Originally published by Cluster, written by Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson

photo: Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson

Entering the Reading Room of the Ancienne Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where the latest Sophie Calle exhibition Prenez soin de vous (Take care of yourself) is installed, feels at first like plunging into a stochastic delirium, albeit one orchestrated in terms of a library’s categorical imperatives. Indeed it is precisely this tension between the intimate and the bureaucratic, the terse, typed-up report and the pain cry – each shadowed by their own particular brand of voyeurism – that gives the exhibition its singular character.


photo: Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson

The show’s starting point is a break-up e-mail Sophie Calle received from a boyfriend – ending with the sly admonition: “Prenez soin de vous.” Interpreting this formal kiss-off in its most literal, plural dimension, the artist asked 107 women constituting a brigade of specialist ranging from predictable staples of bourgeois self-realization (psychoanalysis, philosophy, literary criticism, law, semiotics, proof-reading and forensic psychiatry) to increasingly recondite and spurious fields such as computer coding, text-message translation, Butoh, puppet theatre, parrotry (embodied by a female parrot), clownery and teenagerdom, together with an international troupe of actresses, singers, dancers and musicians, to apply their various skillsets to reproach, berate, mock, critique, reject, correct, certify, rework, and even on occasion compliment the untimely missive of the unfortunate X whom one begins to imagine as a hapless Snaporatz judged in absentia by an infernal tribunale delle donne, whose numbers (and beautifully photographed faces) are multiplied by the cries and whispers of recognition of a good 80 percent of the audience.
Yet at the same time you have to admire the way the ever-elusive, sly-eyed, retiringly monomaniacal Sophie has been able to transform personal humiliation into something more intriguing than a universal embodiment of female calvary erected on the altar of “Why me? What have I done to deserve this?” – a work which functions equally well as a grandiose collective variation on Queneau’s Exercises du style, as mimicry and mockery of the kind of specialist 19th century discourses whose function, as Foucault noted, was to regulate and control the speech of marginal subjects such as female hysterics, and as problematization of post-feminist strategies of emancipation from emotional enslavement. Indeed, what makes this meeting of specialization and emotional empathy resonate so profoundly is the central question it isolates in X’s e-mail: that of the irreplaceability or interchangeability of female identity. For if career specialization might be seen as a way of becoming more singular, more irreplaceable and thus of attempting to circumvent or eschew the caprices of a male Don Juanism forever chasing after the virtual non actualisable eternal feminine – as one interpreter of X’s e-mail positions him – it at the same time contributes to a market of more or less alienated female labour, including the audience, that Sophie Calle herself, as a kind of neo-liber(tin)al artist-entrepeneur take obvious pleasure in cataloguing, seducing and exploiting for her own purposes, who knows why, perhaps simply because she’s worth it.

But in the end the ‘woman who loved too much’ seems to be just another ruse of Calle’s shifty fictions of identity – she appears at one point hamming up the role in a marriage guidance councellor’s office, playing against the deadpan silence of X’s letter which occupies the other chair, to the point where one wonders if she herself might not be its true author. Which would explain why X complains at one point of “not feeling himself”.
The Reading Room of the old Bibliothèque is the ideal setting for this echo chamber of lamentation and laughter, an endless relay of video, photography, song, printed text and manuscript in which invisible batons of rejection, revenge, pride, narcissism, irony, solidarity and self-loathing are passed from one woman to another, inducing the kind of sensorial vertigo that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever lost themselves in a library. Of course the question remains as to why Sophie’s boyfriend gave her the heave. Perhaps because he saw that her response in such an event would be Prenez soin de vous.

www.bnf.fr