ABSTRACT
Such thoughts come to mind amidst a temporary installation by the French-born artist Sophie Calle at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, London, Freud’s last home and work place, and now preserved as the Freud Museum. Here Sophie Calle has followed in a tradition of other artists including Susan Hiller and Cornelia Parker by installing her work between the folds of the museum’s artefacts. Calle’s project, Appointment, takes the form of a sequence of thirty short text pieces interspersed with related objects, some of which draw upon the Freud archive itself (Freud’s overcoat, wedding ring, etc.) and some constructed scenarios introducing new but equally mundane objects to the collection. As a spectator you are never secure that the identities being discussed in the small texts are Calle or someone autobiographically close to her, whether it is the six-year-old who took to stripping in the elevator on the way to her grandparents’ sixth-floor apartment, or the 27-yearold stripper whose blonde wig is torn off by a colleague in a fight. Some of the sequences are sombre; others are apparently lighter, but with a touch of foreboding (see Figure 9.1).
