C’est le bouquet! “The Mystery Guest,” Sophie Calle, The Louvre, and My Birthday
A week or so ago, I was given a gift. I just didn't know it yet.
My boyfriend and I were nestled in his office loveseat, sipping coffee as the sun rose. I was fussing with the internet and reading endless blogs, and he was just watching--something that completely unnerves me but I'm trying to grow used to. I was cruising through Mark Sarvas's The Elegant Variation when he says:
"Stop!"
Or maybe not that, but something like it, and it unnerves me more as he gives directions--up, down, up, up, UP, no, down, down, down, up--until I'm about to whack him and go have my coffee in peace. I shoot him a look, but I scroll down, down, down, and then he exclaims:
"The mystery guest, it's good!"
What rubbish is he speaking?
Then, I get it. A book. The Mystery Guest. I focus on the cover, then on the author name. Grégiore Boillier. And that's when I start to feel a bit guilty over being miffed, because Grégiore is clearly French--and there's little more I want in life than a boyfriend who loves French literature enough to stop my day over it.
"It's good. I have it. It reads quick, too--I think I did it in one or two sittings."
"It's good?" I insist, not wanting to let on about how much of an ass I feel.
He nods.
We don't speak of it. But a few days later, I slip it in my bag and take it to a bar in downtown Saint Paul with soft leather seats and 80's music. After ordering a beer, I settle in and open the first pages. That's when I read the first words of the rest of my afternoon:
To Sophie Calle
I take a long, long drink.
The next page: A note from the translator: "For reasons the reader will understand, I have refrained from translating the expression 'C'est le bouquet.' It means, more or less, 'That takes the cake.'"
Yes. Yes, it does.
Sophie Calle, "Doubles-Jeux"
Photographer and multi-media artist Sophie Calle has haunted my last decade as quietly as if she were following me through the streets and taking grainy photographs. I never studied her in art history classes. I came across her in the mid-1990s as a series of beautifully produced books by Actes Sud one summer I stayed in Paris. Soon enough, on a different spell in Paris, I discovered she was the subject of a novel by a favorite author. Later, on yet another trip, I found her living in the same building as my dissertation subject, Annette Messager, another French contemporary artist. And, then, on a voyage to Budapest, I found her photos filling the castle. It took that long for me to stop and listen. THIS, not the other artist, was the one of my adult life. And so it was no surprise, a couple of years ago, to discover that she commissioned a famous perfumeur to build her a scent: the scent of money. I had, only days before, began contemplating the intersection of art and scent, a space aesthetics has avoided since Kant.
And now she appears again. And the story within The Mystery Guest? A birthday party--Sophie Calle's 37th birthday party--at which Grégiore is the mystery guest unknown to her. And a love story--the realization of why a relationship fails.
This is the book that falls in my lap just before my 37th birthday.
Sophie Calle, "Le rituel d'anniversaire," 1990 (see wine bottle in the lower left corner, given to Sophie by Grégiore)
The Mystery Guest is less about finding out why one lover abandons another(c'est le bouquet that is the key). The Mystery Guest is about potlatch and pride. He brings to Sophie's party a Grand Cru Margaux (instead of paying his rent) to impress his old lover. Sophie, however, does not open it. No one knows. He feels the fool. He stumbles back into the city, confused about love and reading its signs. What does he do from there.
I lap up every word. I don't want to miss the gift. Somewhere are signs for me to read. At the very least, there is a tableau to enter. We all want to go back in the past, n'est-ce pas? For just a moment. To figure something out. Grégiore does. I do. When the narrator goes to Sophie Calle's party, I revisit a place I've actually been. I know the door leading into the factory-turned-artist-compound. I know that overgrown "garden." I know the walk back to Paris. I know, too, the building just beyond Sophie's building. In that second one, Annette makes her installations with plush and stuffed animals.
The book brings me back to a specific place--a grubby street off the Metro 13 just beyond the borders of Paris.
So on the eve of my birthday, I'm taken someplace peculiar to me and asked: What now? What to do with the serendipitous connection? I have ideas, I've sketched things--I've erased things, too. No matter what, Grégiore's swift little tome and Sophie's Doubles-Jeux will serve as a reminder: the best art is often composed of the simplest means--the simple idea, the simple view, the simple weaving of threads. Readers will bring the complexity and tease out the web.
So what about on my birthday, tomorrow, November 14? What will I do? Nothing so elaborate as Sophie's parties. But birthday plans have fallen in our laps--the way the best birthday plans do. First, I will go to the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and indulge in my love of handmade books at the Book Arts Festival. Then, that night, I want to pop over at Traffic Zone and explore some artist studios and see whatever exhibition is in the street front gallery. But the best part of the day? Showing now at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is "The Louvre and the Masterpiece." The last year I spent in Paris, I had a pass to the Louvre. I would whip through a special entrance whenever I wanted and race to see my favorite Watteaus and silver objets d'art and Dutch vanitas paintings. Le Louvre me manque.
This exhibition--c'est le bouquet!
Minnesota Center for Book Arts: Book Arts Festival. November 14, 10am-5pm
Traffic Zone: Open Studios. November 14, 5:30-9:30. 250 Third Avenue N. Minneapolis
The Minneapolis Institute of the Arts: "The Louvre and the Masterpiece." October 18-January 10.
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