For Sophie Calle, the art of oversharing means not sharing much at all

A few days before I was due to meet Sophie Calle, a friend from New York who is a collector made an observation about the French artist: “She’s hard to categorize.” That thought lingers in the air as I approach Calle’s apartment and studio in the Paris suburb of Malakoff. In a nondescript industrial building, an overgrown terrace leads to a loft-like room filled with a fascinating collection of paintings, photographs, drawings and ephemera from the artist’s life (a photo of her with her father, collector and art historian Robert Calle; a dead one bouquet of flowers). of flowers by Frank Gehry) and dozens, if not dozens, of taxidermy animals. Above the front door, a large peacock sits on a perch and lets its long tail dangle to the ground. The main wall of the salon is dominated by the graceful neck and noble head of a giraffe named Monique, which Calle acquired shortly after the death of her mother, Monique Sindler. The spaces are bold and somewhat unsettling, not unlike Calle’s work. Sitting in such an amazing interior as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the artist is thoughtful and engaging. That’s why I decide to start our conversation with this question: How does she characterize herself? “It’s not up to me to decide my category,” says Calle, who seems amused by the idea. “I don’t care at all!”

Calle, 71, has been a sensation in the art world for decades, creating conceptual works often spun from her personal experiences (the French newspaper). Le Monde1998, described her as “a fetishist of her own life”). For The sleepers (1979), over a period of more than a week, she invited a number of friends and strangers to spend hours in her own bed and photograph her. For The hotel (1981), Calle persuaded a hotel in Venice to hire her as a chambermaid for three weeks, which enabled her to photograph what she found in the rooms and write texts depicting the lives of the guests. No sex last night (1992), a collaboration with her former boyfriend, filmmaker Greg Shephard, is a video series documenting a crumbling relationship as the couple drove from New York to Oakland, California.

Calle is now the subject of a major retrospective, “Sophie Calle: Overshare,” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (through January 26, 2025). Although she has had no shortage of museum exhibitions in France and throughout Europe, this is her first major retrospective in the United States. The title “Overshare” is certainly apt given the biographical nature of much of Calle’s work. “One of the points I make about this whole concept of oversharing – a word most often used pejoratively and usually referring to women’s writing – is that it is actually a strategy that is clearly sophisticated and that she has complete control over the extent of what she reveals,” explains Walker’s chief curator Henriette Huldisch. “The title ‘Overshare’ is a kind of strategic conceit and in that sense a provocation. Sophie Calle has a significant grip on the narrative.”

The artist sits at her dining table next to a Flemish portrait from the 15th century. Luce de Montfortthat her parents gave her for her first birthday – is happy to take care of this matter. “I’m very much about sharing too much, but at the same time not sharing at all,” she explains. “I’m not on social media; I don’t have Instagram or Facebook. So I say a lot less than anyone else who writes about what they had for dinner last night, where, or with whom. There are a lot of people who think they know me, but that’s completely wrong. In fact, I choose a moment, but it’s just a moment – I don’t tell what happened before or after. I’ve been with the same man for 20 years and have never written a line about him or shown a photo of him. For 20 years no one has known how I really live my life.”

Calle was something of a fake exhibitionist and only gave the impression that she was revealing everything. “In each situation, I take a very small moment that I feel has something to say – that will be poetic, profound or humorous – but I don’t tell the whole story of the scene.”

France strictly protects individual privacy. Calle’s approach can seem particularly transgressive in her home country, and she has often pushed boundaries. In 1983 she found an address book on the street, copied its contents and anonymously returned it to the owner. She began calling the people listed in the book, meeting with them, taking photos, and writing about her feelings for the owner; She then serialized the project liberation. The subject of the article was angry and demanded that the newspaper publish nude photos he had found of her in return. (After the man’s death in 2005, Calle turned the work into a book simply titled The address book.) “I’ve never been sued,” notes Calle. “Once I met a lawyer I really liked and he said to me, laughing, ‘It always surprises me when I see you on the street.’ I’m assuming you’re in prison!’ It was a joke, but still.”

In many ways, Calle is the most American French artist. She has lived in the United States for a total of about four years – mostly in New York and Bolinas in Northern California’s Marin County – and her confessional tone seems closer to the American approach to self-disclosure; Many believe her work anticipated social media by several decades. Her first major gallery exhibition, thanks to an introduction by Frank Gehry, was at the Fred Hoffman Gallery in Los Angeles in 1989. She had met the architect when she was in LA designing a piece for the 1984 Olympics. “Frank Gehry was the first person who decided to help me,” says Calle. “And I started holding important exhibitions in the United States at a time when my work didn’t interest many people in France. … I guess they thought it wasn’t art.”

Even when Calle draws material from her own life, she tends to use biographical elements to make an overarching message. For her contribution to the 2007 Venice Biennale, she was inspired by the last line of a breakup email from a former lover: “Take care of yourself.” Calle asked more than 100 women, both known and unknown, to share that line with their chosen one Medium to interpret: text, video, dance, song and photography. The expansive piece, You take carebecame a chorus of voices challenging the carelessness of the phrase. Although Calle uses multiple media, she most often works with photography paired with illustrative text. “I have rarely taken photographs without writing, and I have never written without images accompanying the text,” she explains. “At first it was because I didn’t think I was a good enough photographer to deserve the photography category. I also didn’t think I could write well enough to be included in the “author” category. So I found a way to support my photos with my texts and support my texts with my photos.”

Such modesty is no longer necessary today. Calle has pushed her artistic vision through decades of exhibitions and retrospectives. She made a pop video for REM, “Walk It Back”; published many critically acclaimed books about her photography and writing; and spent a night in a bed at the top of the Eiffel Tower in 2002 for the play Room with a viewVisitors came in to tell bedtime stories that were meant to be lively enough to keep them awake.

But not all of Calle’s work focuses on her life. Voir la Merfrom 2011, was inspired by an article in the newspaper that said that there were people living around Istanbul who had never been to the sea, mainly because of poverty. “They didn’t have the opportunity to see the sea, even though they lived about 10 miles away in the mountains. “That impressed me so much,” says Calle. Together with a local aid organization, she organized a trip to the Black Sea for a group of men, women and children and filmed them from behind as they stared at the water for the first time. She asked her to turn around to face the camera after the desired time so that she could register her reaction. “This is one of the most moving pieces for me,” says Calle. “From behind it is as if we were seeing the sea with them for the first time. You can see the shoulders shaking, feel the emotions.”

Another non-biographical work in the Walker exhibition and the only new piece is On the huntwhich she completed this year. As Calle explains in the text accompanying the retrospective: “I created a catalog of the key qualities that men look for in women and women look for in men, based on a selection of dating ads, mostly published in Le Chasseur Français between 1895 and 2019.” An ad in the early 20th century magazine “Hunting and Fishing” begins with the words: “Sincerely meant advertisement: 45 year old lady who has suffered major setbacks and loves older men. Will she find one? Eighty-year-old, disabled, ugly, doesn’t matter.”

When it comes to gender, Calle has a nuanced assessment of how gender has impacted her career. In the first segment of the Walker show, simply called “The Spy,” she follows men she sees on the street, secretly takes photos, and even follows one to Venice (in… Suite Venitienne1980). “If everything I did was done by a man, it would have been something completely different,” Calle explains. “If a man had chased women on the street, there could have been problems. I am often asked whether it is difficult to be an artist. From an economic point of view, it is more difficult for women than for men to find recognition. But paradoxically, it’s helped with the type of work I do – I think I’ve been able to be so pushy because I’m a woman.”