Observation 2—Stenciled Characters (Masami Tsubouchi / Curator)
The display of Sophie Calle, For the Last and First Time appears at first glance to be quite straightforward. There are in fact a number of unusual details specific to the artist.
For example, the characters that make up the words for ″see the sea″ in Japanese (voir la mer) on the wall of the first floor corridor. As the series title of the works in Gallery II, these characters would ordinarily be printed on a plate mounted to the wall. The artist, however, asked that the letters be written directly onto the wall using stencils.
As a device for printing, a stencil is a sheet with holes cut out in the shape of the text or figures to be transferred. Normally ink or paint is applied through the holes, but for this show, soft graphite was used instead. This gave the Japanese characters a special quality, such as a mottled look produced by the wall’s subtle surface irregularities. They also retained traces of the graphite pencil strokes, an indication of the effort it took to fill in the spaces a little at a time. These indications, of a flow or fluctuation in time, stimulate ideas in the viewer.
Voir la mer (2011) captures the expression on the faces of people who are seeing the sea for the first time in their lives. It consists of imagery and the sound of waves, but no text, which is unusual for Calle. The visitor first sees the backs of these people, and then as they turn, the visitor takes measure of their emotional state from the expression on their faces.
As the visitor leaves the gallery, still lost in thought, with the sound of waves in the background, the stenciled characters for ″see the sea″ suddenly come into view. Standing there alone, subtly fluctuating on the wall, the characters prompt the visitor to ″see the sea,″ but in a way that reflects not only the experience of the people observed moments ago, but also their own relationship with the sea, as well as relationship between the human race and the sea; for example, What is the nature of this experience? What is this thing called the ″sea″? As a detail of the display, the use of stencils to write the title is a tiny one, but what it triggers is quite large.
photo: Keizo Kioku