Mary Ellen Carroll: MEC

Despite an oeuvre spanning more than 20 years and a disavowal of any signature style, Mary Ellen Carroll has, throughout her career, been investigating a single, fundamental question: What is a work of art? The resulting multifarious, provocative, and often wry outpouring in architecture, writing, performance, photography, filmmaking, printmaking, sculpture, and painting has been collected into this book--the New York conceptual artist's long-awaited first monograph. Carroll's work interrogates the relationship between subjectivity, language, and power; at its core is a dedication to political and social critique. The touchstones of her practice are the double, the imitation, and the copy, and these motifs are applied to a range of ends--from conjuring the unheimlich to probing the means of distribution and interpretation of the work of art. A Carroll piece may involve something as seemingly effortless as trademarking an idea by another artist or as complex and bold as walking out th