Sophie Calle

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Through March 24

Sophie Calle’s Double Game gravitates around her clever and engaging artistic relationship with the novelist Paul Auster (a collaboration lavishly documented in a 1999 book). In his novel Leviathan, written nearly a decade ago, Auster introduced a character, Maria, whom he had based on the French conceptual artist. In the novel, Maria, like her real-life counterpart, compulsively performs aesthetic rituals, some of which Calle later re-enacted and meticulously documented. In one instance, she followed a chromatic diet (Monday, orange; Tuesday, red; and so on), photographing each day’s offering and including a menu that pointed out her culinary modifications.

Along with these gorgeous prints, the works include some of her more risky enterprises, most of which are steeped in the voyeurism for which she is famous. These pieces weave photographs and written reports, creating thick narratives layered with autobiography, fiction, and the unauthorized biography of unsuspecting strangers. In the Venetian Suite, she tenaciously surveils the activities of a person traveling in the city. In The Hotel, she gets hired as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel in order to pry into the private lives of the guests.

While in some pieces the viewer absorbs Calle’s antics with perverse fascination, in others one cannot help but be taken aback by the disregard for her subjects’ privacy. A case in point is the Address Book. With the amoral coolness of a Victorian-era anthropologist, Calle contacted the people listed in an address book found in the street in order to glean personal details about the book’s owner, and offered the findings to the public in the French newspaper “Libération”.

Among her more provocative pieces is Gotham Handbook, which originated as a response to Auster’s instruction that she should find a way to improve daily life in New York. Here she set out by sprucing up a phone booth on a corner in TriBeCa, and then acted as a kind of hospitality host for the booth, its patrons, and passersby, offering sandwiches, cigarettes, and smiles. A chronic eavesdropper, Calle tape-recorded the phone conversations that took place. This time, however, by placing herself in front of her subjects, she drops her cover a little and moves from the sidelines into the game.




Euridice Arratia