Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished

Just to get this out of the way: the depressing aspect of Sophie Calle’s Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished is the fact that its least interesting ideas still are vastly better than anything we typically come up with. I. Not we. No doubt, you, the reader of these words, has vastly more interesting and inspiring ideas than I do. Clearly. But we, yes, you and I, probably think of many (most?) of them the way the French artist does (as evidenced in the book): They’re either not interesting enough, or we don’t follow through, or for some reason they don’t pan out, or they go sideways or lead down the wrong path. Life, after all, leaves behind a graveyard of those kinds of ideas. And who likes turning around to look at all of those corpses, some of them still festering? Well, Sophie Calle does. Or maybe she doesn’t. Because that’s the thing with this particular artist: as a viewer, you can’t tell. Calle has never merely gone through the motions. Instead, when she engages with something…