Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
“…It takes a long time, years, to figure out for oneself what actually unites the work and what you’re doing. On some level, the point of knowing is that you can know when it’s time to change it. I think that initially you begin your practice as an artist somewhat intuitively. Then, when you produce more work and are faced with the question, What will I do next?--when you take up the self-conscious act of repetition or reinforcement--that’s where cognition comes in. At least with my own practice that’s how it was. And so, early on in my career, as a result of this self-interrogation, I decided to not develop a signature style. I do have a couple of tenets, however. I approach each idea for an artwork by asking, What is the problem I am trying to solve here? I owe that to having a math and science background. Beyond that, my primary concern is to investigate what a work of art is, and I mean that with reference to Heidegger and his ideas of thingness and being.” Mary Ellen Carroll, quoted, in conversation with Hamza Walker
Published by Dancing Foxes Press. Edited by Rebecca Matalon, Karen Kelly, Barbara Schroeder. Introduction and text by Rebecca Matalon. Text by D. Graham Burnett, Pamela M. Lee, Iman Mersal, Kathryn Scanlan. Interviews by David Joselit, Hamza Walker.
Published with Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Working across performance, publishing, urban intervention and long-term social engagement, New York–based artist Mary Ellen Carroll (born 1961) uses conversation, contracts, zoning codes and bureaucratic processes as the key components of their conceptual language. Their practice unfolds through law, architecture and lived systems rather than discrete objects. The artist often operates in real time and in public view, embracing uncertainty, risk and contradiction as generative conditions. How To Talk Dirty and Influence People offers a comprehensive overview of Carroll’s work since the 1980s. Bringing together performance documentation, new critical essays, commissioned fiction and poetry and conversations with the artist, this publication presents the oeuvre of an artist whose work insists that speech, negotiation and persistence are powerful tools for reshaping social reality.
Published by Onestar Press. Essay by Peter Herbstreuth.
In this artist's book whose title says it all, Carroll takes the issue of the normative in relation to aesthetics and identification in photography from the universal to the particular--where all meanings exist subjectively.
PUBLISHER Onestar Press
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 5.5 x 8.75 in. / 142 pgs / 68 bw
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 3/2/2004 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2004
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780964255852TRADE List Price: $39.95 CAD $50.00
Mary Ellen Carroll: All The Men Who Think They Can Be Me