Like a sculptor of a past century, Sophie Calle in her art manipulates and reconfigures a commodity central to the economy of her time. This commodity does not happen to be bronze or marble, however, but information, the elusive stuff that circulates incessantly between consciousness, document, and cyberspace. It is a maddeningly imprecise and unquantifiable commodity, hovering somewhere on the border between objective and subjective, public and private, hot and cold. It is farmed in huge quantities, fought over, stolen, adulterated and negotiated by credit bureaus, intelligence agencies, polling organizations. market-research firms, and yet its value resides in minute specifics and fugitive shades of meaning. Its pursuit thus resembls experimental science – vast quantities of print-outs are generated for every nit that can be seized upon and exploited – as well as art: it is at every point along its process so immaterial, so woozily figurative or abstract, that its commodity status seems like a bit of legerdemain, and its manufacture and trade a kind of parody.
Calle is not the first artist to work this medium. of course. The Surrealists probably were the pioneers, notably in their fascination with opinion polls. The aphorist and suicide Jacques Rigaut put his own spin on the matter: he carried on his person a tiny pair of scissors with which he used to remove surreptitiously a button from the garment of every person he met; this he insisted was a form of art collecting. The novelist Philippe Soupault once staged a version of a highway robbery: he stopped a bus on the Avenue de l’Opera late at night by extending a chain across its path; then entered it and ordered all the passengers to tell him their birth dates (the combination of violence and trivia present in this act does not seem very far from Calle’s concerns). Trivia devoid of violence, data accumulated for their own sake, the relentless documentation of the most apparently boring processes – these are traits associated with various phases of conceptual art, which pursued the sublime through sev􀀞ral disciplines, one of them being busywork. The Surrealist and conceptual approaches to the management of information as a medium in itself could be said to represent in their very different ways the mingled fascination and horror inspired by the looming triumph of bureaucracy. The Surrealists responded with bemusement and savagery, the conceptualists with Zen, which is not identical to complacency.
The work of Sophie Calle appears at various times to display all of these qualities, at others only some. Her first work, The Sleepers, resembles straightforward conceptual bookkeeping but with an added layer of sexual risk. at least by implication. Risk, as well as stealth, deception and intrusion, dominates her most notorious works, Suite venitienne, The Shadow, The Hotel and L’Homme au carnet. The commanding metaphor here is espionage, with more than a suggestion of sadomasochism. Anato/i is a portrait, sharing with her earlier works the fact of having been assembled not in spite of but through adverse conditions, in this case the lack of a common language. In its plainness it throws into relief this common thread, which we might name ‘the blind men and the elephant’. Not surprisingly, her next piece is The Blind. This work, which connects as well to the earlier and more prosaic The Bronx, employs hearsay in pursuit of the ineffable, in effect constructing an artwork only alluded to and not represented by the objects on the gallery wall, a pursuit taken up in Ghosts, Blind Colour and Last Seen.
There seems to be a rough split in Calle’s career to date: her earlier works are, broadly speaking, concerned with narrative, and the later ones with image. In both, the principal tool is language, with the visual component filling an illustrative role. In this way, her work suggests the forensic process during a police investigation: she assembles clues, descriptions, guesses, allusions, and pieces them together into an approximate rendering. In the earlier works, this rendering takes the form of a dossier; in the later ones it resembles an identikit sketch. Cash Machine might be a sort of pun on this idea, with its disembodied, almost ectoplastic surveillance-camera portraits. Autobiographical Stories and The Tombs extend the principle of the visual substitute or approximation in another direction, toward the iconic. The objects that stand in for epochal incidents in the artist’s life and the laconic gravestones that reduce entire existences to a mere familial title possess a weight of their own; the referent is almost beside the point. If one were to hear or read a description of Calle’s work and try to reconstruct it on that basis without actually seeing it, it is possible that one might imagine its theme to be the poverty of language or of image, the insufficiency of second-hand experience. Instead, her work continually stresses the beauty of imprecision, the poetry of gaps and lapses.
She is, in other words, a kind of impressionist. Uncertainty dapples her pictures the way the sun’s rays spatter the leaves and splash the grassy swards in the Bois de wherever. But that’s not all there is to it. Uncertainty is an inevitability when it comes to information; information is uncertain in the same way that humans are mortal. But information nevertheless strives for certainty, or rather its purveyors do, whether quixotically or disingenuously. The police tipster, the industrial spy, the political clairvoyant, the highly placed source – all are in the business of pretending infallibility. And their commerce, once a small-time traffic, is in the process of becoming ever more institutionalized, increasingly central to the global economy as it moves from nocturnal alleys to glass-walled offices. Tremendous financial decisions are made on the basis of lore – consumer profiles, focus-group questionnaires, extrapolations of trend curves – that are about as reliable as the divination of bird entrails. This metaphor is not idly chosen: the
commerce of information is descended in part from that of the augurers who advised military leaders in antiquity. It has merely been dressed up with technology and soft science for the benefit of contemporary rationalists.
Calle’s work is to a certain degree a parody of this trade, and so could be said to be a parody of a parody, a simulacrum of a sham. But to the extent that her portraits – the address-book man, Anatoli, the occupants of the hotel rooms, herself even – are distortions, they are no more so than a Cubist head, say, would be as compared with a photographic likeness. Even when the deck appears stacked – the address-book scheme, viewed from one angle as a tin-pot Citizen Kane, might prompt questions about her motives – enough air is admitted in the form of indeterminacy to prevent any agent including Calle from having full control of the drift. Uncertainty, in short, is the footprint of truth. It is the only aspect of any piece of information that can always be relied upon, and, of course, it is the aspect that diminishes information’s value as a commodity. It is nearly always inconvenient; it is unproductive and inefficient; it is often dangerous. And that is why it is so beautiful, as Calle repeatedly demonstrates in her work.

Luc Sante, ‘Sophie Calle’s Uncertainty Principle’, Parkett, no. 36 (1993) 74-8.