Sophie Calle in Venice

I've written several times on this blog already about my passion for Sophie Calle, so you can imagine how excited I was that I managed to catch the last few days of her show at the Biennale in Venice.

She took as a focus for the exhibition a dumping letter she'd received by email from a lover, which ended in the words 'Take Care of Yourself'.



Well, Sophie Calle knows how best to take care of herself - by examining from every minute angle the experience so as to own it better. She asked 107 women (actually 106 women and one parrot) to give their versions of the letter. This varied from a text message.



To a mathematical diagram.



And also included a deaf signing, a musical interpretation, a clowning, a mother's viewpoint, linguistic variations, a young girl's comments and many many more. It was moving and funny and I can't believe anyone - man or woman - could have walked round without thinking of their own relationships and what they REALLY meant. We too often see things just through our obviously biaised eyes.

It's hard to say which were my favourites. I loved the marital guidance session where Sophie Calle was filmed being interviewed sitting on one chair, while the letter took the 'husband's' seat, saying nothing but looking remarkably smug. I also giggled, along with everyone else, as a cook was videoed chopping up vegetables harder and harder as she read through the letter. And I barked with laughter and shock as the parrot actually dived in and ate the letter. I know I'll be thinking about it for a long time to come, and that - in some way or another - the ideas in that room will come out in my writing.

It's this response which summed up the whole exhibition for me.



I went to the exhibition with a group of women, and couldn't help but wonder what the male visitors felt. Was it their worst nightmare of how women discuss them? Because, to be honest, being surrounded by so many - sympathetic - female responses and voices made me think of numerous lunches I've spent analysing relationships. So perhaps it's not surprising that, according to the Guardian Interview Sophie Calle's boyfriend has made this request from her:

She doesn't use her all boyfriends as work, she insists. Her current partner has asked her not to do anything based on him and she has agreed.

And my writing prompt for today is .... A farewell letter.

When teaching writing becomes not just enjoyable, but actually a privilege, is when you learn as much from your students as you're teaching them. (You mean you get paid for that? Yep, life's good!) My best tutorials - on both sides - are those when we both come away bursting with scribbled names, notes and books to look up. So this entry comes with thanks to Brigitte who introduced me to the work of the French artist, Sophie Calle; Paul Auster fans might recognise her as the model for Maria, in his novel, Leviathan. Sophie Calle is the ultimate artist at transforming her life, and those of strangers and friends, into art.

Reading about her, she appears to be an obsessive who uses ritual to anchor her in life. The photograph above is one of a series of exhibits of birthday presents that were given to her every year - she stopped when she was forty. She decided to keep the presents she was given as a record of affection rather than to use them.

Perhaps her most controversial work was The Address Book where she found a stranger's address book and proceeded to contact names in it to build up a picture of the man; this was then published in a French magazine. Not surprisingly the man tried to sue for defamation of privacy, and eventually got hold of a nude photograph of Sophie which he demanded the newspaper publish!

My favourite though is The Shadow, where she asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her, Sophie, one day. The text on the day is electric - as it progresses, Sophie sounds as if she's almost falling in love with her shadow, wondering what he'll think of her doing this, or that, and how he'll react to her. TO complicate things further, she asks a friend to shadow the shadow and provide a record of who he is. The difference between her account of the day, and the eventual technical report of the private detective is beautiful in itself. The idea came after Sophie came back to live in Paris after an absence and, feeling an outsider, started to follow strangers.

I've been feeling almost electrically inspired reading about this woman and although there's no copying her, my writing prompt for today comes from her... I'm going to London today to meet my friend Shaun for lunch and I'm going to take an earlier train than I would normally and meander round after strangers for an hour. And my 'living' prompt for today is ... not to get arrested!

Sleep

Am heavy with lack of sleep today, and I have to write a central tango scene for the new novel. Probably no co-incidence that I've made one of my characters yearn more for comfy pillows than hot footsteps, but perhaps he'd be better taking off to one of these exhibitions: the 4 vegetative sleep rooms in Rotterdam (see above by Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger), or the wonderful Sleepers, where Sophie Calle invited 24 friends and strangers to share her bed and tell her stories, or even Tracey Emin's iconic bed.

And my writing prompt for today is: An unsuitable bedtime story

Tracy Emin in Venice

The French and British exhibits at the Biennale were next to each other at the end of the row. I went to the Sophie Calle first, and then dashed into Tracy Emin's out of a sense of 'oh, I have to do this because people will ask.' It's not that I don't like Tracy Emin's work, but more that I've always felt there's something a bit intimidating about it, as if I'm 'not going to get it'. This fear wasn't helped by the people coming out as I was going in, who all seemed to be shaking their heads and laughing a little bit.

I still don't know if I 'got it', but I got something, and that was enough for me. I got that I'd like to force all teenage girls to come in and see the British exhibit - and to really LOOK. It made me want to protect and attack all at the same time, a confused, uncomfortable feeling. Birds were a motif, as shown by the beautiful fragile light sculpture on the outside.



The central hall was filled with branches and around it charcoal sketches of women's private parts (God, I'm embarrased about saying that, like a prim aunt, but I don't want to get hundreds of google hunters coming here and getting disappointed.) Anyway, to me - and you'll understand now I'm no art expert - it felt as if there was something equally fragile, bird-like and transient about the drawings. Almost as if you needed to cup them in your hands. It wasn't sexual though, or voyeuristic. More ... oh, what do I want to say ... fleeting. That's it. I was very moved.

And then in the next room, I read this.



And round the corner, I came across this, which made me gasp out loud. Not the words but the way and how they had been written which made them so painfully polite but almost invisible - surely part of the point.



And this sums up this post for me, really. I think I know what the exhibit was saying, but oh I'm not sure, but on the other hand I think I know what I liked about it. Oh heck...why am I such a girl at saying what I mean, and striving to get to the point when I can say this is what I know I want to say, which is what I think the exhibit was really about.



And my writing prompt for today is ... the subversive stitch.