#somebody should do a video essay retrospective on all this in 10 years

[gh-0-stcup]

I don't think the solution to all the problems with polygyny is to criminalize it or crack down harder. It's clear that communities who practice polygyny, especially for religious reasons, will find ways to do so regardless of the legal status. They'll just become more and more isolated the more the government tries to eliminate their lifestyle.

Legal protections for all the wives and their children seems a much better solution. Removing the fear their families will be torn apart or arrested if they try to seek help. Giving them a guarantee of support for themselves and their children if they'd like to leave. And just a social situation where the wives and children don't feel they have to hide what goes on their home.

The shadows are where abuse flourishes. There's nothing inherently wrong with polygyny - the communities that tend to practice this already have issues with misogyny. If the husbands are taught to see women as little more than maids and breeding tools, of course the marriages are going to be fucked.

[illuminations-of-nyx]

Sophie Calle

‘What attracts me is absence, missing, death…’ 

In 1978, when she was 25, she returned to Paris after seven years abroad. Her father, a doctor and pop art collector, had paid for her travels as a prize for completing a degree under Jean Baudrillard, who agreed to fake her diploma to help her escape round the world. Back in Paris, her mother now on her third marriage, she moved in with her father. To impress him, she decided to make art. Weeks passed, and she struggled to find a routine. One day, she decided to follow a stranger. She chose a person a day, stalked them through their lives and, in doing so, found her own. One of these trails (which took her to Venice in a blonde wig) became a piece called Suite Venetienne, which launched her strange and mutable career, one anchored in rules and routine. In the accompanying essay, Baudrillard considers, “the sensuality of behind-the-scenes power: the art of making the other disappear”.

She is an expert in short sharp stories, intimate revelations extracted with or without the subject’s consent, and her pieces speak to non-art audiences, too. She invited strangers to sleep in her bed, she filmed people seeing the sea for the first time, she worked as a maid, photographing guests’ belongings and once, after finding a stranger’s address book, she phoned everybody in it to create a portrait of its owner. As revenge, he found and published a nude photo of Calle – she, typically, was delighted.

Her art is accessible because of its deadpan romance and drama, the voyeuristic thrill of it like a trawl through a private inbox. Her confessional pieces (including the book Exquisite Pain, where she recounts her heartbreak to everybody she meets, asking them for the worst moment of their lives in return) are almost a tease – autobiography wrung dry of all emotion, pathologically honest, and often hilarious. It’s intimate, but... not. She was shortlisted for this year’s Deutsche Börse photography prize, and the serenity of the photographer’s gallery in summertime was broken only by small snorts of laughter.

Calle designed her home in 1979, and she filled it with animals. A giraffe’s head is mounted behind the fireplace, and it is named after her mother. A stuffed monkey sleeps beside the sofa, and under the iron staircase each member of her small taxidermied zoo is named after another of her friends. Her father is a tiger. There are two workspaces, one desk covered with found Victorian photographs of babies; she collects them for the hidden mothers shadowed in the background. The other is a white wall on which she’s pinning works in progress, including a project with the Museum of Hunting, about the “hunting of women”. She’s been trawling through the personal ads in a paper called Le Chasseur Français, to work out what men are looking for in a wife. “Between 1895, when it started, and 1905, it’s mostly money. And after, it’s virginity. And after that, it’s sweetness.” What are men looking for today? “A woman who is nearby.”

When, at 51, her boyfriend broke up with her via email, signing off with the line “Take care of yourself”, she sent it to 107 female professionals to analyse. He was evaluated by a physicist, shot by a markswoman and performed by actor Jeanne Moreau. The effect was that Calle’s emotion was blurred and distorted with the women’s professional work. The piece, which has been touring for the past 10 years, took on a life of its own, finding Calle a new audience of young women. And her work suddenly has company, not just in Tracey Emin’s bed, but in the raw telly, say, of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and the novels of Chris Kraus, female artists who elevate the interior lives of women, with all the pain and blood that implies.

There’s something of the “quirky” about her, of course, that word used so often as a dismissive pat on the head of women that tell intimate female stories. But, even in the shadow of a giraffe that is her mother, her eccentricity is the last thing you notice.

Sitting in a straightbacked chair, her feet bare, she warns me she compiles journalists’ mistakes about her, for a future project where she intends to carry out the errors they make. I laugh; she doesn’t. Perhaps, I say, there is another way to collaborate on this piece. She says she’ll consider it, and then we talk about death for a while.

“Hospitals and graveyards are not places that paralyse me. They inspire me and my work, it’s what has always been attracting me – absence, missing, death…” She has already commissioned her headstone. At the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, 200 people told her their secrets which she wrote down and dropped into her grave, then hung around for a cheery picnic. To some, she says, she was an artist, others a priest, others a brick wall.

As she prepares for her first major US retrospective, I ask what she learned about American pain from listening to all these secrets. “What the work teaches me is not important. It’s what people take from it.” I wait, and finally she elaborates. “I found the people incredibly fragile.” She sighs, thoughtfully. “It seems the really tough things made people suffer less than the small things. Maybe because for the tough things you are in a group, with more people and it becomes a fight. The little thing that someone says to you happens in solitary.” She scoffs suddenly. “But it’s stupid to try to do a scale of suffering.”

“I always feel sorry for people who have children. It’s ridiculous because they look happy and say it’s a most beautiful thing. I think they are lying to themselves and to me. But it’s a defence.” She puts her head to the side. “It’s not that I’m afraid to have regrets, because I’ve never had regrets. Maybe it’s a defence in advance. I feel… ‘light’ not to have that constant fear that something may happen to them or that they could be unhappy.”

Here is something she bonded with the actor Kim Cattrall over, later inviting her to read excerpts from her late mother’s diary (December, 1985: “Sophie’s selfish arrogance! My only consolation is, she is so morbid that she will come visit me in my grave more often than on Rue Boulard”) to be played alongside the video of her last breath.

I’m not surprised people queued in the sun to tell her their secrets – her fearlessness, the spine of her work, is insanely seductive. I wasn’t prepared for the dizzying effect she’d have on me, sitting with somebody who hasn’t given even a crumb of a damn in more than 40 years, whose singularity of intent means she makes notes on Post-its about Tinder as we talk, who seems genuinely surprised people might be shocked she filmed her mother’s death. “I was told people die when you step out of the room. So I wanted to make sure if she had something to tell me, I’d be there.” A shrug, so simple.

She’s standing at the kitchen counter, eating small slices of cheese. From the fridge she retrieves an already poured glass of wine and explains why she lives alone. “I don’t want other people’s dirty laundry. I want to be able to feel free, even if I’m not completely. Friendship requires effort, but I don’t think of it as compromise. I don’t go against my nature, and sometimes it’s not fun, but I like it like that.”

She says she has a suggestion for a collaboration. I should make a list of the questions she refused to answer. I look back at my notes, reading out loud. “Do you feel brave? What did you learn about pain? How does it feel to be told someone’s darkest secrets? What’s your responsibility when a stranger cries to you?”

Smiling, she pulls her feet up beneath her, and looks immediately relaxed, as if she’s solved a problem by keeping even this little bit back. “Yes.” Gazing off towards the garden, it’s as if she has, quite suddenly, disappeared. So I gather my bags.