it is a cold spring morning in Chelsea, Manhattan, just at that section where the grimly chic galleries muster themselves on the western edge of the island, as if preparing for a leap into the Hudson. Here, the art is interspersed with auto repair shops, rusting railway bridges and out of date film posters. Standing out against the car yards can be spotted huddles of New York art fanciers disporting themselves in ironic fur coats and deeply serious facial hair.
This Saturday one huddle is especially big and self-conscious. Elements of it are filtering in and out of a glass-fronted gallery. On the walls are a selection of photographs and pieces of text, although unusually there seems to be more text than photographs. There are a dozen large vitrines placed on the floor, each holding an odd assortment of junk: wine bottles, dead flowers, white-goods manuals. Behind a table in the corner sits a diminutive brunette wearing a smart brown suit and bright red plastic spectacles. A line of the art fanciers is obediently queuing to sit down in the chair opposite her for a couple of minutes. The line is broken as a girl with big hair fights through the huddle, shoves a photograph towards the woman in red spectacles and races off. Underneath the photograph she has written, simply, FIND ME. No one seems surprised, least of all the woman in red spectacles.
This is the final day of French artist Sophie Calle's exhibition "Double Game," in New York, and as is the way with the cunning world of contemporary art, the goings on in the gallery are themselves part of an artwork, a special event staged by Calle to round off her show. The show itself, however, does not necessarily contain any artworks. Rather, the photographs and pieces of text hung on the walls document other artworks, ones that have happened elsewhere over the last 20-odd years of Calle's spectral career.
Calle works at that most subtle edge of performance art, where intimate facets of her daily life are conducted as fiction and made public. In the early days she was interested in secretly observing other people. She lived abroad for many years as a young woman, and when she returned to Paris took to tailing pedestrians as a means of relearning her home city. "For months I followed strangers on the street," she wrote in her book Suite V?nitienne, "for the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them." At one point she trailed a man from Paris to Venice, tracked him down within the city and photographed him covertly throughout his stay. Another time she took a job as a chambermaid and recorded in detail the bedrooms, bathrooms and intimate apparel of the hotel guests, piecing what she found there into a set of fantastical biographies.
Later her interest moved to being watched. She had a private detective hired to follow her for a day, and even worked for a while as a stripper. She developed a growing interest in living her life according to various games, so that everything she did was in some way artful. The vitrines on the gallery floor contain the debris of one regularly played game: gifts preserved, unopened, from her annual birthday parties.
Today, in the New York gallery, Sophie Calle is engaging in a new game. She has invited people to suggest what she should do for her next artwork. This is fitting play, since it will force those who engage in it (these most self-centred New Yorkers) to imagine what it must be like to be the artist Sophie Calle, and to ponder how easy or difficult it is to come up with a Sophie Calle artwork-which is, after all, only a set of rules for a game-and just how far Sophie might go. Even before the suggestions come in, this is already just the kind of subject-object identity tangle that excites Calle these days. She is addicted to being someone else's creation.
Ten years ago, just when things were going well for Calle and her plots were thickening, somebody else took over her games and made them his own. He changed the rules, developing his own version of the character Sophie Calle. After years of treating the world as a piece of art and other human beings as malleable characters within it, Calle was herself turned into a piece of fiction by the American novelist Paul Auster.
Renamed Maria, and given a new birthplace of Holyoke, Massachusetts, Sophie Calle stands, in all her manipulative glory, at the centre of Auster's 1992 novel Leviathan. Auster provides a catalogue of Calle's works that he attributes to Maria-the episodes of surveillance, the stripping, the birthday vitrines-and finally imagines what might have happened if one of Calle's pieces had gone horribly wrong, and life had suddenly refused to mould to her will. The piece in question, L'Homme au Carnet, began in 1983 when Calle found an address book, the pages of which she discreetly copied before returning it to its owner. Working her way through the 400 or so addresses, she proceeded to build up a portrait in absentia, the progress of which she reported weekly in the French newspaper Lib?ration.
Auster gave Calle's bizarre games a rationale. They were, he wrote of Maria, "a method of acquiring new thoughts, of filling up the emptiness that seemed to have engulfed her." In Auster's imagination, such existential games led to violence, murder and acts of terrorism. In Calle's life it led to notoriety and the enduring enmity of the address book's owner.
Fiddle though he did, Auster had provided the ideal record for an artist whose work is otherwise so ephemeral. He had immortalised her art as a story. When Auster sent her the manuscript to ask permission to fictionalise her, Calle says, "I never thought about saying no."
Long before his involvement with Calle, Auster was a game player and intellectual flirt of the highest order, and he shared many of her preoccupations. In his New York Trilogy he had written at length on the relationship between the observed and the observers within a surveillance operation, and created characters who mapped out the streets of a city by following a stranger. In The Music of Chance he told stories of people forced to live their lives according to the rules of malevolent gamblers. Like Calle also, he is a factual magpie. The stories of real people are pinched and used to decorate his narratives. And he regularly appears slightly disguised or as a partial character in his own work. (In Leviathan the narrator is a successful New York novelist who shares Auster's initials and so on.)
Auster's games, however, are contained firmly within the pages of his fiction. Unlike Calle he is unwilling to allow them to spill over into life. His stories are shot through with concerns about the relationship between writer and reader, and the dread possibility that a reader might feel a possessive hold over the writer. So Calle was an author's bad dream come true. She was not simply a reader who felt that Auster had changed her life. She was a reader who knew he had. Auster had imagined what it was to be Sophie Calle the artist, and made up new artworks for her character. She wanted to keep the fiction going.
In her "Double Game" exhibition, Auster's cataloguing of Calle's artwork in Leviathan makes up the first part of the show; she uses him as the exhibition curator. In the second part, she shows what happens when Sophie decides to live out the life of her fictional counterpart, Maria. The imaginary artworks in the novel are weak-eccentricities rather than experiments-but Calle carried them out regardless. For one week she ate colour coded food; pink one day, orange the next, white on another ("novels are all very well but not necessarily so very delectable if you live them to the letter"). She spent days under the spell of individual letters (an idea more Sesame Street than Cork Street) and had herself photographed as, amongst other things Brigitte Bardot, the Bigtime Blonde Bimbo in a Blue Bed surrounded by a Bestiary. She loved being an imaginary person, but Maria was too limiting. Calle wanted to keep playing. Since most of Maria's work was Calle's own there was too little to do. She decided that Auster must write her a new script, create a new character for her to be.
It took Calle a while to persuade Auster to play. "He was afraid to write the script, he did not want to be responsible for what would happen to me," she says. "I had to harass him." Auster eventually delivered something he called Gotham Handbook. It wasn't a novel, a script, or a fiction of any kind, but a set of rather do-gooderish instructions exhorting Calle to converse with strangers, give food to homeless people and to nurture a public spot in New York City, her new home. It was clearly not what Calle had been hoping for. "I was expecting to change my life, to become a character out of a novel. What he gave me was not a new life. He gave me elements to obey, but he didn't create a new Sophie."
But in her mind the game she was playing turned on obedience to Auster, so obey she did. She developed a convincing smile, learned to talk about the weather, bought cigarettes for strangers and adopted a phone booth in Greenwich Village which she decorated with flowers, magazines and, for that personal touch, a voice-activated tape recorder. Her account of the week spent living in New York according to the rules of the Gotham Handbook is the final part of her "Double Game." With the end of the exhibition play has been brought to a close. Auster will go no further. "That is it, it will be over," says Calle. "I'm not going to harass him forever."
Calle nevertheless remains transfixed by the idea of becoming a fictional character. "I find it very poetic not to have to decide for a period of time what my life would be. It might make me do things I wouldn't do naturally, give me a context I would not normally have." She has approached other writers with the idea of having herself rewritten. Calle is coy on this subject, which suggests that one of these projects may bear fruit. She is a talented flirt, and seems to have great powers of persuasion. Whether or not anything comes of her attempts at formal fictionalisation, an informal myth seems to have emerged.
Calle has always been an artist whose work seems to exist most strongly on the level of gossip and rumour. Few have seen her shows, yet tales of her exploits travel widely by word of mouth. Recently these stories seem to have developed an edge of insecurity. Word is going out that it is hard to tell which games Calle has really played, and that some purported games are merely cunning set ups.
Myth, even super-ironised artworld myth, is powerful stuff. There are people who have braved the chilly realism at the edge of Manhattan just to check that Calle actually does exist. Then there are those, like the FIND ME girl, who are here because they themselves want to be part of Calle's fictional-factual world. In a twist to the game-more Auster than Calle-the artist was recently contacted by the police when a young Parisian woman went missing. The woman had been fascinated by Calle, and confessed in her diaries that she wanted to become more like her. Calle contacted her friends and eventually visited her apartment. Although disturbed by her connection to something so terrible, her response has been to incorporate the girl's disappearance into a new project of her own, bringing the missing woman into the Calle story rather than leaving her as a tragic appendix to it.
To me she says I can write whatever fantasy I want of her. "I have given you more than a licence," she says with an edge of excitement in her voice. "I hope I will enjoy it, and learn something. I am happy to see what you will put in the gaps." Even sitting here in her red plastic spectacles, Sophie Calle is fading from view.
"Double Game" by Sophie Calle rrp ?38 BookTore ?35 + p&p. Call 020 8324 5649
