Sophie Calle

(via J & Freakley.)

Official site.

From the Tate Britain’s catalogue piece on 1998 show The Birthday Ceremony:

Sophie Calle is fascinated by the interface between our public lives and our private selves. This has led her to investigate patterns of behaviour using techniques akin to those of a private investigator, a psychologist, or a forensic scientist. It has also led her to investigate her own behaviour so that her life, as lived and as imagined, has informed many of her most interesting works.

…

The Birthday Ceremony draws our attention to the way in which we construct our identity around secret rituals (from forms of self-indulgence to forms of self-denial) and surround ourselves with objects and activities that give meaning and substance to both our private and our public lives.

Description of Maria Turner, from Paul Auster’s “Leviathan“:

I found her a little scary, perhaps even perverse (which lent a certain excitement to our initial contacts), but as time went on I understood that she was … an unorthodox person who lived her life according to a set of bizarre, private rituals. Every experience was systemized for her, a self-contained adventure that generated its own risks and limitations…

Maria was an artist, but the work she did had nothing to do with creating objects commonly described as art. Some people called her a photographer, others referred to her as a conceptualist, still others considered her a writer, but none of these descriptions was accurate, and in the end I don’t think she can be pigeonholed in any way. Her work was too nutty for that, too idiosyncratic, too personal to be thought of as belonging to any particular medium or discipline. Ideas would take hold of her, she would work on projects, there would be concrete results that would be shown in galleries, but this activity didn’t stem from a desire to make art so much as from a need to indulge her obsessions, to live her life precisely as she wanted to live it. Living always came first, and a number of her most time consuming projects were done strictly for herself and never shown to anyone.

“Calle’s work is very much tied up with a process. Her art unfolds as she goes through each stage of preparation and execution. As she descibes (below), the form of the final product – the thing which the gallery viewer actually sees – is the least significant part.“

Interesting June 2007 Guardian article.

I think so.