Calle\u2019s beginnings as an artist seem to have laid the groundwork for the aesthetics of failings and contingency that would characterize her work. In Les dormeurs<\/em> (1979), she successively invited twenty-eight people, mostly strangers she met on the street, to sleep in her bed in an effort to occupy it without interruption for eight days. The work compiled photographs of these bodies caught in moments of abandon, as well as the artist\u2019s notes on the unfolding of the operation, which had its stormy \u00adepisodes. In a manner announcing the whole of Calle\u2019s production, sown with approximate truths that institute zones of uncertainty, the part played by chance in these astonishing encounters was questionable. However, the predominance of the fortuitous set the foundation for a production that would be riddled with erratic movements, whose subjects would bear the mark of hardships and human failings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In two recent works, O\u00f9 et quand? Berck<\/em> (2004-08) and O\u00f9 et quand? Lourdes<\/em> (2005-08),1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - These works were presented in Paris in September of 2008. To see them, please consult the following website: www.galerieperrotin.com.<\/span> Calle is guided by Maud Kristen, a clairvoyant \u00adreputed for her talents and in whose hands she placed her personal and artistic fate. Although Kristen initially hesitated to participate in the project because of the power the artist conferred on her, she finally accepted to lend herself to the exercise, limiting her predictions to where and when Calle aught to go. This led her to two mythical destinations and cult \u00adlocations: Berck, a therapeutic centre, and Lourdes, a place of miracles, where those who have suffered the trials of the body or of the soul go to be freed from their ailments. The two works borne from this initiatory journey recount in texts and images the trajectory of the \u00adartist who, after setting out blindly, probed the forces of synchrony to fulfil her quest for meaning. Here, he principles of chance and coincidence act again as determining forces in the artwork, with suffering, sickness, and death as their backdrops. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Similarly, the work Prenez soin de vous<\/em> developed in the framework of a double affliction: the artist\u2019s loss of both her mother and her lover. A look back at the process allows us to grasp the import of fragility in Calle\u2019s work, how strongly it is inscribed in its material, modalities and finality, thus multiplying its possibilities. In Prenez soin de vous<\/em>, Calle submitted the break-up letter sent to her by her ex-lover to 107 women from diverse fields, asking them to analyze it based on their \u00adprofessional perspective. This operation gave rise to an exercise in translation and interpretation in 107 voices, rendered in image and sound by Calle. The work stages a \u00adsophisticated and imaginary display with as many \u00adversions as there are \u00adspecializations. Moreover, it would seem that such an \u00adoperation also sparked personal reactions from the respondents since the letter\u2019s \u00adtopic\u2014falling out of love\u2014stroke a sensitive chord in the makers as well as in the viewers of the work. This dynamic ensured that the initial intimate act \u00addissolved in an accumulation and interlacing of the senses, and \u00adunburdened itself of its specificity under the \u00adtautological effect of \u00adappropriation and the taking up of the subject by numerous \u00adparticipants. The outcome is a \u00addefetishizing of the artwork since Calle invites \u00adinterventions from \u00admultiple professional fields in a shared relation of \u00advalidity. At the onset, the \u00adprinciple of collaboration that constitutes the work makes it shift into relational aesthetics. Prenez soin de vous<\/em> is an act of pure mediation, instituted by a participative dynamic that prompts different agents to take action. In this context, Calle\u2019s ultimate role consists in uniting players and \u00adactivating mediation, which seems to become the purpose of the work and its \u00addiscourse. It is interesting to note that the three exhibitions of Prenez soin de <\/em>vous<\/em>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - French pavilion of the 52nd<\/sup> Venice Biennale, 10 June to 21 November 2007; Labrouste room of the Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France, Paris, 29 March to 8 June 2008; DHC\/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal, 4 July to 19 October 2008.<\/span> gave rise to just as many presentations. The latitude given to the curators in terms of spatial organization \u00adproduced formal modifications that also changed perception. The exhibition booklet3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Sophie Calle, Prenez soin de vous<\/em>, Sophie Calle, exhibition catalogue presented at the French pavilion of the 52nd<\/sup> Venice Biennale, 10 June to 21 November 2007 (Arles: Actes sud, 2007).<\/span>, which presents the entire contents of the show, becomes itself a distinct version of a work that exists in various modes and moments of production. Although this collaborative component was already indirectly present in Calle\u2019s \u00adprevious works, in Prenez soin de vous<\/em> it reaches its peak to become a creative matrix, one of its \u00adconstitutive issues. The artwork\u2019s intertextuality and interdisciplinarity explode its meanings and limits, hence multiplying its vanishing points. Such \u00adporosity, such eclecticism, and such sharing of the creative act undermine the artistic gesture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to contemporary sociologist Nathalie Heinich, \u201can artwork can find its place as art only through the cooperation of a complex \u00adnetwork of players.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Nathalie Heinich, Sociologie de l\u2019art <\/em>(Paris: \u00c9ditions La D\u00e9couverte, 2001), 58.<\/span> Her field of inquiry takes into account \u201ceverything that occurs between a work and its reception,\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Heinich, 58.<\/span> such as the people, \u00adinstitutions, words, and things that effect the work and participate in its \u00adrealization, to \u00adborrow Heinich\u2019s terminology. This approach, which considers art from a sociological perspective of mediation, seems \u00adcompletely in synch with contemporary art concerns. In our hypermodern context, various players have an actual part in a piece\u2019s development, in cooperation with the artist, or as an extension of his or her work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Art increasingly borrows and solicits the expertise of other spheres\u2014social, scientific, technological, and so forth\u2014to constitute and reflect itself. In an international context, art must also depend on different \u00adcollaborative networks (curators, institutional partners, sponsors, \u00adcritics, viewers, and collectors) to disseminate, legitimize, and sell itself. It is dependent on this chain of partners. These modes of mediation, as well as their underlying structural and semantic hybridizations, do not fail to destabilize today\u2019s artworks and their paradigms. In a collection of her essays published under the title De la valeur de <\/em>l\u2019art<\/em>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Raymonde Moulin, De la valeur de l\u2019art<\/em> (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 161.<\/span> on the origin of artistic rarity, Raymonde Moulin demonstrates how contemporary art has operated a displacement of the valorization of the object towards the author and, by extension, a transfer of rarity. Once linked to materiality and evaluated on the basis of authenticity, originality, and uniqueness, the notion of artistic value can no longer operate under the same criteria. Her thoughts have reached the art of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, the principle of collaboration that conditions and constitutes a number of current artworks induces a delegation of production or of authorship that blurs the figures of creativity and author.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - To gain a better insight into this subject, see Jean-Marc Poinsot, Quand l\u2019\u0153uvre a lieu. L\u2019art expos\u00e9 et ses r\u00e9cits autoris\u00e9s<\/em> (Villeurbanne, Gen\u00e8ve, Institut d\u2019art contemporain, Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art moderne et contemporain, 1999).<\/span> On the other hand, art\u2019s ever changing forms and contents, its evanescence, ubiquity and dependence on curators\u2019 intentions and venues beg the question: how do we archive it in order to perpetuate it? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Through the socializing process that constitutes it, Prenez soin de vous<\/em> brings together such issues. Calle problematizes her own status as well as the integrity and finality of the artwork. Furthermore, her work sets the stage for relational dynamics and its uses in the art world and, indirectly, for the social mechanisms of our technological era. Creativity is no longer the act of a single player. The writing of \u00adhistory is now the privilege of all; it is inscribed and shared on the screen as it is in the media, a situation for which is largely responsible the web, its network and the ensuing breaching of boundaries.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - This idea was developed by Gr\u00e9gory Chatonsky in a paper on \u201ccustomerism,\u201d presented at Vid\u00e9ographe Production in Montreal as a part of the training for DAISI (Design des arts interactifs et esth\u00e9tique de l\u2019interactivit\u00e9) on 11 October 2008.<\/span> These unprecedented openings impact on a form of art that is connected to the context where it finds its source. In becoming a relationship and an \u00adamalgam, art lends itself to precariousness. Its new creative paradigms are \u201cfragilizing\u201d factors for a discipline that struggles to define and \u00adcircumscribe itself\u2014an art form that is simultaneously thought of in terms of malaise (Ranci\u00e8re), the undecidable (esse<\/em>), and crisis (Michaud). Paradoxically, its precariousness is also its strength, as exemplified by Calle who turns her misfortunes into constructive action. Mediation, variety of renderings, ideas and meanings constitute the fertile part of art, what allows it to innovate, evolve, feed and offer itself to us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [Translated from the French by Vivian Ralickas]<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/65_DO06_Paris_Calle_Ou-et-quand-scaled.jpg\")
photo\u202f: \u00a9 Florian Kleinefenn & Guillaume Ziccarelli, permission | courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris & Miami<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nTrial as Material: The Shared Work <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/65_DO06_Paris_Calle_Chasseur-de-tete-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/65_DO06_Paris_Calle_Correctrice-scaled.jpg\")
Sophie Calle, \u00ab Correctrice, Val\u00e9rie Lermite \u00bb, Prenez soin de vous<\/em>, DHC\/ART, 2008
\u00a9 Sophie Calle \/ sodrac (2008)
photos\u202f: \u00a9 Richard-Max Tremblay \/ sodrac (2008), permission | courtesy DHC\/ART Fondation pour l\u2019art contemporain, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nStates of Art<\/h2>\n\n\n\n