ew York based artist, Mary Ellen Carroll recently invited actors to attend an open audition to be her.
“…Female or feminine male (28 - 40), tall (5’10” +), lanky, brunette, hazel eyes, intelligent…dry wit, not so ugly, strong character, for role as post-conceptual artist in New York.” Assured that they would be paid and that there would be no nudity, Carroll received as wide a variety as could be humanly possible for such a precise physical brief: the publicity shots which are reproduced in this book feature women and men who black, white, big, small, bald, hirsute and uncannily nearly all widely grinning. Now I have never met Carroll but I am assuming that all these would-be doppelgangers present no clear or present danger to her in terms of anatomical exactitude; to revisit that old legend, she is safe that she will not die in the near future through meeting with them. Baudrillard’s universally well-thumbed concept of the simulacrum - the copy without an original - grimaces at us from the pages of, illustrating, in a most graphic manner, that our current notions of culture and society as a shifting flux of undifferentiated images and signs are most notably reinforced when reproduction and reproducibility are in play, especially when has been an exact outline of what the original should have been like. I wonder if one of the photographs is actually her…
Maria Fusco, London.

Mary Ellen Carroll
All the men who think they can be me
Published February 2004

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