The piece was a perfect example of Calle's ability to force intimacy between strangers. Only this time, instead of being a covert observer to other's behaviors, she openly invited personal engagement within the universally resonant setting of "bed time." The piece also blurred the lines between artist and viewer, toppling notions that art had to be experienced from the outside in. She doesn't use her all boyfriends as work, she insists. Her current partner has asked her not to do anything based on him and she has agreed.

An immersive experience held in a vast study room, it was first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and instantly became one of the ultimate works dealing with a breakup. There were readings from a psychoanalyst, chess player, clown and even her own mother, with each adding something vital to how Calle and the audience processed the breakup. Gabrielle Moser, 'Working-through' public and private labour: Sophie Calle's Prenez soin de vous' n.paradoxa:international feminist art journal vol.27 January 2011 pp.5–13. NERI: In New York, Take Care of Yourself will be installed at Paula Cooper Gallery, where in 2001 you invited the public to supply potential ideas on suggestion forms for your art. CALLE: For the French Pavilion, the rule is that the artist chooses a curator. Normally for a one-person show it isn’t really necessary, but the Venice Biennale is a complex situation. What I needed was not so much a curator as a complice, someone to stand by me. Daniel did much more than that. He protected me, and, more importantly, he helped me to think about the work.CALLE: Yes and no. At one moment I thought to work with a psychiatrist on memory problems, but I never did it. In theory, I could be tempted to work with anybody if the idea is good. Angelique Chrisafis, writing in The Guardian, called her "the Marcel Duchamp of emotional dirty laundry". [24] She was among the names in Blake Gopnik's 2011 list "The 10 Most Important Artists of Today", with Gopnik arguing, "It is the unartiness of Calle's work—its refusal to fit any of the standard pigeonholes, or over anyone's sofa—that makes it deserve space in museums." [25] Publications [ edit ] Books [ edit ] The work requires and rewards the viewer who offers an investment of time. It is not an exhibit that one can easily slip into. Disheartened, to find myself battling to read and understand the responses; the intellect and expertise of some of the women soared above my head. As well as being at times visually difficult, particularly the presentation high on the wall, the choice of font, context of language, overlays of writing and the use of perspex hindered my progress as I struggled to read and digest some of the information. As I travelled around the room I found myself overwhelmed and felt I needed to return to the exhibit at a later date. In buying the exhibition book, the overpowering walls have been compacted into bite size chunks and DVD’s within provide an element of choice in what to view making the whole experience more accessible. L'Absence [set with Souvenirs de Berlin-Est, Disparitions, and Fantômes]. Arles, France: Actes Sud, 2000. ISBN 9782742728015. Sophie Calle’s book entitled ‘Take care of yourself’ was published by Actes Sud Press on June 1st, 2007 (4 dvd and two leaflefts are inserted).

The sheer variety of responses, from the potentially illuminating to the absurd, all adhere to Calle's use of a conceptual constraint. In this instance, it involved the artist taking the letter's advice at its word - to take care of her self - via 107 different interpretations. The constraints, or rules, that Calle uses as starting points often allow for chance results, and as here, often make public the artist's emotional life. In this instance, Calle turns a humiliating rejection into a liberating celebration of feminine solidarity.This led to another fixation. "The obsession of always having a tape in the camera, changing the tape every hour, was so great that instead of counting the minutes left to my mother, I counted the minutes left on each tape."

Maybe he’s already decided how he’s going to write about me, how to explain me. Maybe he hopes it will be like the time my writer friend Hervé Guibert interviewed me, and asked me if I was born in 1953, and I told my whole life story, spoke for five hours straight, gave him everything. Or perhaps he has in mind a tale, a fiction, in which case it will be as though he were never here at all. Every bid submitted is treated as a maximum bid. You should always bid the maximum you are willing to Unlike her detective-style work with strangers, this piece showcased the artist's equally passionate impetus to enroll people into her projects in a similarly anthropological way that would allow for an expression of human commonality in shared experiences. This "voice of the people" type of art would go on to influence later artists like the French JR, who pastes massive-scale images of townspeople onto the buildings and structures of their community to give an intimate glimpse of its unique personality and concerns. CALLE: Yes, exactly. As usual, problems bring solutions. This problem brought so many responses that I couldn’t have imagined before. I think about this process in terms of the French word interpréter, which has a double meaning: to think about meaning or analyze, and to act theatrically. An actor is un interpréte. All the women were between me and the letter, as interprètes.NERI: You conceived Take Care of Yourself for the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Why did you advertise for a curator for the project and then ultimately choose the artist Daniel Buren from among the candidates?As you have noticed, I have not been quite right recently. As if I no longer recognized myself in my own existence. A terrible feeling of anxiety, which I cannot really fight, other than keeping on going to try and overtake it, as I have always done. When we met, you laid down one condition: not to become the “fourth”. I stood by that promise: it has been months now since I have seen the “others,”because i obviously could find no way of seeing them without making you one of them. Jessica Lott (2009), Sophie Calle, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, USA, Frieze , retrieved 2010-04-27 Stepping into the main section of the room was like stepping into a contemporary novel. The walls were systematically covered from floor to ceiling in the responses from the women who participated. Craning my head up towards the high ceiling, I was overwhelmed with the quantity and intensity of the responses. Beneath each profession, Calle incorporated their ideas of love, subtlety of language and identity through photography, installation, writing and video. Calle has also inspired artists and writers who use rules as a game or a trigger for ideas, inspiration, and unforeseen outcomes. Because of this, her work is sometimes linked to the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo. The acclaimed novelist Paul Auster has thanked Calle "for having authorized him to mingle fact with fiction."