Calle and her collaboration with Paul Auster

Sophie Calle’s unsavoury reputations lead to her collaboration with writer Paul Auster in 1992 combining their mutual subject matter of identity and authorship. In Auster’s book ‘Leviathan’, Calle appeared as a character named Maria and went on to create Maria’s artworks such as ‘the chromatic diet’ as described by Auster in the book. Maria was an artist but her work had nothing to do with creating objects commonly defined as art. Some people called her a photographer, others referred to her as a conceptualist, still others considered her a writer but in the end she couldn’t be pigeonholed in any way. Her work was too unusual and idiosyncratic for that.

In their collaboration, the identities of the author/artist and that of the character/subject begin to merge together creating a confusing post modern outcome. This too is an aspect which I find relates directly to my planned collaborative installation with Zoe Moyden. Although we are both interdisciplinary artists our working methodologies differ and we draw inspiration from very different sources. The final installation will merge together our mutual idea and concept with our opposing influences (hers drawn from architecture and the urban environment, and mine from nature and its influence upon the urban environment). The interactive installation will also merge our methodologies in our individually selected materials, media and processes used to create objects to re-invent the space.

The concept that my collaborative partner and I are currently developing around our intended site specific, interactive installation attempts to break down social restrictions applied to communication. This is one of the areas where I feel that Sophie Calle’s working methodologies inform our concept and practice. In Calle’s collaboration with writer Paul Auster where she responded to his book ‘Improving Life in New York City’, Calle smiled at strangers keeping a record of smiles given and received and inhabited a phone box in the city, painting it, adding flowers, snacks and a pad of paper for people to leave comments.
Our concept differs in that we want to create a comfortable space in an outdoor environment where passers by rarely stop to sit and reflect or interact, and an opposing uncomfortable harsh space in an otherwise tranquil, meditative environment. Differing from Calle’s intentions with the Phone Booth to claim a public space as her own, we want to make a public space more inviting/alluring to alter its use and peoples perceptions of it.

Sophie Calle’s most famous works consist of re-creating moments from other lives. One example of this process documents the artist getting hold of a lost address book and calling everyone inside, asking them to describe the book's owner and then published their answers every day for a month in the leftwing newspaper Libération - to the horror of her victim, who tried to get what he hoped would be revenge by persuading the paper to publish a nude picture of her. She was simply delighted by his response. I like the idea that we could publish or exhibit the final outcome of our installation within the space that we used which will appear as if we were never there. As a record of an event that did not exist to those who were not there to see it, perhaps the documented memory of our installation could provoke just as much of a reaction as the live thing. Ask people who participate if they have an inanimate object on their person that they could leave in the installation space creating clutter like that you would find in someone’s living room.