Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
If you’ve ever been to a nightclub that puts a sticker on your phone’s camera, you know the inherent appeal of a space without social media. Such intrigue translates to people as well. The power and prestige that come from not posting are so disproportionate that it’s sometimes a wonder that anyone ever chooses the alternative. Not that it’s always a matter of choice, of course. We all have our versions of SKIMS to sell.
Sophie Calle is not on social media, according to the press release for her new survey at the Walker Art Center, though the exhibition is called “Overshare.” The show reaches from today back through the late 1970s and demonstrates her prescience. Calle was obsessed with surveillance and voyeurism long before the rest of us were forced to consider such matters on a daily basis.
Her Autobiographies series began in the late 1980s and continues today. These offer a black-and-white photo alongside some stirring text. The Bad Breath (1994) displays an ornate couch and tells the story of Calle’s father sending her to a doctor at age 30 to clear up her supposedly bad breath. The man turns out to be a psychoanalyst, not a GP, and he asks if Calle always does what her father tells her to do. The text finishes: “And so I became his patient.”
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Hilarious, quiet, painful. It would be wrong to say that Calle is a writer as much as she is a visual artist, but the composition of her words, their order and poetry, is a key part of her work. I tend to think of her as an inverted version of W.G. Sebald, who wrapped alluring and haunted photographs in swirling prose that sucked you right into them, perhaps never to escape the image again. With Calle, the photographs tend not to be that inviting, so they push you over to the text as you seek the relief that accompanies the explanation. Then it’s her text that ensnares you, to the point where you hardly remember how you got there. All this started with a couch?
Her True Stories series uses real objects to a similar effect. Here you can see a telephone over which she was dumped, a brassiere accompanied by the story of how she willed her breasts into existence, a key to the hotel where her mother lost her virginity. These are impossible to enter, and even outside, the text seems concerned with absence because here before you is the artifact at the heart of the story, and it’s insufficient.
My favorite works that I didn’t know about include a commission from an American bank to make a work for their collection. The result was Cash Machine (1991-2003), a series of photographs of people withdrawing money from an ATM outfitted with a camera, and Unfinished (2005), a video about her inability to finish the project after ten years. So much anxiety for someone not on social media! She turned down the commission because she didn’t know what to do with the images or what text should accompany them. “If I showed these found documents without adding my experience, I would be betraying my own style,” she explains in Unfinished. “Still, I did manage to steal three surveillance tapes. You never know.”
“Sophie Calle: Overshare” is on view at Walker Art Center through January 26, 2025.