Sophie Calle's work has appeared in a range of media and formats.

Sophie Calle's work has appeared in a range of media and formats, from a major French daily to a Manhattan telephone booth As "The authentic Stories of Sophie Calle" goe in succession view in Kassel and the artist's work Double Game appears, contributing editor Yve-Alain Bois examines Calle's seamless transitions between fiction and reality.

protracted a cult figure in France, Sophie Calle is admired in several disparate circles, each of which has a partial grasp of about aspect of her work--one thinks perhaps of Laurie Anderson by means of way of comparison. For her earliest concocts she sidestepped the rarified precincts of the art world in favor of the mass media--how many Conceptual artists can claim that their first work was a bestseller? Or can cope with her invasion, over the course of an entire month of half a page in a widely read French daily? Calle has always felt more confident outside the museum and gallery ghetto. yet she has since become part of the international art show proper, exhibiting in respected venues--including the Boijmans in Rotterdam and Leo Castelli in novel York--she continues to move at a rapid clip, attracting novel audiences along the way. Her 1992 feature-length film Double Blind (which documents a cross-country odyssey that climaxes with Calle's drive-thru wedding in Las Vegas) was distributed in a less degree than the title No Sex Last N ight in commercial movie houses by the and of channels usually reserved for big-budget productions. She has worked in in this way many genres and fields that it's not always easy to realize that the whole is more than the summary of the parts.

The near coincidence of "The steady Stories of Sophie Calle," the artist's retrospective opening this month at the Fridericianum in Kassel, and the publication of Double Game (Violette Editions, London), a hefty, luxurious compendium that contains among other things the translations of her previous main division s provides a good occasion to pause and attempt to fit the various pieces of her career together. With small in number exceptions, the works selected for the indicate correspond to those in Double Game. Calle's favorite prevailing style of display being the gridlike mural intertwining thesis and photo, her transition from the main division format to the gallery space (and the other way around) is seamless.

"At the extremity of January 1981, on the roads of Paris, I followed a man whom I thrown away sight of a few minutes later in the populace That very evening, quite on chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice, I decided to tread in the steps of him." This opening paragraph from Calle's first volume Suite venitienne, published in 1983 is paired with a photograph of a man's rear bust, ball from below and at stop range. (The text is completely translated in Double Game, although the choice and presentation of images vary a bit from the original.) We notice the brim of his hat, a white highlight onward the nape of his neck This double spread is a advantageous place to enter Calle's vast and diversified production, for regardless of media, her work has always revolv around issues of distance and absence, of voyeurism and exhibitionism; it has largely adopted the constitution of the forensic archive; it has repeatedly deliberately confused levels of reality--or, mor e precisely, it has favorably transformed reality (the archive) into fiction (narration), and vice versa.

Suite venitienne is a scrapbook of Calle's inquiry for, and later obsessive surveillance of a man she identifies as Henri B during a thirteen-day strain in the Italian city. We are spared none of the details--a list of all the taverns she called in order to find him; a photo of the door of the pensione where he stayed with his companion; snapshots of the roads he walked; maps charting his wanderings; a precise countdown of Calle's frustrating schedule as a shadow; and interviews with "witnesses" (the proprietor of an antique shop that Henri B patronized, for example). The not many glimpses of the city that are provided utterly hang on Henri B.'s stereotypical tourist's appetite (Calle shooter them while waiting for him to exit this cenotaph or that); one of my favorites point out tos a kid chasing pigeons onward the Piazza San Marco (he's seen from behind, of course, clasping a knife in his hand: "I would like to view him kill one," notes Calle). Nothing is spared--that is, do not include the face of the man she pursues; he's always vie wed from the back, from a safe distance, since the whole enterprise was predicated upon Henri B.'s ignorance of his being followed. At about point, though, the wig and disguise fail Calle, and Henri B recognizes her eyes--she is disappointed at his staid reaction. She tries to take a portrait of him on the other hand he blocks the camera with his hand: "No," he says, "that's against the rules"

Early in succession in Suite venitienne Calle propounds us four technically mediocre missiles arranged in a grid, that point out to several men conversing around a dinner table. The zests of the visual field are blurred: These images were her first attempt at using a Squintar, a len attachment that allows united to take photos without aiming at the expose The quality of the images says it all: Calle's not interested in photography by se, she's an apprentice sleuth More precisely, she's no other than interested in the predatory and voyeuristic aspects of photography, in its sadistic nature. uniform before the publication of Suite venitienne, she had been fascinated by the agency of the act of shadowing: Commissioned to do a piece as part of a midst Georges Pompidou show dealing with self-portraiture, she hired a private watch to document her comings and goings and exhibited the proceedings of his investigation, his bureaucratic report ("At 10:20 the control leaves home. She is dressed" etc) and the sustaining evidence provided in the form of his photogra ph What the detective did not know was that he was her employee; nor did he notice that she had him tailed as well--a friend of hers discharge him entering a porno cinema. (Displayed as The Shadow in the retrospective, this 1981 work appears in Double Game subject to the title The Detective.) For further evidence of Calle's incipient interest in this aspect of photography, consider The Sleeper 1979 the earliest work in the retrospective (it is absent from Double Game). Calle invited others to drowse in her bed; she photographed them each hour, the only rule being that the bed remain constantly occupied. The experiment lasted eight days. The resulting grid-mural documents the be still (calm or agitated) of the thirty or in such a manner people who lent themselves to her archival impulse.