"I'm getting an erection just thinking about it" is not usually how people today refer to the idea of marriage. Being legally bound and financially joined to someone has a clichéd reputation for giving (avoidant or unable-to-make-up-their-mind) partners cold feet when pressed for commitment. Understandably, miscommunication is usually the biggest issue in relationships, with people often opting to follow their interpretations of their partners' words and actions, rather than clarifying directly with their partners what it is that they're interpreting. People tend to gloss over how assuming does not equal knowing, and implying does not equal communicating. Yet relationships continue, even if their language languishes in a cesspool of apologies that start with the words "I thought you meant" or "What I meant was."
But thinking about being married to Sophie Calle as he watches her, his legally wedded bride with whom his miscommunication festers, is enough to give Greg Shephard an erection—or so he said 33 years ago. The two artists, partners in an already declining relationship at the time, had set out on a road trip from New York to California on January 3, 1992. Calle proposed making a film of their journey in order to convince Shephard to drive her cross-country for her teaching position. Each having brought their own camcorder, they filmed 60 hours of their two-week trip, culminating in the 76-minute documentary No Sex Last Night (Double Blind). Through low-resolution amateur footage and film stills inspired by Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962), No Sex reveals the criticisms, hopes, fears, and withholdings of relationship (mis)communication told through two separate, but simultaneous, first-person perspectives.
Often situated in roadside diners or auto-body shops, the travelogue is narrated by the raw, and sometimes biting, voice-overs of Calle and Shephard's inner-thoughts about themselves and the other: Calle, who wants to get married when they reach Las Vegas to fulfill a deep desire to no longer be "an old maid," and Shephard, whose voice-over says at one point, "Why am I here? If you asked me I would say, 'To do this project.'" He is burdened by his guilty lack of desire for Calle, whose romantic wants annoy him. They each think the other is narcissistic. Their incompatibility, which they forcibly ignore as they both cannot afford to deviate from the original plan once on the road, is painful to witness, but also refreshing in a selfish way: how often are we given insight into another's thoughts?
Both artists recorded diary entries on their own camcorders, kept private from the other. Later in the year, with a divorce on the horizon, they worked on editing the film together, portraying themselves as a woman focused on her solitude and jealousies, and a man obsessed with his car who avoided intimacy. Each morning, Calle would film their unmade hotel bed and report, "No sex last night." Only after more than two weeks of sexlessness, when they hesitantly agree to marry in Vegas at a drive-through chapel, does Calle finally show their morning sheets and say, "Yes." In True Stories (1994), her book of memoir anecdotes accompanied by photographs, Calle writes of her road trip consummation: "Later he confessed that his desire sprang from the fact I was now his wife. An erection was the first thing marriage had given me."
Known for her voyeuristic photo-textual projects over the decades, Calle is a conceptual artist who uses sociological investigation as a medium for presenting people candidly, often without their knowledge. Having been criticized, including by Shephard, for invading people's privacy for the sake of her projects, No Sex Last Night places Calle in the position of exposed subject, revealing the sometimes unflattering sides of her own inner-thoughts while also making her the target of Shephard's discontented voice-over.
"I guess the video kept us together. Through it we grew very close, but now that it's finished, what will become of us?" Shephard asks himself toward the end. "I learned lying became the easiest compromise, and a way to be somewhere else. I never understood when someone was affected by me because, in a way, I was never really there." Shephard, who faltered for days over agreeing to the Vegas wedding, had been writing to women back in New York throughout their road trip, and continued to do so while trying to make his shotgun marriage work with Calle. "I realized that all this year we have been three," she says, upon her discovery of his love letters. Nobody likes feeling lonely, but sometimes being in a relationship can still leave us feeling entirely alone. And no amount of camcorder footage, communication, or erections can bridge that gap of incompatibility.
No Sex Last Night (Double Blind) screens at Spectacle tomorrow night, February 27, as part of the series "Anti-Valentines."
