When Sophie Calle’s lover dumped her by email, she turned life into art. Fisun Güner on a woman who binds the helpless and confessional to the coolly conceptual

The first time that Sophie Calle, France's most celebrated conceptual artist, entered a contemporary art gallery, it was not to see a big-name artist's work, but to exhibit her own. The work in question was Les Dormeurs (The Sleepers), and it became an artwork entirely by accident, following a chance meeting with an art critic whose wife had told him about her. And that is how Calle, who had never even been to art school, became an artist - accidentally.

The Sleepers was exhibited in Paris in 1979. Like most other projects of Calle's over the past 30 years, it is composed of photographs and text and involves an intimate dialogue with strangers. For that first piece, conceived originally as a diversion or distraction rather than an artwork, she invited 24 strangers to sleep in her empty bed - not all at once, but singly, in eight-hour shifts and over the course of nine days. (At least one of the men involved had hoped he was being invited to an orgy.) The deal was that she would ask her guests to tell her something about themselves and then photograph them every hour as they slept. She also asked each of them how old they had been when they had last wet the bed.

Calle has said that the idea came to her after she began following strangers on the streets of Paris and photographing them, like a private detective. Initially, she had no purpose other than to relieve her loneliness: in her mid-twenties, with no job and few friends, Calle was at a loss what to do with herself, having returned to the city of her birth after several years spent travelling abroad. This psychogeographical dérive around Paris was a way of reacquainting herself with the rhythms of the city and the lives of its inhabitants. The idea for The Sleepers finally came to her when a friend asked Calle if she could use her bed.

Although the circumstances of the work's creation were largely fortuitous, Calle cannot claim to have been a complete ingénue when it came to art. Her father, an oncologist, was an avid collector of conceptual art, and she has always said that the reason she became an artist was that she wanted to seduce him.

Perhaps because they are steeped in the tradition of psychoanalysis, French female artists often seem to be obsessed with their fathers. One thinks, for example, of Louise Bourgeois and the shock of what Daddy got up to in the garden shed with the family governess, an in­cident that has informed Bourgeois's work for the past 70 years.

As for Calle's father, he approved of his daughter's accidental career, though he was to make clear his disapproval of one artistic project of hers: he asked her not to publish her 1989 book La Striptease (The Striptease), which documented her activities as a stripper at a club in the Pigalle. This time, she chose to play the rebellious daughter and went ahead and published. Like much of the body and performance art of the period, her apprenticeship in striptease can be interpreted as a cleverly subversive, knowingly counter-intuitive feminist intervention - though her motives remain somewhat vague, and seem to have had as much to do with the need to earn a living as with the intricacies of radical gender theory.

These images are not on display in Calle's first UK retrospective, now running at the White­chapel Gallery. It is possible that she would rather forget them, because they lack the multilayered subtlety of her subsequent work, reproducing instead the lumbering clichés of the pudenda-in-your-face feminist art of the late Seventies. The Striptease has dated badly, and it may well have been the crassness of its execution - as much as the explicitness of its sexual content - to which Calle's father, a highly cultivated man, was objecting.

You will, however, find The Sleepers at the Whitechapel, beside a selection of other works that leads the viewer through each decade of her life as a practising artist. These emotionally resonant projects - one journalist memorably described Calle as the "Marcel Duchamp of emotional dirty laundry" - are mostly presented through small-format photographs.

All are accompanied by text couched in Calle's elegant, spare, evocative prose. Her writing (and here one must praise the translation) is
altogether different from the drearily desiccated "objective" documentary style of most conceptualists. Andrea Tarsia, the curator of the Whitechapel show, says that her writing reminds him of Raymond Carver, which is praise indeed.

The centrepiece of this exhibition is undeniably Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself), the ambitious and lavishly staged film, photo, performance and text work that was the star attraction at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and which occupies the whole of the ground-floor gallery at the Whitechapel. Presented here in its first English translation, Take Care of Yourself is aurally and visually sumptuous, with high-quality images and music. But ultimately it is the text, as well as the clever deconstruction of text, that really draw in the viewer and sustain his attention. You might say that the installation is one part intellectually ludic French theory and two parts chick-lit. Alternatively, one could see it as a thrillingly open-ended detective story by a female equivalent of Paul Auster, the American author who is Calle's best-known collaborator.

Take Care of Yourself unpicks ("eviscerates" might be a better word) a circumloquacious email sent to Calle by a lover who was leaving her. The electronic missive is written in an introspective and self-consciously literary style, but is also blandly predictable, an elegant variation on that old line: "It's not you, it's me." It is by turns overweeningly self-justifying and accusatory. And for all its highfalutin Gallic panache, it ends flatly, with those four dreary words of the title: "Take care of yourself."

It didn't take Calle long to work out exactly how to take care of herself: by turning her life into art. She sent her lover's message to 107 other women, asking that each of them analyse the text from her particular professional perspective. The correspondents included a psychiatrist, a lexicographer, a crossword-setter, a psychologist, a lawyer and a Talmudic scholar.

Each feasted upon the wordy email and tore it and, occasionally, the writer apart, some assessing his character with pitiless, dispassionate scorn, others deflating it with clever wit and playfulness. The psychologist, for example, says that the lover "is an authentic manipulator, perverse, psychologically damaged and/or a great writer". The lexicographer, my personal favourite, stitches together phrases from the text with quotations taken from classic novels, to great effect. Thus Jane Austen laments: "You really are a very sad girl and do not know how to take care of yourself."

Take Care of Yourself erects a towering babel of feminine scorn, but the overall effect is closer to one of comic deflation, of female rage and male ego. The work may have started off as a substitute for therapy, but it is better understood as a kind of sublimation in the purest sense, for it is much more than just confessional.

Other works in the exhibition show Calle submitting her will to that of others in ritualised game-playing. Auster gives her a list of things to do in New York in order to make the city a nicer, brighter place: she keeps a note of the quota of smiles given and smiles received. On the turning of her Tarot cards, a clairvoyant instructs her to travel to a small French town and delight in the people she meets and the coincidences she observes. She asks strangers in the Bronx to lead her to a place of their choosing in their run-down neighbourhood. "I like being in control and I like losing control," she says. "Following the rules of others is restful. A way not to have to think - to be trapped in a game and to follow it."

The most powerful work in this exhibition, however, is possibly the quietest. Like all Calle's best work, it is about loss and absence. Pas pu saisir la mort (Couldn't Capture Death, 2007) features a video of her dying mother, as the artist's elegiac text enumerates a list of "last" things her mother performed or prepared: "a last party", "a last poem", "a last journey". It is a profoundly beautiful piece of writing, and a reminder that a last breath - taken, we are told, "somewhere between 3:02 and 3:13" - is "impossible to capture".

“Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers" is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London E1, until 3 January 2010

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