By Lee Christien


If I were you I'd consider the inter-relationship between actions and words as a way to navigate the terrain of a conceptual artwork's material expression. Did Sophie Calle really spend time living in the building of the Musée d'Orsay long before it opened as an art gallery? Calle apparently one day drifted into this building during its previous structuring as hotel run to ruin and abandonment. With her meticulous camera-eye slowly tracking along the tributaries of the busy Parisian streets, Calle entered via the open doorway which led her into this building. 

Maybe photography, then, is simply a medium that searches for a subject? A subconscious check-in, she entered the doorway to explore an ever-now empty time-space blasted out of history. For Calle, traipsing through the abandoned, dusty, hotel she located among the emptiness a fantasy dervish dreamscape that spiralled out in light waves. Shooting her camera, the ghosts were taken home on the film roll of her SLR camera. 

Later, in the darkroom: flowing movements developed, blown up, cropped, stop-bathed, fixed.

Framed for display: panels of peeling paint, long retired fittings, empty pipes, the sense of strange drafts, an impression of eeriness vibrate in the sparse interiors captured by the camera. Echoing out from the prints of Calle's photos, the past reverberates through the uninhabited rooms, corridors, walls and floors of the former-hotel. She gazes out at us, the absent viewers. Telescopaged from out of the present, photography gazes back around from the past and into the present, and then swings around again. With telescopic precision this montaged time collapses in the image.

I earlier mentioned the need to consider action alongside language because, for me, it seems a sensible ground from which to survey the wider topology of the artistic cultural space with its attendant homogeneous layer of history. Blown along by the wind of capital, dust is heaped over every object. The exposed floor boards creak as spectres haunt hallways, they pass by on the staircase, dance in the ballroom, rendezvous in the empty hotel rooms. This shifting and undulating terrain of visuality is boundaried-in, burying the past underneath curatorial paratextures that crud up to cover and efface the networked links between base and superstructure. A landscape whose surface, on closer inspection, is permanently unstable, volatile, and fluid. Old light captured by Sophie's camera ruptures in the present, disrupting her desire for chronology. 

The solidity of the future is predictable, it flows into the view of the present only to elide past and recede. It's inevitable materialisation ebbs down into the channels of artistic processes and productions. Provenance seeks to ensure the eternal return of these entwined, tentacular, twisting, rhizomatic movements that enrich the terra firma in deep time: patrons, guests, collectors, tourists, trends, groups, innovators, insiders, outsiders. In Calle's prints, material traces are superimposed and reside co-existent with the present.

The horrors of an abandoned hotel; perhaps once a holding centre for those deported under Pétain? Citizens of the republic given over to homogeneous time. They passed through the zones of effacement where belongings, objects, and identities were removed: entire rooms filled with shoes, jewellery, wigs, glasses, and watches. Here, they were denied the very means with which to navigate chronology. 

Superstructure and base filter through Calle's artistic project due to its interplay between absent character and Ur-present message. Here, her random surveillance vetos reason. Calle's exploration of narrative perspective validated an inclination that loops and overdrives into cognitive feedback, the return of which pre-empted an original voice -now overly familiar in the ever-present-moment of ethylene culture. Calendars, postcards, and souvenirs in the Musee D'Orsay gallery shop mark these passageways of chronological time: L'Origine du monde, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Olympia, Camille Sur Son Lit De Mort, Coquelicots (red marks scattered in summer's open field -an indication of the arrival of something). 

By probing into the relationship between fiction and reality, the question of free will emerges.  

Take the artist's book Double Game by Sophie Calle, for example, which is a collection of photographs and texts that document and elaborate a fictional character named Maria, who is in fact based on Calle herself, who was first written about by the author Paul Auster in his novel Leviathan. 

By becoming Maria in Double Game, Calle rubs out the division between the author and a fictionalised version of her character captured, described, and narrated within Auster's novel. Maria, a composite of language, steps out of the page to re-shape Calle -result of Auster's gaze.

A new fiction emerges from this authorial turn to the real (Calle), and what is found is the complexity of umwelt. The unity of the subject's carriers of significance -captured, classified, and novelistically organised by Auster- become the raison d'être of Calle's reinterpretation of the subject-perceived, her fictional double, Maria. 

Double Game starts with a reproduction of the series of pages from Leviathan that introduce the character of Maria. The pages clipped out from Auster's novel are annotated in red marker pen by Calle who highlights sections, crosses-out passages, and makes notes on the content. Here, she is responding to the narrative assertions of the novel by elaborating upon, correcting, and even questioning the authorial voice in its narration of the character, Maria. 
 
Spiralling out of the annotated text, Calle's visual thinking and (re)appropriation of the text and character of Maria stages the setting for the rules which govern the artist's own book. Here, Calle signposts how she intends to work across different levels in Double Game. First, working directly from the deviations between Calle and her fictional counterpart Maria -clearly identified by red pen marks scrawled across the pages of the annotated novel- Calle recreates these fictional experiences made up by Auster, and acts out the activities of Maria. For example, in the novel Auster describes how Maria plans and assigns herself a different colour of food to then eat and photograph each day of the week.  
 
In her book, images of red food scatters across the day's menu -an indication of the passing of something? 
 
Calle follows the text as a script for her own life and carries out the project. Here, the conceptual artist materially illustrates the novel's fictions. And of course, what complicates this re-enactment is the fact that art project was something Auster imagined that his fictional portrait of Calle, Maria, would do. 
 
In the novel, Maria does things that Calle had done which Auster was aware of. Then, in Double Game, Calle does things that Auster was unaware of.
 
In the former empty hotel, abstracted or original thought, votive vessels, religious paintings, landscapes, society portraits, postcards and souvenirs from the museum shop now occupy the hotel rooms as if stirring in a fever dream.