During my mini vacation in Montreal to visit my sister and Dylan, we went down to the DHC/ART Foundation to see Sophie Calle’s monumental installation Prenez soin de vous/Take care of yourself. Originally presented at the 2007 Venice Biennale, the piece is a sprawling, exhibition-sized installation of 107 women’s interpretations of a breakup email Calle received from her lover (well, it’s actually 104 women, plus two puppets and a cockatoo). Giving a hard copy of the letter to women chosen for their training, skill or talent, Calle asked musicians, dancers, singers, psychiatrists, elementary school students, criminologists and dozens of other professionals to interpret, dissect or act out the cryptic letter.
The original breakup email, in French
Sophie Calle, Exquisite Pain, 2001 [detail]But whereas some people I spoke to were turned off by Exquisite Pain‘s self-referentiality, by involving so many diverse women and prioritizing their training or profession above their personal interpretations (for the most part), Prenez soin de vous seems to side-step that landmine and to offer a more distanced meditation on love, heartbreak and revenge while still keeping a classic Sophie Calle twist. It helps that the original breakup email is so painfully awkward and pretentious, making it almost impossible to identify or sympathize with its author.
That said, among the 107 interpretations there are some that work better than others, especially as visual artworks. Some of the more text-focused interpretations seemed to offer more for the viewer, especially the 2nd grader’s book report on what she took from the letter, a professional crossword-writer’s creation, an SMS language translator’s adaptation of the letter into a text-message friendly version and an editor’s marked up version of errors and repetition in the original.
Sophie Calle, Prenez soin de vous, 2007 [detail]
Sophie Calle, Prenez soin de vous, 2007 [detail]
I was sort of hoping that some of the video works would offer more insight to the process that went into Calle’s selection of the women and their relationship to one another during the interpretations. But instead, they mostly focused on actors, dancers, and musicians’ interpretations of the letter which, while interesting, still left me asking questions. Were the women Calle chose personal acquaintances, or did she find them through recommendations and professional references? Why, for instance, are almost all the women white and middle class? How much direction were they given in how to execute and present their interpretation? Did Calle edit any of their responses? Did any of them refuse to participate?
The closest I got to answers to any of these queries was in a video with a family counsellor, who meets with Calle (the only time she appears in the show, to my knowledge) in one chair and a hard copy of the letter in another. The audio track that accompanies it allows you to hear the counsellor asking Calle for clarification about some of the vaguer references in the letter, and to hear about Calle’s personal reaction to the letter and some of the context of its delivery. While, at times, this window into Calle’s own experiences makes her seem less heroic and occasionally even whiny, the video manages to complicate the rest of the installation and to question Calle’s involvement in, and response to, the breakup.
I came away from the show, as I do from all Calle pieces, unsure of what I thought of it. I am still in awe of its scale and complexity, and in awe of DHC’s coup in acquiring it for exhibition, but continue to be troubled by some of its political implications. Which is maybe the point in the first place.
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