Seeing things

At its best audio can be a much more visual medium than the screen. Making Art with Frances Morris (produced by Kate Bland), which I caught by chance on Radio 4 last week, gave us insights into the work of the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle that were so vivid it was almost as if we had been to an exhibition of her work. Calle, now 65, is known for her unconventional approach to what art can be. In 1980 she was invited to show one of her first works, The Sleepers, a collection of photographs, in New York. ‘I asked people to give me a few hours of their sleep. To come and sleep in my bed. To let themselves be looked at and photographed,’ is her explanation of the project. But on arriving at the gallery in the south Bronx to set up the exhibition she was embarrassed by its essential frivolity. ‘It was not appropriate,’ given that she was walking past people who were sleeping on the street.

She abandoned that show and in ten days came up with another set of photographs after standing outside the gallery between two and five in the afternoon and asking complete strangers, ‘Would you take me to your favourite place?’ One stranger took her to see the only tree he knew in the area; another stood outside a bank and said that his dream was to one day have his own bank account. She took pictures of her guides at their chosen destination, and herself alongside them. By chance, evil or not, an intruder got into the gallery on the night before the opening and attacked all the photographs, covering them with graffiti. Calle went on with the show, deciding that the graffiti was ‘an unexpected contributor’.

Another project, ‘Voir la Mer’, from 2011 was a response by Calle to her discovery that lots of people living in Istanbul (often immigrants from the countryside) had never seen the sea in spite of that city’s extraordinary maritime location.