My heart sank when I ascended the steps into the first gallery of the large Sophie Calle retrospective at the Walker Art Center. (My visit was on January 5, 2025). The walls of the room displayed nondescript black and white pictures in daunting arrays, 12 to 20 photos per group surrounded by oceans of text. The effect was like entering an earnest Berlin or Hamburg history museum with a few embattled relics besieged by a dozens of placards of densely printed information. You don't typically go to an art museum for the purpose of reading labels for several hours. But this exercise is required by the conceptual art-works made (or written I should say) by the French artist, Sophie Calle. Of course, no one could possibly read every word of the voluminous printed materials covering the gallery walls. It's enough, I think, to get the gist of the works.
In the first gallery, Calle records several experiments involving spying on people. In the early eighties, she hired herself out as a chambermaid, cleaned rooms in a Venetian hotel, and took pictures of people's soiled garments, their beds, cigarette butts and pajamas and reading material. In one case, her pictures show items left in the room by honeymooners. The labels are duplicative of the pictures -- they simply itemize the materials photographed in the rooms. In another experiment, Calle selected a man at random and stalked him for a day. The art object consists of photographs and a detailed itinerary of the man's perambulations and encounters during the time he was under surveillance. In a third work, Calle persuaded people to sleep in her bed under surveillance by her still camera. The fourth work is a video about money in which Calle asks people on the street how much they make and interviews bankers about their work and favorite jokes. None of these experiments yields anything of the slightest interest at all. In fact, it's remarkable how dull these quotidian events turn out to be. (It's as if Calle has an unerring eye for the mundane and uninteresting). Things improve a little in the next couple galleries in which the artist documents her marriage to someone named Greg, undertaken on a whim in a Vegas wedding chapel, and lasting only a couple of years. Again, there's nothing remarkable about Calle's brief and unhappy marriage and the relics that are preserved from that experience are things like bottles, pieces of cheap furniture, postcards, and pictures. (Apparently, Calle had the endearing habit of holding Greg's penis when he urinated -- there's a good picture of that activity in the show.) Calle carefully documented the deaths of both her parents, recording their last words, and mentioning some events in the last weeks in their lives. In one video installation, she apparently shows the death of her mother, a dignified figure lying supine in a bed with a little stuffed dog next to her -- the woman is inert; sometimes, a hand enters the frame to check her pulse or breathing. At last, the bystander is convinced the woman is dead and, then, moves the little stuffed doll closer to her face, pulling the covers up to the corpse's chin. (The label for this disheartening video states a date, 2007, and the words 'Impossible to Catch Death"; in handwriting, scribbled on the white wall in pencil, the words appear "Please do not make any photographs or film in this room, Thanks S.C." (This is the most poignant and meaningful thing in the show and, yet, the naive effect of the handwritten note penciled on the wall, seems unintentional.) In an alcove, two safes are displayed. Calle persuaded a married couple to write a secret never shared with the other person on a piece of paper and, then, locked the papers away in the two small safes. The art work consists of an elaborate contract prepared between the husband and wife (and Sophie Calle and the Fraenkel Gallery) documenting the agreement, considering contingencies such divorce or death, and providing that the safes, whose combinations are known only to Calle, will never be unlocked. It's interesting enough but a gimmick without any real pay-off. In a final huge gallery, there are five screens showing people who have never seen the sea standing in front of waves stretching to the horizon -- these are classical Rueckenfiguren, figures seen from behind. Then, the people turn to the camera which slowly advances into a close-up of their eyes. Of course, there is no discernible reaction -- whether these people (they are Istanbul) are moved or frightened or astonished can not be read from their bland expression.
Calle manages to surveil people, watch them die, and expose them to transcendent experiences without discovering anything of interest in the spectacle. We go to art museums to see ideas embodied or people and things ennobled or rendered meaningful. Calle's work does the opposite -- she flattens everything down to a piece of wholly uninteresting reportage. It's astonishing to me that she was able to create this work without happening on anything worth seeing. Anyone who has lived a little knows about unhappy marriages, parents on their deathbed, strangers walking around foreign cities, and hotel rooms. Calle doesn't defamiliarize these aspects of life -- she doesn't dramatize them or make them have any significance; these things aren't illumined in any way. It's an irritating and arduous show, made all the more difficult by the enormous amounts of writing on the walls, none of which is even slightly interesting. There's a dispiriting nihilistic aspect to the show --if this is all that life holds, what's the purpose of living. The paradigm work is the video shot on the shores of a grey, featureless ocean -- people are looking into the vastness of the sea for the first time, but we can't read anything on their faces -- their bland expressions remind us of why we need art: in real life, people don't emote, don't act, and conceal both their emotions and thoughts. Art exists to repair this deficit in reality. I suppose there's some value in pointing out the enormous and disheartening gap between art and life -- but, ultimately, the fact that life always disappoints us is pretty clear to just about everyone.
You can cleanse your palate by looking at the new hang of paintings and objects in the permanent collection -- it's called "This Must be the Place." At last, the "Large Blue Horses" by Franz Marc is displayed prominently and, without the implicit apology for the beauty and drama of the thing that has characterized its exhibition for the last thirty years. The huge muscular horses are hung at eye-level and they strain, pressing toward you out of the frame. In the context of Calle's uninspiring show, Marc's horses remind you why you might spend an afternoon at an art museum as opposed shopping or watching football on TV. Nearby, there are several interesting small works on paper, including a ghostly lithograph by Louise Bourgeois of some sort of floating angel and a dark conspiratorial engraving by Kaethe Kollwitz -- both beautiful works that deserve your attention. There are some political works by Edgar Heap of Birds (about the 38 Sioux hanged in Mankato after the Dakota War) and a few large images by Kara Walker with her trademark mammies and picaninnies cavorting in front of lithograph images from the Civil War. A lapidary work (or works) by Yuji Agematsu exposes, by contrast, the failure of Calle's work. Agematsu walks the city streets in New York, picking up small pieces of trash (he calls this stuff "detritus"). The fragments of paper, metal, small badges, and foil are, then, carefully arranged in clear plastic pouches in which cartons of cigarettes are sold. The art is like flower arranging or the Japanese art of Ikebana. The little displays each about two by three inches are gemlike and extremely beautiful Agematsu has figured out a way to transmute garbage into gorgeous, tiny displays that seem either floral or, in some ways, narrative -- some of the little bits of debris are figurative and look like fish or personages or flower blossoms. Agematsu collects the kind of trash that you don't even see as you walk a city street and, by some kind of alchemy, transmutes it into art, and beautiful art as well. Calle takes the moments of our lives, aspects of reality that are intrinsically meaningful, leaches them of meaning and beauty and puts them up on the walls as diagrams of futility.
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