free-parking-blog: Sophie Calle, Last Seen…, 1991 In her series Last Seen…,

free-parking-blog:

Sophie Calle, Last Seen…, 1991

In her series Last Seen…, Sophie Calle creates a poetic remembrance of a famous crime: the theft in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston of five drawings by Degas, a vase, a Napoleonic eagle, and six paintings by Rembrandt, Flinck, Manet, and Vermeer. Gardner’s stipulation in her will that the arrangement of the galleries remain fixed ensures that a sense of loss remains a permanent fixture of the museum. Calle interviewed curators, guards, and other staff members, asking them to describe the absent works; their varied responses are displayed as a counterpart to photographs of the labels, empty pedestals, and bare wall hooks left behind after the theft. [via]

In exhibiting the photographs alongside people’s recollections of the missing artworks, Calle manages to articulate “the poetic picture that appears through the collective memories of everybody.”