PORTRAIT. Sophie Calle, Empress of the Intimate and Paradoxes

Sophie Calle dans son loft atelier pose avec son Loup naturalisé à qui elle a donné le prénom de son galeriste, Emmanuel Perrotin. YVES GEANT

The visual artist photographer and author, known for her often autobiographical works, is the winner of the Praemium Imperiale prize, nicknamed the Nobel Prize of the arts. Meeting in her Parisian studio with a whimsical artist who has long chosen Le Cailar as her second anchor.

"This way. This way!", calls out a little voice without us being able to tell where it comes from. It is that of Sophie Calle who finally pokes her nose out between the foliage of the shrubs in her garden, her mischievous smile and her gaze amused by this unexpected little hide-and-seek. She welcomes us to Malakoff, very close to Paris, in her cosmic-poetic-naturalist lair. A loft with a garden, her living and creative space for over 30 years, resembling a cabinet of curiosities. On the walls, big names and unusual finds. Objects everywhere, like so many joyful, offbeat oddities. And then there on a shelf, here near the entrance, on the sofa, a slew of animals… who bear the first name of his relatives: there is Emmanuel (Perrotin), the wolf, or the giraffe Monique, named after his late mother.

The death of the cat Souris and the record

“I made a triple disc unintentionally. When my cat Souris was about to die, I decided that I would have him put down at home by the vet. I asked my friend the singer Camille to come and sing him a song in his ear. Which she did. That gave me the idea for her to write one about Souris. I also asked my friend Laurie Anderson who had made a film about her dog. Then, I said to myself why not continue and I sent a photo of my cat to a few people I knew with some information about his character. Everyone said yes and I ended up with about thirty titles including those of Bono and Pharell Williams."

Malakoff, his first anchor. The second is called Le Cailar. Thanks to his father. Bob Calle, director of the Curie Institute by day and friend of artists pop art at night, the linchpin of the Carré d'art in Nîmes, had his roots and his ties there. Sophie Calle and Le Cailar have been going on since childhood. “I started doing the votive festival when I was 15. I, who was rather solitary and wild, opened up to others. It changed my character. My father told me throughout my adolescence, enjoy it because when you're 20 you won't like it anymore. Then he told me the same thing again when I was 30. And when I was 40, he understood that there was no point in insisting anymore. When I arrive at Le Cailar, I find myself a bit like the person I was at 15-20 years old. It's certain that I don't live in the same context as in Paris, I don't see the same people, I don't eat the same food and yet I have the same life." This summer, with her friends, they recreated the Olympic Games with a Cailarenc twist. Sophie Calle was Anne Hidalgo. As a speech, she unrolled a very long ribbon coming out of her mouth. Like at the inauguration of her exhibition at the Picasso Museum. Not the same audience but the same joke. Sophie Calle has the power to make humor universal. "She even carried the flame that day", her friend and godson, Sébastien Bantzé, still laughs. “Sophie is always up for it, ready to make little jokes with her offbeat humor.”

“The humor is maybe there if you say so. I didn't have to make a choice. It's my nature. It allows me to put things I don't want to face head on at a distance.”, she says. We then think of Romain Gary's phrase: “Humor is a necessary aid, the surest of all”. She agrees. Sophie Calle is rich in paradoxes: she likes to laugh at herself as much as she likes to reread Georges Perec. We know some funnier ones. It's because she admires “his subjects, his scalpel-like descriptions, his inventories”.

The artist cultivates another paradox that inhabits practically all of her work. The one linked to the intimate as when she stages the death of her mother, stages her own tailing, welcomes people into her bed so that it does not cool down, or stages her romantic breakups twice. She shows a lot but without ever really revealing and constantly blurs the boundaries between public and private things. Thus we think we know everything about her while she remains a mystery, still at 71 years old. “It's because I don't try to unpack my daily life. I like to write, to make images and I use my life for that but it is rewritten, edited, transformed. I try to transform moments of my life into poetic stories. What I tell is true but it is not the truth. You know, I talk much less about my private life than all the people on Instagram".

The lives of others inspire her just as much as she finds in them an "artistic, poetic, romantic potential". It sometimes implies a danger“but I still wonder if it's worth it. Once I had a project that I didn't do because my lawyer told me, there you are taking a big risk.”

No pleasure, no joy, no “meals with friends”, no “vacations by the sea” will have a chance that she will transform them into a work: “When I love what I am experiencing I don't want to take a step side." Only what upsets or overwhelms her will deserve an artistic story. "Looking at things from a distance when you are unhappy is not so bad. And if I make a work of art out of it, it will be a victory over pain and suffering". But what fundamentally makes Sophie Calle unique lies in her talent for seizing the absurd, exalting irony, sublimating chance and ennobling the ugly. In photos, in writing… in almost every way. Never through the theater. “Too afraid to fail” in this art that she places “above”.

By the way, does the artist, former activist “pure and hard” in her youth, want to do useful work ?: “That's not my driving force. I don't make works for therapeutic, sociological, political, feminist reasons. But if they touch on these areas, if they hit the mark, or if they do some good to some people, then it's even better…"

Les maisons du Cailar

“I lived for 50 years in a house in Cailar that was Jean Lafont's. I think it's the house of my life. The one where I was happiest and unhappiest. It was a very modest home. I left to settle in the village. When I moved, I asked everyone who came to take something. I kept three things: a staircase that my father had told me to keep but I forgot why; a wooden mosquito net through which I watched the bulls and the table on which I performed abortions in 1973 in Paris when I was an MLAC activist and which I had exhibited at the Picasso Museum."

Today, she is preparing to receive the Praemium Imperiale Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for the arts, like Soulages or Balthus a few years before her. On November 22, probably the Emperor of Japan himself will award her this distinction in the painting category. “It's rather funny to be labeled a painter! But there is no photography category, so they adapt… It's a joy, an immense pleasure. But I won't say I'm proud. I am proud of my exhibition at the Picasso Museum last year, which took me three years to put together. .

In the meantime, she is coming today and tomorrow to take down her Arlesian exhibition in the cryptoporticos where she presented photos and objects “condemned” after a flood. She had called it “Finishing in style”. A title in the form of a will ? Not at all. She is exhibiting in Minneapolis in October, in Tokyo in November and in Sérignan in April. Sophie Calle writes wills almost before every trip and sometimes changes the beneficiaries. Death occupies her thoughts a lot so she conjures it up with her works. To the point of making it a final performance ? She replies mischievously: “What I know is that I would like to die alive”.

Exhibitions: from Tokyo to Sérignan

The Walker art center in Minneapolis is hosting the artist from October 26 for a major retrospective. She will then fly to Tokyo for the opening of her exhibition “Toulouse-Lautrec and Sophie Calle” at the Mitsubishi Museum on November 22. From April 12, she will show in Sérignan in Hérault an exhibition entitled “Are you sad ?”

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