembowelling’ of text began to decode and unmask the ambiguities of language as they second guess X’s (Calles former lover) intentions. The simple use of a particular word or a comma and quote unravelled a new dimension of meaning and reality as they were all explored from a collective of perspectives. Development Takes Center Stage In 33rd District City Council Debate By James Trimarco and Krista Hanson