Abstracts of Papers
Brett M. Van Hoesen:
Realizing the Invisible: Sophie Calle's Last Seen and the Politics of Preserving at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
In her photo and text series entitled, Last Seen, the contemporary artist Sophie Calle explores the lingering life of thirteen works of art stolen in 1990, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The museum, the once private residence of the wealthy Bostonian philanthropist, Isabella Stewart Gardner, became a public institution in 1924, with the caveat that the exhibition display of Gardner's collection of objects within the building was to remain intact, preserving the authentic layout of Gardner's palatial home. The widely publicized art theft of 1990, dramatically challenged the laws of Gardner's will, in the end forcing the curators of the museum to leave actual "holes" within the exhibition space where the stolen five drawings by Degas, six paintings by Rembrandt, Flinck, Manet and Vermeer, a Napoleonic eagle and an antique vase were once housed. Calle's 1991 project, Last Seen, investigates the tension between the haunting absence and phantom presence of these missing works within the context of the museum. In a style reminiscent of Joseph Kosuth's conceptual projects, Calle pairs for each work a large-scale photograph of the now "empty" space with an accompanying text panel, which contains excerpts from interviews she conducted with museum staff about the missing works. In a conceptual manner, Calle's Last Seen indexes a host of definitions for one single object based in part upon the occupational character of her interviewed subjects, which included museum curators, conservators, security guards, etc. While Last Seen highlights issues pertaining to reception theory, Calle's series also plays upon the mechanics of the museum and emphasizes the frequently bizarre rules and rituals regarding museums' ownership and exhibition of objects of material culture. In this project, as with others from her œuvre, Calle complicates the relationship between creator, object and receiver; the messages transmitted by her works often incorporate the intermediary role that museums and other exhibition venues play in determining the relationship between the work of art and its audience. This paper will discuss the way in which Calle's Last Seen series expands the mediatory space by implicitly critiquing the connection between producer, object, consumer, and museum.
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