Sophie Calle. Here Lie the Secrets of Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, 2017. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery & Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.

As I approached the cemetery on foot through the neighborhood of Bay Ridge, I tried to think of a secret meaty enough to divulge. Calle was on site on April 29th and 30th to receive and transcribe secrets in person. Without taking pictures or names, there was a caveat that the artist “might keep a memory of your story, but it will remain anonymous.” Predictably, I came up with nothing—not an unfulfilled desire, taboo belief, or misdeed of any kind, so in lieu of writing something trivial or fabricated, I decided to leave my note card blank. Thus forgoing direct participation, I turned my attention to what appeared to be a number of cathartic confessions imparted to Calle by other Creative Time devotees. Between the two chairs, drama was high; the artist was present. However, for those of us lingering on the margins, the procedure of the piece proved challenging to engage. The marble obelisk is designed with a mail slot to inter secrets into a chamber below the monument for the next twenty-five years. Annually, Calle will return to Green-Wood to oversee the burning of the accumulation. On the heels of Creative Time’s 2016 programs—Duke Riley’s magical Fly By Night and Pedro Reyes’s haunting Doomocracy—Calle’s mediation of public intimacy registered among my fellow observers as a miss.

Calle is not a newcomer to social practice—intimate encounters with others is a hallmark of her oeuvre. In 1979, Calle surveilled a man through the streets of Venice to create her seminal work, Suite Vénitienne. More recently, her project Take Care of Yourself (2007) prompted 107 women to respond to a breakup letter through the media and vocabulary of their choice, resulting in 107 vignettes of dance, music, visual art, and written word. Where Here Lie the Secrets diverges is in the architecture of the open call. Participants were not selected—instead, they showed up. Moreover, only a small selection of secrets will ever be heard or seen by Calle, so by and large, public participation is not fodder for appropriation and fictionalization, as is the case with many of her formative works. With Here Lie the Secrets, Calle shifts the emphasis of the artwork from the story being told (and subsequently hijacked and rewritten into a creative project) to the gesture itself.

Sophie Calle. Here Lie the Secrets of Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, 2017. Courtesy of Creative Time. Photo: Leandro Justen.

Creative Time Artistic Director Nato Thompson describes the piece as providing a “space for intimate reflection. It is a quiet, personal, and yet also public act.” Calle’s monument is more of a provocation than an object, compelling visitors to meditate on the dual nature of secrecy—intimacies that linger unfulfilled and withheld, or misdeeds with public effect. What is a secret in the digital age, when every movement and click is surveilled, recorded, and sold? Beneath the epitaph, Here Lie the Secrets confronts our contemporary political reality—a reality in which power is strengthened by a strategic balance of secrets and leaks. As Žižek suggests, “The truth liberates us, yes, but not this truth.” There may be secrets, but there is also truth in a cemetery’s stones.

Sophie Calle. Here Lie the Secrets of Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, 2017. Courtesy of Creative Time. Photo: Leandro Justen.

Moreover, the context of the cemetery provokes a spatio-temporal disruption, which Foucault describes as “absolute break with traditional time.” Leveraging the context of Green-Wood, Calle evokes deeper questions related to time and existence—ideas that were similarly explored in Rachel, Monique (2006), a video work documenting her mother’s death, which made its New York debut at the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest in 2014. Even so, Here Lie the Secrets is different than previous works, sharing more kinship with Richard McGuire’s time-traveling graphic novel Here, which presents time as an experiential allusion, illustrating scenes, objects, and events from separate centuries within the same frame.  Similarly, Green-Wood’s centuries-old gravestones conjure larger continuities between the evolution of people and culture bound by a specific place.

Sophie Calle. Here Lie the Secrets of Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, 2017. Courtesy of Creative Time. Photo: Leandro Justen.

In the artist statement for Here Lie the Secrets, Calle writes of the confession of a secret as the ultimate proof of intimacy. However, it can be argued that cemeteries—though eternally silent—are profoundly intimate sites where all life intersects. Bringing to mind the title of Calle’s 2001 retrospective Double Game, here too there is a conscious redoubling at work. The obelisk is a classic Egyptian motif symbolizing the connection between heaven and earth, and Calle’s monument can be viewed as a conduit, forging connections across time and generations—uniting us through shared human commonalities, including our inescapable universal end.

Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery is on view at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, through April 29, 2042.

Sophie Calle. Absence, 2013; installation view, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Courtesy of Sophie Calle and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert. © 2013 Sophie Calle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

She did. In Absence, Calle’s current show at Paula Cooper Gallery, her mother’s last word, “souci,” appears frequently, rendered in tall, imposing letters that loom above the other pieces.

The French word means “worry” and is often uttered within the phrase “Sans souci” or “Don’t worry.” But Calle fails to include the negative “don’t,” turning the show into an exploration on negatives, positives, and neutrals. Like much of Calle’s past work, Absence acts as a mystery novel that tirelessly searches for a missing person. In this case, that person is her mother.

Using photographs that chronicle Calle’s life during and after her mother’s death, the exhibit explores the liminal space between presence and absence. She creates a world where both qualities can exist at once.

The center wall displays an array of mixed-media works, ranging from framed paintings that repeat the word “souci,” to enlarged excerpts from her mother’s journal, to a photograph of a taxidermied giraffe named for her mother. Next to the giraffe hangs an inscription reading, “When my mother died I bought a taxidermal giraffe. I named it after my mother and hung it up in my studio. Monique looks down on me with sadness and irony.” Here, Calle blurs the line between mother and giraffe, signifier and signified. Other images capture tombstones and crosses inlaid with the word “mother.” Each memento serves as a reminder of the life that once was. They give Calle’s mother a presence in spite of, and often because of, her absence.

On the wall to the right hang images of Calle’s trip to the North Pole, where, in lieu of ashes, she scattered jewelry and photographs of her mother. The bright blue waters neatly contrast with the white lines of Calle’s boat and heaping piles of clean, crushed snow. In one image, bright beads and a black-and-white photograph sit in the ice, half-buried. The talismans serve as a quiet but effective echo of Calle’s mother’s life and provide catharsis for the viewer—a goodbye.

Sophie Calle. Absence, 2013; installation view, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Courtesy of Sophie Calle and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert. © 2013 Sophie Calle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Another wall documents a trip Calle took to Lourdes, a small town in the south of France, while her mother was dying. Many of the photos capture the mundane—street signs, shuttered shop windows—objects notable to Calle but not the viewer. Long, poetic narratives accompany each photograph. But these dirge-like descriptions overshadow the work they’re meant to enhance. The low-contrast group of images have a prosaic appearance; they’re easy to overlook. In this group, only a few lines of narrative mention Calle’s mother. One section reads, “Was my mother a good mother? I’m already using the past tense.” Despite these reflections on how we grieve for those still living, the Lourdes project lacks the visceral, emotional pull of the rest of the show.

Sophie Calle. Absence, 2013; installation view, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Courtesy of Sophie Calle and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert. © 2013 Sophie Calle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

In what at first seems like an arbitrary curatorial choice, an adjacent room contains works from Calle’s new series, Purloined, based on artworks stolen from museums across the world. She photographs the spaces where the art was once displayed, and accompanies the images with long descriptions of the stolen works by guards, curators, and other museum staff members.

Sophie Calle. Absence, 2013; installation view, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Courtesy of Sophie Calle and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert. © 2013 Sophie Calle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

The room feels like an intrusion into the intimate examination of Absence. Still, the two series begin to merge. Both meditate on the discussion that surrounds disappearance. The lengthy descriptions in Purloined mirror the narratives that appear in Absence. Again, the photographs become the secondary element; the viewer looks toward the descriptions of the stolen works for an indication of what once was. Together, the exhibits attempt an investigation, forcing the viewer to take mere words as inscrutable evidence and wonder if they are enough.

Sophie Calle’s Absence is on view at Paula Cooper Gallery through November 16, 2013.