ART REVIEW : ‘Calle’ Exhibition Borders Fact, Fiction

Irony and enchantment dance around one another in “Sophie Calle: Proofs,” an enticing, modestly scaled exhibition of the French Conceptualist’s quasi-documentary photographs and deposition-like texts. Containing very little of what the legal profession regards as probative, Calle’s slippery art takes shape in the gray area between fact and fiction.

Rather than seeking to uncover incontrovertible truths, her 15 sly pieces from 1981-1992, which fall into three categories at UC Santa Barbara’s University Art Museum, explore the elusive connections between people’s inner lives and outer worlds. Without exception, desire provides the most intense links between these realms.

The earliest work shown outlines Calle’s peculiar notion of proof and records how far apart appearances and realities often are. To make “The Shadow,” the artist hired a private detective to follow her for a day--to provide, she writes, “photographic evidence of my existence.” The anonymous investigator took pictures of Calle’s activities and jotted down brief notes recording where she went, how long she stayed and who she met.

For her part, Calle wrote a dreamy, diaristic account of her leisurely day, recalling childhood scenarios while strolling through parks, savoring memories over drinks and meeting people who knew her intimately.

As you read the two narratives interspersed with 30 black-and- white photographs, the discrepancy between facts and feelings is striking. Although the private eye dutifully tailed Calle, the uninspired information he gathered provides no insight into her rich emotional life.

But Calle refuses to settle for such a tidy division between public and private. Almost all of the thoughts she recorded that day involve the detective’s constant gaze.

She even had her hair done for him, imagining that his unfaltering attention was that of a secret admirer. The undertow of romance that tugs at Calle’s account throughout the day returns as she falls asleep in another man’s hotel room, thinking of the detective and wondering, like a schoolgirl, if he liked her.

In another series from 1981, Calle became an amateur detective, spying on the belongings of hotel guests where she worked as a temporary chambermaid. “The Hotel” consists of Calle’s descriptions of her searches accompanied by photos of unmade beds, open suitcases, messy bathrooms and articles of clothing hung neatly in closets or strewn about rooms.

With more imagination than the professional who followed her, she detected romance in every room. The goal of her little investigations was not knowledge or full disclosure, just the suggestion that intriguing stories were constantly unfolding, even though she’d never know them.

“The Blind” (1986) rounds out the first part of the show. Calle asked people who were born blind what their image of beauty was. Their poignant responses are juxtaposed to photos of their faces and the various objects or images they’ve vividly described but never seen.

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At stake in Calle’s art is never the thing-in-itself, but the indeterminate effects things have on people. Intimate recollections, private reveries and personal fantasies carry more weight than objectivity.

The second third of the exhibition consists of two series from 1991 based on missing paintings. For “Last Seen . . .” and “Ghosts,” Calle asked guards, curators and other museum staff members to describe what they recollected about famous paintings that had been stolen (from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) or temporarily loaned (from New York’s Museum of Modern Art).

These curious, wide-ranging stories push to humorous extremes classic Conceptualism’s attempt to dispense with the art object altogether--to downplay its status as a salable commodity to emphasize ideas and meanings. Where Conceptualism was obsessed with dry, abstract language, Calle focuses on juicy, fantasy-tinged memories.

The show’s final third includes “Autobiographical Stories” (1992), a series of photo-text pieces describing loaded moments in Calle’s life. It’s impossible to disentangle fact from fiction in these perplexing works, which function like outtakes from a captivating 1-hour, 15-minute video she made with Greg Shephard.

Titled “Double Blind,” this video is Calle’s masterpiece. It tells a traditional tale of girl-meets-boy but with such a strange mix of detachment and intimacy that it’s impossible to know when the characters are playing roles or being themselves. Although Calle and Shephard drive across the United States and marry in Vegas, you never know if they mean it or are just going through the motions.

The best way to think of Calle’s work is as a cross between Andy Warhol’s ironic distance and Oscar Wilde’s passionate insistence that artifice is an essential part of reality. Ranking among the most interesting artists today, Calle combines alienation and sincerity in fascinating narrative fragments. Her literary art bends the rules of Conceptualism, dispensing with a search for desire’s origins to intensify desire’s symptoms.

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“Sophie Calle: Proofs,” UC Santa Barbara University Art Museum, Santa Barbara, (805) 893-2951, through April 23. Closed Mondays.