I. The optic.
[Mary Ellen] Carroll’s current exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People,” . . .took seven years of planning, and it shows. The curator, Rebecca Matalon, worked with the artist, known also as MEC, to showcase some forty years of often confoundingly immaterial work. The spine of the exhibition, structured around six themes — Doubling, Climate, Policy, Media, Sovereignty, and Being—is the artist’s ever-growing library of index cards [e.g.]. . . .
ON JANUARY 17, 1991, the day the Gulf War became the first war broadcast live on television, MEC wrote the following lines on an index card: “we are living in a political epoch, everything is about policy. but—who (cnn) gets to participate (technology) in this process simultaneously 24/7 there are personal policies, workplace policies, government, community, etc. policy is/as a material.”
Matalon, when I met her in Houston, suggested to me that nearly everything Carroll has made could be read through the lens provided by this one card. In her catalogue essay she went further, asking whether MEC’s entire career is one long performance devoted to bearing out the idea that the propositional and the real, the political and the practical, are not only mutually contingent, but inseparable.
(Kat Herriman. “Pushing Paper: Kat Herriman on Mary Ellen Carroll’s daredevil encounters with red tape.” Artforum [November 2026]: 39 -43; my bold)
II. An application.
against policy (a tiny manifesto): The notion of “policy” presumes a state or governing apparatus which imposes its will on others. “Policy” is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their affairs are to be conducted. By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs.
(David Graeber [2004]. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Prickly Paradigm #14. Prickly Paradigm Press. The University of Chicago Press.
WRONG. Life’s too sketchy to write up policy and politics like that.
