Moje życie moją sztuką. Sophie Calle

Abstract

In France, Sophie Calle is considered to be one of the most popular postmodern artists. Her diverse artistic work includes writing, photography, performance, and multimedia installations. Her inspiration for a creative act is usually her own life (as she admits herself, it results from her being bored with the reality). Yet it seems more adequate to say that her life is her artistic work, as it is very difficult to mark the borderline between the real world and the world of her creation. Calle arranges situations in which she herself, her emotions, behaviour, and persons selected by her become the participants of a performance. It may be following a stranger in the street, photographing people sleeping in her bed, or adopting the features of a novel heroine. Thus Calle fulfils a double role, of the agent and at the same time the object of an artistic enterprise. The artist is both the writer and the written, both the story teller and the story told. Her creations, or rather auto-creations, are a constant story of herself, creating a personal mythology. Hence the question about the sense of art, which may appear to be merely a multifaceted game that the artist plays with the recipient and with herself, or an attempt at psychotherapy, at catharsis. The work of Sophie Calle is a proof that art may be anchored in everyday ordinariness, accidentality, or just in the void. It only has to be written down, photographed, recorded, turned into a show, and brought down to limited time and space: it has to be forged into an apparent act of creation to be called art.