The Address Book
Trailing Sophie Calle through her books
Dear Friends,
I write in haste—it was hard to stop reading and start writing. This week I found myself pursuing a writer who makes an art of pursuing others, and I got caught up in the chase.
— Sal
I was passing Paula Cooper a while back, and I went into to see what was up. It was Sophie Calle, whose work I always have a curiosity about.
The main show on the walls was called On the Hunt, consisting of framed sheets of phrases gathered from personal ads from 1899–2010: “a catalogue of the qualities most desired in women by men, and in men by women,” says Calle. These were juxtaposed with photographs of hunting stands, and of animals caught by infrared cameras at night.
You can view the series here, though unfortunately the text in the images doesn’t enlarge well enough to read easily.
After I circled the big gallery I found myself in a smaller annex, a library room, with a table of Sophie Calle books, some chairs, and some older works on the walls. I got caught up in reading The Address Book, which was presented as a series of prints taken from the pages of a French Newspaper. It was a novel, I thought, a special kind of novel where the author flings herself into a particular situation and records the result, what happens, what she feels.
I’ve been thinking of this way of proceeding as “method writing,” even though I know it does not quite make the correct analogy with method acting—the phrase still sticks with me. Rather than relying on autobiographical chance to create tension and emotion, the writer creates an artificial situation.
Years ago I studied the Paris Situationists with some fervor. I had discovered them as I was standing in the anarchist section of Saint Marks bookstore, paging through a book, electrified by the phrase, “the new type of beauty can only be a beauty of situations.” At that time, all I wanted was a new type of beauty, and all I wanted was a situation.
Read the rest on my weekly, Free Words.