REVIEW: Sophie Calle, "The Sleepers"

Cover, The Sleepers by Sophie Calle. Image Courtesy Siglio Press.

REVIEW
The Sleepers
By Sophie Calle
Emma Ramadan (Translator)
Clothcover ($48)
Siglio Press

By Michael Workman

As much as Sophie Calle is known as a photographer, she has also always been known as an artist’s book-maker. Well, not an artist’s book-maker exactly, since artist’s books are often unique art objects themselves, but instead cast in Calle’s conceptions as compendiums of an idea. Often nearly journalistic efforts at explorations of intimacy that guide so much the project of her lifelong artistic curiosities, I recall going through no less than three copies of Exquisite Pain, each volume stolen, absconded with, ripped from my (now somewhat onerously cumbersome) library, with its succulent, near-blood red, gilt-edged pages. I miss every stolen copy, and still can’t help but harbor some pang of resentment for each of the thieves.

Calle’s work merits such ardor, of course, as it is almost designed to elicit it. My first encounter in person with Calle’s work, for example, was as an art critic visiting the 2007 Venice Biennale, where she represented France with "Take Care of Yourself," an installation inspired by a breakup email she received, which concluded with the phrase "take care of yourself."

To interpret and cope with this message, Calle invited 107 women from various professions—including a grammarian, a philosopher, and even a parrot—to analyze and respond to the email according to their professional expertise. I remember the grand open air of the pavilion, lined with the comparatively diminutive rows of portraits she’d taken of each participant, many poised in contemplation of the email; and the resulting interpretations, displayed through text, video, and performance, exploring the possible range of human reactions to the breakup, refracted through the lens of the professions of each of the participants as a way of framing the tumult encountered by individuals processing such a brutal heart-stopper of a message.

That is, of course, obviously the appeal of much of Calle’s oeuvre, anchored as it is in the vast ocean of emotional bonds that comprise our stubborn human striving to feel connected to one-another, a striving refracted through the endless lenses of desperation and longing for relationship that are the meat and potatoes of Calle’s own artistic ardor. Both projects transform personal heartbreak into collective artistic experiences, engaging others in the interpretation and processing of deep, ore-extractionist emotional pain. While "Exquisite Pain" focuses on the artist's journey through suffering and healing by comparing her pain to that of others, "Take Care of Yourself" externalizes the breakup experience, inviting a communal dissection and understanding of the event. These works exemplify Calle's signature approach of blending personal narrative with collaborative analysis to explore themes of love, loss, and recovery.​

​"The Sleepers" (Les Dormeurs) was published twenty years before she was selected to represent France at the Biennial, and it set the course for the work that appeared there, particularly the collaborative analysis. Calle invited 28 people—friends, acquaintances, and strangers—to sleep in her bed in shifts over the course of eight days, for eight hours each. The idea was to keep the bed continuously occupied, turning a private, intimate space into a kind of living installation. The resulting work was originally presented in Paris in 1979 at her first solo exhibition, held in her own apartment. The following year, it was featured in the XI Biennale de Paris at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1980, and Calle entered into the pantheon carved out by her own mature artistic voice in the years that followed.

This Siglio Press edition is the first issued in English, a sumptuous clothbound cover that opens spine and all, hinge-like, to reveal a page stack vaguely resembling a pop-up of a bed frame and floor; a psychological space inviting readers into the space of the bed occupied in 1979 alongside the widely cited “baker, a babysitter, an actor, a journalist, a seamstress, a trumpet player, and several painters.” Different as it is from the mainlined emotional trauma of her later work, including the breakups, and the invasive turn that followed on the success of The Sleepers such as "Suite Vénitienne," 1980, in which Calle followed a man she met at a Parisian party, known as Henri B., to Venice without his knowledge. Basically stalking before the crime had been defined, she documented his movements through photographs and detailed notes. Or 1981’s The Hotel where, while working undercover as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel, Calle photographed and documented the personal belongings of guests without their knowledge, compiling her observations about guest’s personal items such as suitcases, diaries, and toiletries into an art piece.

Artists steal, of course, not just from other artists, but also from the inhabitants of life present and ready at hand. Similarly, her controversial The Address Book resulted a few years later in 1983 when Calle discovered a lost address book belonging to a man referred to as Pierre D. Before returning it, she photocopied its contents and proceeded to contact the individuals listed, interviewing them about Pierre D. She then published these interviews in the French newspaper Libération. Upon discovering this, Pierre D. threatened legal action against Calle for invasion of privacy. ​

All of which, as part of Calle’s raisonné, has resulted in the usual peanut galleries of boosters and knockers, often involves a desire to confront intimacy, absence, and emotional vulnerability by documenting the lives of others—and herself—through methods that mix art with surveillance, autobiography, and storytelling. These early broaches that verges on a kind of entertainment at the emotional brutalization of others seem to emerge from the same source as the frameworks that bring her close to others by utilizing the same artistic powers that brought her such early (and enduring) acclaim; in the tension of this struggle the countervalances of that capacity for unique human insight invigorate the project time and time again.

In fact, Calle's visual project verges on (is deeply rooted in) a literary one, and so this is the reason for the textual elements, the book-making and which constitutes the substantially under-recognized, persistently under-appreciated, under-investigated aspect of her project from the start, brought on by the commercial aspects of the market forces that pen in her visual art project; Calle’s work has always occupied a space between visual art and literature, and it’s precisely this hybrid nature that gives her projects their distinctive emotional and conceptual prowess.

From the beginning, her practice has relied not only on images but on text—intimate, diaristic, methodical writing that drives the work forward and provides its deepest artistic, substantially emotional resonance. The photographs alone do not carry the meaning; it is the combination of written narrative and visual documentation that creates the full force of the shared image. Many of her most iconic works—The Sleepers, Suite Vénitienne, The Address Book, Exquisite Pain—are as much literary undertakings as they are visual ones, and are often best encountered in book form.

The pacing, sequencing, and interiority these books afford highlight Calle’s skill as a kind of conceptual novelist, one who writes with images and archives with prose. Visual art in general and contemporary art market forces specifically can’t allow for such specificity, which speaks in part to why this literary dimension of her work remains stubbornly under-acknowledged, and persist as a blind spot in much of the critical and curatorial treatment she receives.

Calle’s texts, by contrast—particularly those embedded in book form—circulate outside these systems and are less easily commodified. The result is a persistent underappreciation of what might be the most radical and enduring part of her practice: the way she insists on narrative, intimacy, and emotional complexity in a field that often flattens, abstracts or villfies them. Her work calls for a new kind of attention, one that acknowledges her not just as a conceptual artist or photographer, but as a writer whose chosen medium stretches beyond the page, beyond the written word, and in the contexts of an entirely different universe than all the usual artistic bigotries allow for. As the latest entry in this history of book-making, this new Siglio Press edition of The Sleepers continues the long arc of Calle’s practice—reasserting the book as her most incisive medium, the space where her writing, images, and acts of intimacy finally converge into a single, fully realized form. First published more than four decades ago and long out of print, its reissue arrives at a moment when the boundaries between art and autobiography have been so thoroughly blurred by contemporary practice that Calle’s early experiment feels not merely prescient, but newly essential—a reminder of how her investigations into intimacy and authorship anticipated the confessional, participatory modes that now define so much of our cultural landscape.

Michael Workman is Editor-in-chief of Bridge.

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