When Monique Sindler was dying in her bed in Paris in 2006, Sophie Calle, her daughter and the renowned French conceptual artist, set up a video camera and began taping. The artist, 60, has explained that her reason for the camera was that she didn’t want to be out of the room when the moment of death came. She wanted to hear her mother’s last word and see her last breath, but she had heard that the dying often wait until nobody is around to let go.
“I was afraid I wouldn’t be there if she had a last thing to tell me,” she said this spring in a Skype interview from her home near Paris, where she has mounted a taxidermy giraffe head on the wall and named it after her mother. “The camera made me feel restful because I could sleep in the other room or go out and buy food. When I wasn’t there, I was still there.”
While Ms. Calle’s career often involves invading the privacy of others — copying someone’s lost address book and calling people in it and then publishing their remarks in a newspaper; posing as a chambermaid to photograph the messes left by guests; and exhibiting a breakup email from a romantic partner to elicit commentary from various female experts — she had never made her mother the sole subject of one of her voyeuristic projects.
“Finally,” Ms. Calle recalled her mother saying when she set up the camera, suggesting to her daughter and to anyone who came by and questioned it, that she was pleased that her turn as a subject had finally come, even if it was at the very end.
Visitors to the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, at Fifth Avenue and 90th Street, can read about this at Ms. Calle’s coming installation. It is called “Rachel, Monique” for her mother, who used both names at various times, and it opens in collaboration with the Paula Cooper Gallery andGalerie Perrotin on Friday. The installation includes a life-size video projection of her mother in her deathbed and a sign that lists the last music she heard and last word she spoke, which was “souci,” meaning “worry.” And in a clergy stall, viewers can hear a recording of a familiar voice reading excerpts from Ms. Calle’s mother’s diary, translated into English: It is Kim Cattrall, of “Sex and the City,” who had offered her services after she heard Ms. Calle in a marathon 30-hour reading of the diaries last summer in Avignon.
“My mother loved Kim Cattrall’s character in the television show,” Ms. Calle said.
Inside the chapel of the 88-year-old church last Monday, she was casually dressed and overseeing the installation. “A little to the right please,” she politely told two helpers as they shifted a long, framed list of her mother’s last doings against a Gothic-style window sill. As if it were a bouquet, she held a white book of photographs and passages about her mother to be placed among the red prayer books in the racks.
“Take out the curtains,” she said about one window. She moved a silver crucifix on the altar. She looked at the pews near the back. “Let’s put the grave on the floor here,” she said.
If she wasn’t emotional in the presence of such personal and intense images, that’s because Ms. Calle has mounted various iterations of the work since 2007, when the video had its first screening at the International Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. And even then she was more consumed with the technicalities of the installation than the subject matter.
“It’s only when everything was up that I couldn’t look at it or I’d cry,” she said.
Robert Storr, commissioner of the 2007 Venice Biennale and the dean of the Yale University School of Art, was the first to encourage Ms. Calle to do something with the footage. He had called to invite her to show at the fair in the immediate days after her mother had died. She told him she was too upset, but also mentioned the video she had made.
“Although she said she wasn’t ready, it was clear to me that she wanted to make a work out of what she had done,” he said.
Mr. Storr, a great admirer, said that his opinion had not changed since 1983, when he wrote in Art Press, a French journal, that Ms. Calle was “decidedly bourgeoise, downright annoying, the embodiment of the unreliable narrator” and “without a core.” Since then, he has acquired her work for the Museum of Modern Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., and included her in various shows.
While some of her recent work happens to be more lyrical and less invasive (one features blind people talking about the last thing they saw, another documents adults seeing the sea for the first time) her reputation as what Mr. Storr once called “a stalker provocateur” prevails. Of course, now that audiences have seen Tracey Emin’s dirty-sheet installation (“My Bed,” which included bedsheets stained with bodily fluids and which was shortlisted for the Turner Prize), surveillance art, viral YouTube videos of unwitting buffoons and a litany of tell-all memoirs, the culture has caught up to Ms. Calle.
At any rate, the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest had no qualms about opening their hallowed doors. In fact, the 150-year-old congregation, which runs a Heavenly Rest Stop cafe with tables in the back of its sanctuary, has timed its exhibition to capitalize on visitors to the Frieze New York Art Fair, opening Friday on Randalls Island.
“And for us, death is what we deal with daily,” said the Rev. Elizabeth Garnsey, who initiated the installation but is making sure certain parts are removed for Sunday services. “People always come to us for the end of life. So while it might be disconcerting to see this work in an Episcopal church, we think life is about change. And Sophie’s show is full of joy.”
Ms. Calle, who also captures her mother’s flirtatious humor in the piece, was given the blessing of her family and her mother’s friends to go ahead. When asked about her mother’s diary entries describing her “selfish arrogance,” or one that states, “I’m never a priority for her,” she shrugged.
She has few regrets about her participation in her mother’s last months as she languished from cancer. She visited her daily and often slept by her bed. “I was there with her a lot,” she said. “And I tried to bring her a miracle every day.”
For instance, Ms. Sindler was crazy about Yves Calvi, a French TV journalist. Ms. Calle convinced him, a stranger, to visit. She made martini parties too. “Her deathbed was a salon — everybody wanted to come,” Ms. Calle said. “And if she didn’t want to see someone she’d say, ‘Tell them I’m already dead.’ ”
When Ms. Sindler finally took her last breath, Ms. Calle and an attendant weren’t sure they had seen it. They wondered about it for 11 minutes. Then they turned on the Mozart concerto that her mother had requested for the end.
“Although we couldn’t detect life anymore, we couldn’t detect death,” she said. “We couldn’t find it.”
The video she will show has a title that means “Couldn’t Capture Death.”
Afterward, Ms. Calle gave her mother the best funeral she could have imagined. “And when I woke up the next morning, I only felt guilty because I never thought to tell her I was giving her the greatest funeral,” she said. “So I did find a way to find a little spot for guilt.”
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Guilt is not something that comes so readily to an artist whose invasive works have earned her shows at the Centre Pompidou, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, among others.
And while some critics have suggested she makes her art to deal with the suffering of such things as a romantic breakup or the sense of aimlessness of her early adult years, she doesn’t always agree. “I make art to make art, but sometimes it has a therapeutic aspect,” she said.
For instance, changing the cassettes while taping her mother gave her what she felt was a useful distraction from the anxiety of an impending death. But she also said that nothing could stop her from being overcome witnessing the body in a plastic bag leaving her home.
“I shouted from the staircase and in the streets because the horror of death was that plastic bag,” she said. “Death is full of rituals that help us to grieve, but there is nothing ritualistic about a body in a plastic bag.”
In the chapel, she was pleased with how a framed print of her mother’s last word looked when placed against the altar. “Her last words were ‘Don’t Worry,’ but her last word was ‘Worry,’ which is really the opposite. It’s a strong word, and I like the paradox.”
In her diary, her mother suggested her “morbid” daughter would visit her more at her grave than in her home.
“It’s not the case,” Ms. Calle said, as two men placed a photo of her mother’s grave without a date of birth (because she was vain about her age) and with the inscription she wanted — “I’m getting bored already” — between pews. “But she’s right in that since I am showing this piece, I am with her a lot. She’s now extremely present in my life.”
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