Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Dick Coyote and the Camel’s Back

      March 3, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      On Britney, Party Girls, and the Fight for Narrative Control

      March 2, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Our Side Of The Clouds

      February 26, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: The End of the World

      February 9, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: Canada Geese

      March 1, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Cain, Knocking

      February 24, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Bird Heart for Forgiveness

      February 19, 2021

      Fiction

      New Skin

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Skittering

      February 17, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Art

      What the Sun Can’t Heal: Review of Blood Memory by Gail Newman

      March 5, 2021

      Review

      How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays by Gloria Frym

      March 4, 2021

      Review

      Weirder Sadness, Reverberating Empathy, Invisible Revolution — Joanna Fuhrman’s To a New Era

      March 1, 2021

      Review

      Review: To Limn / Lying In by J’Lyn Chapman

      February 25, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

      Small Press

      Abalone Mountain Press

      February 3, 2021

      Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Dick Coyote and the Camel’s Back

      March 3, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      On Britney, Party Girls, and the Fight for Narrative Control

      March 2, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Our Side Of The Clouds

      February 26, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: The End of the World

      February 9, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: Canada Geese

      March 1, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Cain, Knocking

      February 24, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Bird Heart for Forgiveness

      February 19, 2021

      Fiction

      New Skin

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Skittering

      February 17, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Art

      What the Sun Can’t Heal: Review of Blood Memory by Gail Newman

      March 5, 2021

      Review

      How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays by Gloria Frym

      March 4, 2021

      Review

      Weirder Sadness, Reverberating Empathy, Invisible Revolution — Joanna Fuhrman’s To a New Era

      March 1, 2021

      Review

      Review: To Limn / Lying In by J’Lyn Chapman

      February 25, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

      Small Press

      Abalone Mountain Press

      February 3, 2021

      Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
ArtLiteratureReview

Sophie Calle’s Ghosts

written by Joseph Houlihan December 10, 2014

Ghosts by Sophie Calle
Actes Sud, 2013
176 pages – Actes Sud / Amazon

Sophie Calle demonstrates a great social awareness. Her work reflects that inevitable Baudelaire phrase, “Poetry is for everyone.”

Ghosts reminds us again of this awareness in a beautifully simple yet challenging project: in 1990, Calle created stand-in art objects for pieces out of museums on loan or temporarily in storage.

She worked with institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum to create pieces to hang on the blank walls, interviewing museum guards and officials, asking them to describe the pieces, transcribing their testimonies, and compiling these descriptions onto new canvases.

Calle_2

The result is something very simple–repetitive descriptions of an art object–but enormously impactful.

The descriptions are often funny. On a Modigliani nude: “I remember that my three year old grandson took one look at her and said he recognized her breasts, which is what he pointed out.”

And haunting. A De Chirico: “It’s a chilly painting because it’s so empty. There’s a landscape, a scenic view of some strange things, a masked face, a man looking like a hostage with a sheet over him, a feeling of isolation. That’s all I can remember. It reminds me of a TV show called ‘The Prisoner.’ The story of a man trapped in a ghost town.”

Hopper: “The house reminds me of Psycho, it terrifies me. The shades are drawn. It is dark and scary. You know you are not welcome there. It’s a house whose bell you would never ring. When I was sixteen, in North Dakota, there were homes like that and people were living in them.”

When paintings and objects were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Calle photographed the empty spaces and again asked the guards and staff to look at the absence and describe the missing works.

While these descriptions don’t replace the works, they reach a provocative place on their own:

“I remember chrome green with a lemon yellow and also a yellow ochre that diffused almost a glaze on top of those brighter tones.”

“It was a young man, probably early thirties, facing the viewer holding a glass of, I think champagne, probably just writing out something, wearing a dark top hat and a dark jacket.”

4541

From the Gardner Museum’s website: “The Gardner Museum continues to actively investigate any and all leads related to the theft. This ongoing investigation is conducted by the Museum’s director of security in cooperation with the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office.”

The core of this project hits on the classic aesthetic tension between idealism and materialism: does the aesthetic value of an art object exist in the experience of viewing or does it come from something essentially within the object?

The first perspective is typified by the work of Benedetto Croce, who argued the aesthetic experience is wholly subjective and developed in people. That is to say, the ability to have a meaningful aesthetic experience is learned and while some art works necessarily elicit greater aesthetic response, the aesthetic response itself is what gives art power.

And the second perspective is more closely aligned with Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who viewed the art object as possessing certain inherent qualities that have artistic value in their ability to engage and act upon the beholder. This is one of the essential precepts of the avant garde: the ability of a work of art to de-automatize life.

Another great element of this project is it’s connection to art and the liminal. Maurice Blanchot argued that art objects exist in varying stages on fruition while they are still imagined (with the imagined piece possessing almost infinitely more valencies that the realized piece). The interesting connection with Ghosts here is the almost transposition of these “realized” pieces back into the conceptual/liminal frame.

Ghosts is a simple project, in an obvious Conceptualist tradition, but it is an attractive and provocative thought experiment.

Sophie Calle’s Ghosts was last modified: December 9th, 2014 by Joseph Houlihan
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Joseph Houlihan

Joseph Houlihan lives and writes in Minneapolis, MN.

previous post
[[there.]]
next post
Wednesday Entropy Roundup

You may also like

Poets Paying the Thesaurus A Visit

October 17, 2014

Under the Influence #2 or: Aborting the Past and the Reevaluation of Killing Idols

January 18, 2016

Dispatch From a Life Deep in the Fall

March 28, 2014

Palm Readings: A Review of It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides by Jessica Lee Richardson

March 28, 2016
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • Jack Morrison wonderfully written & incredibly knowledgeable as always, great write-up!

    Warganization – Inauguration ·  March 4, 2021

  • furiousvexation Loved this. Killer first line and such a painted picture. Bravo!

    The Birds: a poem ·  February 17, 2021

  • Deidra Brown Wonderful, moving work!

    The Birds: a poem ·  February 15, 2021

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • Literacy Narrative
  • COVID-19
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • Food and Covid-19
  • The Talking Cure
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2021 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top