Sophie Calle. Prenez soin de vous. Correctrice, Valérie Lermite. Take Care of Yourself. Proof-Reader, Valérie Lermite, 2007 portrait
William Congreve, an English Restoration playwright wrote in his tragedy The Mourning Bride, "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned," which has come down to us in a shortened version as Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Sophie Calle has made something of a career as a scorned woman, and now in an exhibition that has finally made its way here from the Venice Biennale to the Paula Cooper Gallery, we get to see just how much a woman whose ego and pride have been trampled on can hurt.
Oh, about 107 women's worth.
Sophie Calle. Prenez soin de vous. Meriem Menant, Clown. Take Care of Yourself. Meriem Menant, Clown, 2007 portrait.
Calle got the breakup email from her boyfriend. They had agreed that if either of them ever wanted to go out with others, they would tell each other; in addition, Calle swore in that case she would never become his "friend." She describes the situation as follows:
I received an email telling me it was over.
I didn't know how to respond.
It was almost as if it hadn't been meant for me.
It ended with the words, "Take care of yourself."
And so I did.
I asked 107 women (including two made from wood and one with feathers),
chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret this letter.
To analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it.
Dissect it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me.
Answer for me.
It was a way of taking the time to break up.
A way of taking care of myself.
The art fostered by the breakup has turned out to be a fertile minefield for Calle and Leanne Shapton, who made an entire auction catalog out of the debris of a love affair.
Sophie Calle.Take Care of Yourself. Clairvoyant, Maud Kristen, 2007 portrait.
But the subject of being rejected by someone you love is so universal, such a rite of passage as to be considered cliché -- yet Calle makes it absorbing each time out of the heartbreak gate. Calle's curatorial skills also have a chance to shine here: her choice of women to comment on her breakup email is both astute and uncommonly witty.
Calle has done brilliant, funny, charming, acerbic work. Imagine your emails being dissected by family mediators, proof-readers, cartoonists, actresses, social workers, philosophers, forensic psychologists, intelligence officers, chess players, accountants and nursery school teachers. They are identified professionally only by a frieze which runs atop the larger than life scale versions of the email, crosshatched, highlighted and chopped to bits.
They have parsed, translated, dissected and pored over the mail.
Calle's last show in NY, Exquisite Pain, also dealt with the aftermath of the breakup though in that case the comments she solicited and her own texts were of a less obviously vengeful nature.
Sophie Calle. Prenez soin de vous. Sussan Deyhim, Chanteuse. Take Care of Yourself. Sussan Deyhim, Singer, 2007 portrait.
What about the guys, though? Imagine what it's like to be them, their personal lives and foibles laid out for all to see. Gregoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest tells what it's like to be on the other side of Calle's revenge, in his case the almost out-of-body experience of being ignored and overlooked and made to feel a mere footnote after an intense and serious relationship with Calle at a birthday party of hers to which he's invited.
Shapton, who also attended the opening, felt sorry for all the men in the house. She said, rightly so, that it was like a "refrigerator of revenge." The email seemed to be exposing a certain hat trick quality of some boyfriends: a wish to have their honeys and run around also, a penchant for keeping them as best friends when they go off in another direction. Humpf.
We've all had the revenge fantasy and few of us have had the chutzpah to act on it. But the visceral thrills one gets from Calle's documentary pain pill are not insignificant. One imagines that those women invited to participate also had some measure of schadenfreude.
Calle seems to be missing the privacy gene as are all great memoirists; exposing our anger at exes in public is both daring and dangerous, but even with the fallout, risking it all for love still looms as something we are bound to do.