This artist not only takes pictures of herself nude but used the to make art. She also wrote books about other people she came across. There were people she followed and took pictures of, always documenting her findings. After the death of her mother she traveled to her mother's desired location and went about burying personal items belonging to her mother than documenting the ritual of doing these things. Personal experiences from her life she documented as a journal, writing everyday of events and feelings always including at least one photograph. Within some of her work she documented other people's worst memories, saying, 'Their stories did have a side effect: they made my pain manageable.'
Her texts read like detective reports, or a psychiatrist's case notes, or even a Le Monde journalist's deadly prose.
'Sophie Calle is a French artist who works with photographs and performances, placing herself in situations almost as if she and the people she encounters were fictional. She also imposes elements of her own life onto public places creating a personal narrative where she is both author and character. She has been called a detective and a voyeur and her pieces involve serious investigations as well as natural curiosity.' http://www.iniva.org/dare/themes/space/calle.html (Accessed 18 March 2012)
The website below shows exhibitions of her work:
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/sophie-calle-talking-to-strangers
(accessed 18 March 2012)
Birbiglia, M. 'Sleepwalk with me: And other painfully true stories,' London: Simon & Sehuster.
Mike Birbiglia is a one man comedian. This piece of work follows a young boy from when he was twelve all the way into adulthood, touching on subjects of girls, masturbation, making out, and then finding out he had cancer aged nineteen. From this piece of writing you can see that the writer has made it universal because these are topics that every teenage boy goes through once they reach puberty and the fact that the writer is using his own personal experiences within this piece makes it extraordinary because he is comfortable to share intimate details of his life with his audience. This allows the audience to not only join him through his journey but also to understand and maybe in some way allow them to respond to what happened within the performance.
This video is a look at his piece 'Sleepwalk'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qItVguhA1hA
This is his official site: http://birbigs.com/ where you can follow him on facebook, twitter ot join up to his mailing list as well as get more information about him.
This year (2012) Mike Birbiglia's Sleepwalk with me is being made into a movie.
A burgeoning stand-up comedian struggles with the stress of a stalled career, a stale relationship, and the wild spurts of severe sleepwalking he is desperate to ignore.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2077851/
Darren O'Donnell: A suicide-Site Guide to the City
Suicide-site Guide to the City offers a way to blend touches of real-time engagement with a polished, fully rehearsed performance.
Within this reading you could tell the performer used experiences from his life in which he told in a narrative way at times playing two different characters.
Before the show began he walked around and interacted with the audience in order to get material but also to understand the kind of audience he was going to be performing for, in a way you can say he constructed his show around his audience.
He speaks a lot about suicide and the notion of dying but also how he is holding onto life and what he does to overcome this feeling.
He keeps going back and forth between stories, he would start telling a story but in the middle begin another story and then return to where he left off on the other story.
In some scenes he play two characters but from his stage directions he says he doesn't show a definite distinction between the two.
He used repetitive sounds and voice overs throughout his performance.
I like how even during his performance he talks about the things that at may happen after the performance and how the audience will react, in a way mapping out the events of the future.
There is one scene were he speaks to the present and the past.
He also makes reference to items that don't speak, like the streetcar, but he gives the car a voice, what is would say if it could speak and how it has it's own stories to speak about in what it sees and the different things that the people it passes go through.
I can understand some of what he was talking about more personally and have highlighted words and phrases of things that I would personally think about:
The insanity in the world - the terror that is supposedly pounding on our doors - and, for the duration, you can just be. (106)
I'm sick of pretending. I have a small hope that we'll crash and I'll never have to pretend again. I am very curious about what happens in death. (107)
I think about death all the time. I love sleeping and dreaming. Which is sort of what I imagine death is going to be like.
I have found that through my free-writing a lot of the thoughts of death that I have been feeling and thinking about is seen. In a way while reading this play I could see a bit of myself in certain parts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Birbiglia, M. 'Sleepwalk with me: And other painfully true stories,' London: Simon & Sehuster.
Jeffries, s. (2009) 'Sophie Calle: Stalker, Striper, Sleeper, Spy,' Guardian 23/09/09 (Online) Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/23/sophie-calle?INTCMP=SRCH (Accessed 18 March 2012)
O'Donnell, D. 'A Suicide-Site Guide to the City
Whitechapel Gallery (2009) 'Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers,' http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/sophie-calle-talking-to-strangers (accessed 18 March 2012)
Youtube (2008) 'Mike Birbiglia Sleepwalks,' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qItVguhA1hA (Accessed 18 March 2012)
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