After
her mother died of breast cancer in 2006, Sophie Calle decided to make a video
of her last moments. It is with this movie, entitled Pas Pu Saisir la Mort (“Couldn’t Catch Death”),
that the artist started the project Rachel,
Monique in which she used “photographic
documentation, narrative texts, found imagery and personal iconography” (press release) to
tell the story of the disappeared. Like any of Calle’s projects, Rachel, Monique keeps evolving. The last adaptation,
Absence, is the first version in
English.
In
this show, Calle does not show the video of her mother's last instants. The viewer is welcomed to the
gallery by a letter the artist wrote to Daniel Buren – a French conceptual
artist – explaining her reluctance to expose such a personal artwork in a commercial space. This prelude gives the spectator a curiosity
to pass the lace veils that obscure the entrance of the main gallery space. On the left
wall is displayed a story of how the artist followed the instructions of a
fortuneteller to do a pilgrimage to Lourdes, the city of catholic miraculous healings,
while her mother was dying. Arranged to be read in front of the pictures and texts' recordings of Lourdes, an installation of marble signs on the floor lists diseases that were
supposedly cured in the city; a list in which breast cancer cannot be found. On
the center wall is an arrangement of mixed-media that works as a mausoleum for the
artist’s mother: transcriptions of a page from her mother's diary are
alongside a list of all the "lasts" the artist’s mother accomplished (last
pedicure, last party, and so on until the last breath) and different pictures. On the right wall is an
explanation and short movie of Calle’s trip to the North Pole, a journey her
mother wanted to take and that the artist accomplished after her death as homage.
The
display of the show can be read as the story of Calle’s exploration of her
mother’s disease and death; a reflection on the mechanisms and the rituals we
go through to accept a family member's loss. It is not surprising for an artist that
has made an artwork of her life that mourning
her mother would be staged in front of the public. No one can ignore the force
brought by the interplay between images and text, something that might not be
possible to express with mere words or pictures. Something that will touch the spectator's heart every time. The narration of the loss of a
loved one is not the only story to Absence. An adjacent room displays the work Purloined that investigates
artworks stolen in the 1990s and subsequently found; all are represented by a picture of their exhibition space, except for one
work by Lucian Freud that wasn't retrieved, which is represented by the drawer that used to keep it safe when
not on view. Next to the pictures are transcriptions of curators or museum
guards’ vision on the loss of the pictures.
By traversing
the exhibition the viewer is confronted with Calle’s emotions around the recurring themes of absence and disappearance. Both rooms offer a story of loss and
mourning, both rooms also offer closure and give the spectator a feeling of accomplishment,
a sort of catharsis. But the biggest absence of the show remains unsolved: what about the video of the artist's mother's last moments, Pas Pu Saisir la Mort, the enigma of
the whole project? A tenacious spectator will discover that the video will be
shown at the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, Manhattan, in May 2014.
I think your description of how the show actually looked like along with the conceptual aspects of her work is very useful and gives the reader a clear understanding.But I believe that the emphasis on the absence of her mother's video is unnecessary. Maybe after this issue was addressed, the review could deal with the new layers of meaning that this absence could potentially convey.
ReplyDelete