JOE SACKSTEDER / A REVIEW

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Ex-Hotel to Exhibition: Walking Backwards Through The Ghosts of Orsay

Sophie Calle, Jean-Paul Demoule
English translations by Peter Behrman de Sinéty
Musée d’Orsay / Paris / March 15 – June 19, 2022
Reviewed by JOE SACKSTEDER

Near the exhibition’s exit, a copy of its book, The Elevator Resides in 501, a shrinking-down of the museum as a space’s exit-through-the-gift-shop strategy. But this book isn’t for sale (not here at least); rather, the book is folded involutedly into the narrative of The Ghosts of Orsay itself, an anthropologist of the distant future musing at the nature of this “curious arcanum.” It is “one of the last ‘books,’” discovered in a gray suitcase (also on display) in a museum “that was temporarily cast into darkness around the year 2020.” Thus the pandemic conditions under which Calle revisited her project of the late 1970s are given resonance. This scary context combines with other details to cast a pall of mortality on the project: the fear of darkness that caused Calle to vacate by night her earlier explorations of the ruined Hôtel Palais d’Orsay, her utterly unlit versions of the museum’s most famous paintings, and even her heartbreaking photographs of long-dead Orsay felines. The palimpsestic layering of the Palais d’Orsay (burned to the ground in 1871), the Hôtel Palais d’Orsay (closed to guests in 1973), and the Musée d’Orsay (mourned by this anthropologist of the future) confronts exhibition viewers with the relative thinness of a life’s or a species’ tenure. The Musée d’Orsay—this pillar of French culture I’d automatically added to my travel itinerary—less than a lifetime old, its “immortal” paintings and sculptures only a few lifetimes older, all of them fragile, doomed to some form of ruin let’s hope more than a few lifetimes in the future. A further layer of desolation is the one brought about imaginatively by Calle’s project; “Yet this book is itself a kind of ruined monument,” the anthropologist considers, “a final attempt to transmit a message to potential future generations.”

The renovation of the Hôtel Palais d’Orsay that replaced room 501 with an elevator shaft—hence the title of the artist’s book—contributed not just to the exhibition’s themes of haunting and erasure, but also to a joke about aesthetics of the old and the new: “Could the ‘emergency’ be to escape from this art, often described as ‘academic,’ and flee in search of more contemporary artistic forms?” Both escaping-the-museum and getting-into-the-museum (for culturally or aesthetically underrepresented groups) are rallying cries often shouted in the same breath—and ones that are sometimes experienced within museum spaces, an example being Nicholas Galanin’s 2022 Architecture of return, escape (British Museum), a blueprint of the titular space on blue deer hide, an Ariadne thread of dotted red lines leading indigenous artifacts to freedom. It’s a perceivable paradox that the best attempts of curators usually fail make a generative one—but in Calle’s knowing hands the paradox helps play into the short-circuiting of the space itself, the contradictions in its layers of temporality and utility.

A previous guest of the Hôtel Palais d’Orsay on whom Calle becomes fixated, one of her Ghosts perhaps, is a man named Marius David, though he stayed there—as far as we know—just for one night, October 26th, 1937. Of the check-in cards that Calle liberated from the hotel and displays in this exhibition, only David stayed in 501, the room Calle chose as her “refuge” in 1979. She replicates what little she could turn up about Marius David’s life as well as the minor events that took place that day in Paris, as described by newspapers: “the fit of madness of a sailor in Argenteuil who threw his daughters into the river, the kidnapping of Maroussia the Tzigane dancer, the publication of Fernandel’s memoires, and the opening of the 1937 Radical-Socialist concert.” What can be salvaged has a striking effect, the viewer understanding that a whole life and a whole day would have gone relatively lost, unconsidered in its individuality for the remainder of history, if not for one weird project’s embrace of indeterminacy and the coincidence of two strangers’ spatial cohabitation separated by decades.

Ghosts is a creation feigning confusion about the nature of its own creator. One description asks, of a photo of Calle, “Is she here because she likes ruins, or has she come to bring ruin?” Renovation is the ruins of ruins, and the Musée d’Orsay forgets a hotel as surely as museums mislabel the past—as categorizable, as stable, as near, as long ago. Denovation… revetation… we lack a word closer than restore for “to make old again.” The exhibition demonstrates the impossibility of doing so by hijacking a nostalgic retrospective, fictionalizing the museum’s future evacuation, and pointing out the cracked paint below a window in Orsay’s here and now, the entropic resumption of a slower re-ruin.

The elegiac encroachment of darkness in Ghosts is reminiscent of the increasing obtrusion of the word night into sample sentences of Anne Carson’s Nox, a pseudo-referential word-by-word translation of Catullus’s 101. For example, demonstrating the use of meseras in a sentence, Carson writes, “nocte fratris quam ipso frater miserior: made sadder by the brother’s night than the brother himself.” As Nox is a reflection on the death of her estranged brother, the word night becomes an algebraic variable for all that Carson can’t solve for. Above the photographs of famous Orsay paintings in darkness, Calle combines their titles into an ode of her own: “At the Moulin de la Galette, the floor scrapers and the little fourteen-year-old dancer luncheon on the grass with Olympia, and still they speak of the origin of the world as the starry night descends upon the poppy field.”

The display of Hôtel Palais d’Orsay objects from Calle’s collection mimics museums’ sacred curation of similar objects rendered more important by their ancientness. The text in dark gray is a relatively factual description of each object in its historical context, the text in blue humorously inaccurate guesswork by an uninitiated anthropologist (in the artist’s book, the blue text is presented before the gray). Written by French archaeologist Jean-Paul Demoule, the blue text uses the technique of defamiliarization famously described in Viktor Shklovsky’s 1917 essay “Art as Technique” and sometimes taught to college students via Horace Miner’s 1956 American Anthropologist essay “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” which parodies both the hygiene obsession of Americans and the colonial, exoticizing gaze of classical anthropology as a discipline. Of the telephone receiver, this defamiliarizing voice surmises, “Note that the instructions above the ‘office’ signal light are in French, while those above the ‘Network’ light are in English, indicating that the communication devices now absent from the hooks did not communicate in the same language.” This was a description further disorienting for someone like me who spent my hours in the exhibition reading Peter Behrman de Sinéty’s English translation of Calle’s and Demoule’s words on my iPhone; when the time presented itself for me to reflect on Ghosts, I decided that that adding a third layer of text to the displayed items would be an apt approach. 

There are different and self-contradictory layers of defamiliarization occurring in Ghosts, as it seems that the just-quoted voice could not be the same one that describes the finding of the artist’s book, The Elevator Resides in 501, despite a strong resemblance, as the former is contained within that discovered book. The latter voice seems thoroughly ignorant of ancient cultures, while the former possesses strangely robust niche knowledge. Demoule’s persona compares the “ancient weapon” of a doorknob to “hammer throwing in athletics or the bolas of the native peoples of Patagonia and of the Gauchos, an object also found among the Inuit and Japan.” Messy comparisons, for sure, but one that comes from a place of some possessed knowledge, this speaker suffering from a lacuna of worldliness the shape of the Hôtel Palais d’Orsay and every object it ever contained. The decontextualization and the display of such items reveal what philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” would describe as each object’s Zeugsein, “the equipmental being of the equipment.” Also its aletheia, “the unconcealedness of its being.” Or, to adapt Shklovsky’s most famous quote, this art “makes the knob knobby.” Of course, Heidegger is describing Vincent van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes—and Calle elsewhere in the exhibition photographs van Gogh paintings in darkness, a reconcealing that perhaps unconceals something more than the truth of a man’s face.

Our defamiliarizing anthropologist’s funniest and most moving confusion pertains to an accumulation of hotel work orders to a maintenance staffer named Oddo—to whom Demoule keeps returning with the supposition that Oddo was a deity beseeched by the hotel inhabitants for divine intervention. Near the exhibition’s exit and at the very end of the artist’s book is Calle’s accumulation of all the work orders into a giant block of crimped red text, which she then turns into an erasure poem that makes visible the labor that kept ruin at bay for a time, an act of artistic de-reification that recalls Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ 1969 “Maintenance Art Manifesto”—or a séance, a prayer: “AU DOS… like a sign from Oddo, Odo, Mr. Audau, my Orsay ghost.”

In 1978, between the time when the Gare d’Orsay and its hotel fell into ruin and it was renovated into the Musée d’Orsay, conceptual artist Sophie Calle noticed a little wooden door while walking the quays of the Seine and through it gained entrance to a ghostly structure bearing traces of its oppulent past. A few months later she began haunting the building during the day, taking photographs, practicing her Robert Wilson moves in the ballroom, and sitting on a mattress in room 501 of the station’s hotel, “waiting for something.” This was before her voyeuristic work documenting a surveilled stranger in Suite Vinettiene and her stint as a note-taking chambermaid in The Hotel, a project akin to The Ghosts of Orsay. This exhibition, which ran from March 15th to June 19th, 2022, at the Musée d’Orsay, displayed photographs she took and objects and documents she collected during her time squatting in the pre-renovated building. She was invited back to the museum during the pandemic to curate the display of her collection and explore the building’s current state with camera and flashlight in hand. What began with disorder, confusion, and danger culminates 40 years later in Calle’s trespassing displayed with the greatest of care, clarity, and prestige. The secret wish of many an iconoclastic artist. But the exhibition’s focus on spectral imagery decenters retrospective celebration in favor of playful obsession with the clash of entropy and personal stasis—a tension embodied by hotels. Wayne Koestebaum, in his 2007 autotheory novel Hotel Theory, examines the hotel as a space that exemplifies Heidegger’s notion that the “primordial phenomenon” of human life is that of “not-being-at-home,” a state which he then transposes to writing itself, what he calls “hotel prose”: “Concentrating on my own sentences, converting intuitions into phrases—this process feels like staring directly at time.”

Staring directly at time. For the exhibition’s wealth of wonders, this review itself has risked entirely erasing details I found most haunting: an old blueprint of the fifth floor of the hotel in which room 501 is inexplicably effaced, two travelers painted over in the white snow of Cuno Amiet’s Deep Winter, their shadows visible through the back of the canvas. Calle is sensitive to such gaps, and how the hypervisibility of an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay provides no full respite from the ineffability of one’s own ghostliness even during lived life. In reference to a pilfered notebook displaying meticulous measurements of the building’s consumption of gas and other resources in 1971, Demoule’s accompanying text blurts out in non sequitur fashion an “explanation” that couldn’t help itself from being spoken somewhere: “This might lead us to a third hypothesis: that a conceptual artist, on the cusp of accomplishing her oeuvre, was so misunderstood that she finally departed, evanescent and ghostly, with her first (and last) works, and now wanders endlessly through an immense abandoned building, like her encrypted notebooks.” In addition to hotels’ uniformity and their fabricated likeness to home, they’re uncanny in Freudian terms for the catering to concealment that Calle herself enjoyed. Koestenbaum writes that the hotel, “belonging to a continuum of habitations, including prison and hospice, is haunted by what Heidegger calls ‘being-toward-the-end.’” The Hôtel Palais d’Orsay’s end was there at Calle’s artistic beginning, and it represents an uncanniness twice-removed for Calle to return near the end of her life and find a space marked by uniformity and anonymity transformed into one of ultimate curation and show. Orsay, where artists and hotels and palaces will continue to perform their staged immortality—at least until the next time darkness falls.

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Joe Sacksteder is the author of Make/Shift (Sarabande Books), Driftless Quintet (Schaffner Press), and the forthcoming experimental horror novel Hack House (Astrophil Press). His work has been featured in The Atlantic's culture roundup, and recent publications include Conjunctions, The Offing, West Branch, DIAGRAM, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He has a PhD from the University of Utah and currently lives and teaches in Virginia.