Welcome to One Fine Show, where the Observer highlights an exhibit that recently opened at a museum outside of New York City, a place we know and love that is already getting a lot of attention.
If you’ve ever been to a nightclub putting a sticker on your phone’s camera, you know the inherent appeal of a space without social media. Such subtlety translates to people as well. The power and prestige that comes from not posting is so unequal that it is sometimes surprising that anyone would ever choose the other. Not that it’s always a matter of choice, of course. We all have our own versions of SKIMS to sell.
Sophie Calle is not on social media, according to a statement from her new exhibit at the Walker Art Center, even though the exhibit is called “Overshare.” The exhibition reaches from today back to the late 1970s and shows his science. Calle was obsessed with surveillance and voyeurism long before we were all forced to consider such matters on a daily basis.
His series of Autobiographies began in the late 1980s and continues today. This provides a black and white image with dynamic text. Evil Spirit (1994) features an ornate couch and tells the story of Calle’s father sending her to a doctor at age 30 to get rid of his bad spirits. The man turns out to be a psychoanalyst, not a GP, and asks if Calle always does what her father tells her to do. The text concludes: “So I became his patient.”
READ MORE: Ukraine’s Resilience as Resistance: How Artist Maya Hayuk Leans on Her Heritage
It’s funny, it’s quiet, it’s sad. It would be wrong to say that Calle is as much a writer as he is a visual artist, but the composition of his words, their order and poetry, is an important part of his work. I tend to think of him as an inverted version of WG Sebald, who wraps captivating and persuasive images in swirling prose that puts you in, maybe you can’t escape the image. With Calle, the images tend to be less inviting, so they push you into the text as you seek the relief that accompanies the explanation. Then it’s his text that traps you, until you don’t remember how you got there. It all started with a sofa?
His True Stories series uses real things to similar effect. Here you can see the phone she was thrown over, the brassiere that goes along with the story of how she wished her breasts were there, the key to the hotel where her mother lost her virginity. This is impossible to enter, and even from the outside, the text seems worried about not being there because here in front of you is an artifact that is at the heart of the story, and it is not enough.
My favorite jobs I didn’t know about included a commission from a US bank to do their collection work. The result was Money Machine (1991-2003), a series of photographs of people withdrawing money from an ATM equipped with a camera, and It’s not finished (2005), a video about his inability to finish the project after ten years. So much concern for someone who is not on social media! He turned down the commission because he didn’t know what to do with the pictures or any text to go with them. “If I show these documents found without adding my knowledge, I will be betraying my own style,” he explained. It’s not finished. “However, I was able to steal three surveillance tapes. You will never know.”
“Sophie Calle: Overshare” is on view at the Walker Art Center through January 26, 2025.
