Sophie <3 Grégoire scrawled on a notebook: that is the way it would have gone down in an ordinary relationship. But because we are talking about high rollers in the French arts scene, Grégoire Boullier dedicated a genre-bending book to the conceptual artist Sophie Calle in 2004. In return, she dedicated, after a fashion, a major traveling art show to him. Or, rather, to telling him to fuck off.

In the book, released in English in 2006 as The Mystery Guest, Boullier recounts his invitation-by an ex-girlfriend to whom he hadn't spoken in years-to be the eponymous "mystery guest" at Calle's thirty-seventh birthday party in 1990. Every year in the '80s and early '90s, she hosted a birthday party to which she'd invite the number of guests corresponding to the age she was turning, and to which one guest would bring someone Calle didn't know and who would symbolize The Future, in all its unpredictability.

Sometime between then and now, there was love and there was loss.

Boullier's appointment as mystery guest was productive for both him and Calle: they commenced a long-term relationship. Then, suddenly, he broke it off, in an e-mail ending "Prenez soin de vous," which translates to "Take care of yourself," also the title of Calle's show, first presented as the French submission to the 2007 Venice Biennale and now at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea until June 6.

Calle's work from the 1970s and '80s are voyeuristic, stunts like calling the people in an address book she had found in the street to ask them about the owner. Her recent work is more consistently focused on herself-but is always funny, always playful, without ever being self-deprecating in the standard sense and without losing its edge of menace and paranoia. For "Take Care of Yourself," she has enlisted over a hundred women of various backgrounds and professions to read Boullier's break-up email and respond to it. Singers sing it, criminologists analyze the author's psyche, proofreaders dissect its grammar. Some of the names are familiar-Jeanne Moreau, Laurie Anderson, Feist-but most are unknown members of the haute bourgeoisie, lawyers, doctors, and scholars.

Calle herself is almost absent from the work, appearing only in a video in which she talks to a family counselor about the relationship and its aftermath, while sitting next to a chair containing a printout of the email. It's her intention that the two protagonists in this drama remain invisible (it would be an even stronger show if she'd left herself out entirely). Yet of course they dominate the proceedings, particularly Boullier, whose name doesn't appear once; the email ends with an "X," but it's unclear whether this was Boullier's own gesture or Calle's redaction.

Calle's point is about the force people exert in absence, and the spectacle of these successful women forced to chase a man's shadow is intensely melancholy.

Also melancholy is that, even with hugely blown-up photos of most of the women reading the email alongside the displays of the responses they produced, they remain ciphers. The artist of whom the exercise is most reminiscent is Vanessa Beecroft, who employs armies of models-always female, almost always scantily clad-in the performance of silent, affectless, nearly motionless rituals. Calle's women are accomplished and prosperous, but they're as inaccessible as Beecroft's. They do their work diligently and go home; they are unaware of one another and there's no sense of feminist celebration or mutual regard. (This may be being a woman today.) It's eerie that a show so obsessed with emotion is so devoid of personalities, but Calle identifies that as the way we live now.

Yet there is something affecting about everyone's diligent, guild-like professionalism-and perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the show at this particular moment is seeing so many people so happily employed, particularly women.

And women do seem to have the last laugh: the literary scholar who reads the email for textual antecedents identifies "Prenez soin de vous," Boullier's send-off, from the work of Madame de Sévigné, the great 17th-century French letter writer. But Calle is too smart to think that professional success has meant that women have "won" anything. She's got her name in big letters outside of the Paula Cooper Gallery, of course. But the size of both the name and the crowds enticed by it are dwarfed by those of Picasso at the Gagosian next door.

Previously: On Daphne Merkin

Zachary Woolfe grew up on the South Shore of Long Island, tutors Upper East Side high-schoolers by afternoon/early evening, and enjoys opera and himself. He also writes about the U.S. Open for The New York Observer.