Hilarie M. Sheets: "Conceptual Artist Plays True Detective"

In “The Plastic Surgery,” a vignette from Sophie Calle’s ongoing “True Stories” series, the conceptual artist paired a framed photograph of her face in profile with a brief story divulging how her grandparents had strongly encouraged her to get a nose job when she was 14 — reassuring her that she could change her mind up to the last minute.

“In the end, though, it was Doctor F. himself who put an end to my dilemma,” Calle wrote in the accompanying text. “Two days before the operation, he committed suicide.”

With a twist no one would see coming, the artwork is confessional, relatable and disconcertingly funny. Created in 2000 and part of her frequently updated series, which debuted in 1988, “The Plastic Surgery” is a quintessential example of how Calle deploys word and image.

For 45 years, Calle, an acclaimed French artist, has constructed situations that explore relational dynamics between family members, romantic partners and strangers with forensic precision. For her 1981 series “The Hotel,” Calle got a job as a housekeeper in a Venetian hotel, using it to photograph people’s belongings and analyze them in accompanying texts — a transgressive act that yielded results at once banal and gripping.

“Is she the original oversharer?” posed Henriette Huldisch, chief curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where she has organized the exhibition “Sophie Calle: Overshare.” It opens Saturday and travels next year to the Orange County Museum of Art in California.

It is the first major North American career survey for Calle, who has already been well celebrated in Paris, her hometown, with a retrospective beginning in 2003 at the Centre Pompidou and a site-specific installation that opened last year at the Musée Picasso, overtaking four floors. Next month in Tokyo, Calle, 71, will be one of five international artists to be awarded the Praemium Imperiale, recognizing the importance of the arts in today’s society.

“Sophie has used her own life as material or inserted herself into other people’s lives by devising these dramatic scenarios that really prefigured a lot of the ways in which people perform themselves in our current social media landscape,” Huldisch said of Calle’s photo and text-based works, videos and installations, which strategically disclose as much as they conceal. “In an often witty, matter-of-fact way, she touches on some very dark and universal human themes — love, loss, shame, fear, embarrassment.”

The exhibition includes Calle’s collaborative 1992 feature-length film “No Sex Last Night,” documenting the rocky relationship with her then-boyfriend, Greg Shephard, on a road trip across the United States, with each complaining privately into hand-held camcorders about the other. (Their incongruous marriage in Las Vegas didn’t survive past the editing of the film.) “That was made at a time when reality TV was really in its infancy,” Huldisch said.

Asked if she is a reliable narrator in her work, Calle said, “I don’t invent an encounter or a person, everything happened.”

She continued, in a video interview from her home in France: “But the stories are written — there is a choice of words, a specific moment with a specific vocabulary and image.”

Calle, who is not on any social media nor particularly interested in it, pointed out that she and Shephard could have made 10 different movies, “all saying the opposite,” from the 60 hours of footage they shot (an observation that would not be lost on the producers of the “Real Housewives” franchise).

“Sophie has a blend of fiction and so-called reality that I really love,” said Laurie Anderson, the renowned artist and storyteller who befriended Calle at a screening of “No Sex Last Night” at the 1993 Telluride Film Festival. “She’s someone who is just relentlessly honest.”

Anderson was one of the over 100 women whom Calle enlisted to respond in their chosen mediums to a breakup email she had received from a man with the anodyne sign-off “Take care of yourself.” It became the title of a piece that was first shown in the French Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

“Revenge is the basic thing most of us who did it felt because everybody has gotten that blithering, idiotic letter,” said Anderson, who accepted Calle’s spontaneous marriage proposal in 2015 while they were visiting a picturesque chapel in San Francisco. (Anderson’s brother Thor officiated at the faux wedding.) The close friends are scheduled to give a talk at the Walker on the show’s opening day.

“If I am going through a difficult moment, I wonder, ‘What can I do with that?’” said Calle, who has made works dealing with the deaths of both her parents and her cat, as well as romantic failures. “When you look from a distance, you don’t suffer anymore.”

Calle grew up in Paris living with her mother and traced her initial interest in art to her father, a doctor and collector. After studying sociology for a year at Paris Nanterre University, she traveled the world for the next seven years before returning to Paris in 1979 with no money or direction. She went to live for the first time with her father, whose walls were covered with Pop and conceptual art.

“I didn’t know what to do with my days so I started to follow people,” first as a way to discover different neighborhoods, said Calle, who then began photographing the strangers she trailed, and keeping notes. “I was playing. I think I knew what I was doing but not consciously.”

She escalated her game by following one of these marks to Venice — after learning at an art opening of the man’s plans to travel there — and documented her cat-and-mouse pursuit through the city’s twisting streets. The ensuing detective story, titled “Suite vénitienne,” or “Venetian Suite” in English, was published and first exhibited in Paris in 1983, cementing an art-world reputation for Calle, and will be included in the Walker survey.

The idea of surveillance continues to undergird Calle’s latest work, debuting in Minneapolis. The project, a series of 12 diptychs titled “On the Hunt,” juxtaposes photographs of animals taken with a night-vision camera and images of hunting towers beside text panels using phrases that Calle lifted from dating ads that ran in the classified section of a French hunting magazine between 1895 to 2019.

“It charts the history of cultural mores, both enduring human aspiration and hunting for championship — as filtered by Sophie Calle,” Huldisch said. In the text panels referring to ads from the early 20th century, women are looking for wealth (and are willing to accept infirmities) while men are preoccupied with the virginity of prospective mates; physical appearance becomes paramount in later decades.

“On the Hunt” will be shown in New York next year in concurrent exhibitions at the Paula Cooper and Perrotin galleries.

“What Sophie pioneered in the 1980s — unabashed autobiography, self-fashioning and a constant probing of the boundary between public and private — has become such a huge feature of our socially networked lives,” said Anthony Allen, a partner at Paula Cooper. “We are all engaged, in one way or another, in sleuthing, in experimenting with our public selves while trying to retain privacy, in creating online personas and narratives for sharing with others.”

The Walker’s lens of “oversharing,” he added, “is a new and timely way of looking at Sophie’s work.”

— Hilarie M. Sheets