The idea of testimony, of confession, speaking in the first person to narrate one’s own experience, as an expression of subjectivity or as an exposition of the intimate is a way of transmitting truthfulness. We see it in books, in documentaries, in television programmes and also in the works of artists. At a time when reality appears constructed, mediatised and virtualised, what we are often left with is the “here and now”, the most personal experiences and the relationship with others. The artist Sophie Calle, who we can see in an exhibition these days at the Virreina. Centro de la Imagen in Barcelona, is a good example of this. Calle writes fragments of her biography, which are true slices of life: she has herself followed by a detective; she invites people to sleep with her and tell her stories; she shares a letter about a break-up and asks more than a hundred women from very different professions to analyse it, interpret it, comment on it and sing it, if they consider it appropriate.
In Calle’s case, it is very difficult to separate the professional from the personal, probably because she works the circumstances of her life as a form of artistic approach: she asks for love letters to be written for her, commissions her biography from a professional writer or films as fiction the love story that she confesses is the most authentic she has ever had. Calle is the protagonist of her own novel and also of others such as Leviathan by Paul Auster, in which she is not hard to recognize in the character of Maria Turner or in the story “Because she didn’t ask for it” from the book Explorers of the Abyss by Enrique VIla-Matas.
But Calle is not the only one. The American artist Jill Magid also likes to see herself as “the protagonist of someone else’s novel.” In 2007 Jill Magid returned to her city after having spent five years abroad. Since she lives in Brooklyn, she takes the subway often and is amazed every time she hears the announcement over the loudspeaker that “for security reasons” any passenger may be subject to a search. Without hesitation, Jill approaches an officer and asks him to search her. The policeman’s refusal leads to an agreement: the possibility that the artist will accompany him during his night patrols. The worlds to which the protagonists of this story belong could not be more different, but the fascination is mutual and she writes a diary that records all her impressions during the patrol shifts.
Calle, Magid and many other artists use strategies of (self)representation, they move in the realm of the private, they focus on the everyday, the intimate, the affective, the emotional and the confessional. They put the self at the centre of the discourse in order, in essence, to speak about all of us.
[Article published in Bonart, 2015]
