Then she showed it to another woman, and another: 107 women in total, each of whom she photographed and then asked to interpret the letter according to the practices of her profession. The tone of the email was cold and mechanical, and Calle couldn’t make sense of it, so she showed the text to a close friend and asked her to explain it. ![]() Take Care of Yourself (2007), her greatest work, began when she received a breakup email from her boyfriend, identified only as ‘X’ in the project. The French conceptual photographer, currently the subject of a fine show at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, has chronicled passion, heartbreak and recovery in intensely personal exhibitions and books, some of which are so emotionally naked that looking at them can feel like an invasion. Great art about love, in all its messiness and splendour, requires an artist who is willing to be vulnerable and to risk embarrassment – an artist like Sophie Calle. Yet today love is back on view in the galleries, and often in disarmingly candid guises. Until recently, artists have seemed more comfortable investigating sex, and the social and political dimensions of the body, than the disruptive, unpredictable phenomenon of love. Love is still the principle obsession of songwriters and filmmakers, but among artists love went somewhat out of fashion in the central decades of the 20th Century. Love, for all its mystery, has of course been one of the great subjects of Western art, and its many varieties – courtly love, erotic love, filial love, divine love – have been depicted through Greco-Roman allegory, Romantic iconography or harsh realism. Love is the ultimate union and the ultimate rupture at once. On the other, love is an explosion: an event that marks you for life, an irrevocable division between then and now. ![]() On the one hand, love is an attachment: the strongest and most unshakeable relationship you can have with another person. Its force, argues the philosopher Michael Hardt, derives from contradiction.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |