A Woman Scorned Turns Rejection Into an Art Form

In one moment of cross-species solidarity, a parrot -- female, one assumes -- shreds a copy of the thing with her beak. (In a nicely democratic, anti-market move, Calle has made many of these videos, and lots of other details from the project, available in a deluxe new book. It costs almost $100, but it includes several DVDs that, in more limited editions, would cost collectors hundreds of times that much.)

My favorite video shows a competitive markswoman whose response to the e-mail was to shoot it up. She's shown on a firing range, kitted up with the latest high-tech clothes and a gleaming rifle custom-machined just for her hands. The gun barrel barely twitches as she blows the note away. This is jilted woman as remorseless killing machine. Lucky for X that Calle is only an artist.

So what's this all about, then, as art? Gender difference and female solidarity, obviously. The boyfriend's face, the usual stuff of love-affair art, is missing from this installation. Instead, we get a fabulous composite portrait of a community of women, mostly skilled professionals, brought together by the actions of one loser guy. The weepy sentiment that has traditionally been seen as women's artistic territory is replaced by hard-nosed social analysis.

The piece is also deliberately comic. Laughter was the almost universal response of the pavilion's visitors -- far more women than men, at one count -- and that made the piece, for all its sad foundation, feel as cathartic as Caravaggio's violence.

By tending toward comedy, Calle also fights against the melodramatic cliches that art is still surrounded by -- cliches of the tortured artist, the lost romantic soul, the aesthetic spirit who feels more deeply than all others and often speaks in tongues. In this piece, Calle is more torturer than tortured, more glib Don Rickles than babbling Ophelia.

That analogy to insult comedy gets at a possible failing in the work. There's a sense that the whole thing is a one-liner; that you only need to hear the premise to get the piece's point. You could argue that "Take Care of Yourself" doesn't demand, or reward, the kind of close study that you'd give a Titian or Cézanne.

That sounds plausible at first, but in practice it isn't really true. Calle's execution is flawless, and its obsessive details matter deeply to her art's success. She gets precisely the right women to do her dirty work for her, and captures what they've done with a perfect artist's eye. Her footage of the markswoman, for instance, would have had less impact if it hadn't been so immaculately staged and shot. And it would have worked less well if it weren't such a contrast to another video that looks as though it's straight from a surveillance camera's tape. That one shows Calle herself undergoing couples counseling, with her ex-boyfriend represented by his e-mail, sitting on an empty chair.

There's plenty of visual variety on view in the pavilion. There are also lots of different entry points into the piece, which give it almost as many twists as a Titian.

The piece isn't a single one-liner, after all. It's a compendium of brilliant, very different cracks and anecdotes and shaggy-dog stories. It's a whole comic routine, almost an entire career in angry comedy. That's not bad for just one work of art from a woman who, as in the past, is sure to be heading, now, for something completely different.

The Venice Biennale continues through Nov. 21. Visit http://www.labiennale.org/en.