MINNEAPOLIS — For five decades now, Sophie Calle has been probing human connection, emotional impulses, and vulnerability via fictional devices, dry humor, and an unapologetic impropriety. In Sophie Calle: Overshare at the Walker Art Center, the artist scrutinizes strangers, family and friends, and herself, exploring desire via keen observations about social convention and its accompanying wants and needs.
In 1981, Calle hired a private investigator to follow her through the streets of Paris, taking pains to ensure that he didn’t know she employed him. The detective’s resulting black and white surveillance photographs make up one-half of “The Shadow,” on view at the Walker. In one grouping of five photographs, Calle is seen walking away from the camera, or hidden by a tree branch; some images are blurry. Whereas contemporaneous works such as “Suite Vénitienne” (1980) and “The Hotel” (1981) saw Calle spying on others — taking photos of strangers and the belongings of hotel guests while she worked as a maid, respectively — here, she flips the gaze toward herself, becoming the subject and the star. In her text, Calle describes the pleasure of being watched. “I do not sit at our usual table, but closer to the window, and order a cafe creme,” she writes. “It is for ‘him’ I am getting my hair done. To please him.”
Calle’s enthusiasm for her role as subject speaks to a broader cultural fixation with artists’ muses, à la Dora Maar inspiring Picasso, or Edie Sedgwick inspiring Andy Warhol. In the 1992 film “No Sex Last Night” (retitled “Double Blind” in 1996), Calle grapples with a desire to be a muse for her collaborator Greg Shephard, as well as to use him as her muse in turn. Each equipped with a video camera, they film each other and record their private thoughts during a drive from New York to San Francisco. At several points in the film, Calle’s camera lingers on an unmade bed in the morning, her voiceover intoning “No sex last night.” At a certain point in the film, she simply says “No,” indicating they yet again didn’t make love.
The film speaks to a culture that emphasizes women cultivating desirability, rather than pursuing their own desire. In a voice-over translated by subtitles, Calle recalls one conversation with Shephard in which he asks her why she looks sad. “I told him I had been contaminated by his lack of desire,” she says, the camera lingering on the car’s side mirror, which reflects the barren desert and mountains.
In “On the Hunt” (2020/24), Calle sorts archival personal ads by time period, panning out from individual desire to the larger sociological and historical forces at play in its makeup. Pairing ads by men on one side and women on the other, she highlights the unique dating trends of the time. Personals culled from the 19th century, for instance, focus on marriage and money, while physical disabilities emerge as a factor during wartime and afterward. Above each decade sits either a photograph of a hunting stand or a surveillance image of a hunted animal, emphasizing the animalistic instinct that underlies the search for a mate, no matter the time period. In line with a half-century career as an aloof but impassioned observer, the work reveals the loneliness of the human heart in Calle’s signature brutal, ironic way.
Sophie Calle: Overshare continues at the Walker Art Center (725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, Minnesota) through January 26, 2025. It then travels to Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California from March 7–June 1, 2025. The exhibition was organized by Henriette Huldisch, Erin McNeil, and Brandon Eng.
