When people talk about “flipping” houses, they usually mean buying real estate at a low price, giving the property a quick polish of renovation, and then selling at a profit. In her newest creation, however, New York City-based conceptual artist and chef Mary Ellen Carroll is literally flipping a Texas home around 180 degrees. In the process, she’s challenging assumptions about every aspect of domestic architecture—that’s everything and the kitchen sink. Carroll’s topsy-turvy project is being realized in Houston, she explains, because it is the largest metropolitan area in America that doesn’t have a formal zoning code for residences.
In a neighborhood called Sharpstown, she purchased a three-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot tract house (built in 1954) that structural engineers, following her instructions, will soon lift and spin halfway around, before returning it to its foundation and reconnecting all systems. The result, she says, will “reprogram” the structure from a residential building to a commercial or public-use space. “Everything I do is about questioning,” Carroll explains. “In Sharpstown, I’m looking at decisions related to design and urban planning. What is front? What is back? What are the invisible processes that impose consistencies in how people live?”
Not content to simply flip the house, Carroll envisioned ways to deconstruct its plumbing, too. For help with this, she turned to the Kohler Company in Wisconsin, the nation’s largest manufacturer of plumbing materials. Since 1974, Kohler has operated Arts/Industry, an unusual program that invites artists to experiment with the company’s facilities and industrial technologies. “We try to select artists doing extraordinary work, who will benefit from exposure to the factory and create new ways of thinking among our factory associates,” says Ruth Kohler, director of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, which administers Arts/Industry. “We were intrigued by Mary Ellen’s mind and the conceptual nature of her work, particularly when we learned about the house in Texas.”
Carroll, 46, who regularly exhibits her work at galleries and institutions around the world, from the Whitney Museum in New York to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, is a recipient of both Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. Whether her creations involve crashing a 1985 Buick Riviera into Munich’s Museum für Völkerkunde or walking out of her apartment door penniless with only her passport and the clothes on her back for a six-week visit to Argentina, she prides herself on not having a signature style.
On the contrary, she’s equally comfortable creating with neon, photography, ceramics, or food—the last in an ongoing series of performance pieces she calls “itinerant gastronomy,” in which she and her collaborator, Donna Wingate, cook exceedingly elaborate meals in inhospitable settings. (When was the last time you tried to deep-fry brioche donuts and serve them with chestnut purée or make veal sausage from scratch while perched on the Goethals Bridge, between Staten Island and New Jersey?) If there’s any consistency to her oeuvre, it’s that her creations all share a certain degree of theatricality and tricksterism and are conceived to frustrate easy assumptions about what constitutes a work of art. Carroll demystifies her sense of conceptual art by likening it to cooking. “A really great recipe is still great, whether or not the dish is ever prepared,” she says. “My exploration tends to be less about representation, more about language.”
Carroll admits to having felt overwhelmed at first when she was set loose at Kohler. “The factory floor is the size of many football fields. There was such a complete difference in scale between what I can do alone in my studio and here with machines and processes that are all designed to produce large quantities of things with incredible efficiency.” One day, while observing the manufacture of sinks, Carroll discovered that pads made of Styrofoam—a material chosen because it melts away when the porcelain is fired inside the kiln—are used to cushion the product as it is transported on the kiln car. With her inside-out approach to the Sharpstown house, Carroll immediately decided that she wanted to make a kitchen sink using Styrofoam packing material as a mold.
Workers at Kohler were initially dubious, and their trepidation seemed justified when several early prototypes collapsed or otherwise failed to take shape. “I thought it would be simple, but it turned out to be no end of trouble,” Carroll recalls. “The interesting thing about being an artist, though, is you can only learn if you are willing to fail. And what’s incredible is that when the factory workers saw my persistence, they were willing to match my efforts every step of the way.”
This didn’t prevent them, though, from dubbing the amorphously shaped white sink that resulted the “Flintstone” model, as if the television-cartoon housewife Wilma might use it to clean up after a dinner of dinosaur steaks. Ruth Kohler sees the workers’ teasing as an essential part of the process. “Sometimes our factory associates think the visiting artists are dilettantes, simply playing at what they do,” she says. “But someone like Mary Ellen, who is so articulate about her work, has a big impact on their lives. As they began to feel more comfortable with her, they were even able to critique her work, but in a nice way.”
That her creations invite such response was noted, too, by Charles Renfro, the project architect for the newly constructed home of the Institute of Contemporary Art museum, in Boston. While it was still under construction, Carroll cooked one of her “itinerant gastronomy” dinners—including oyster soup with salsify, butternut-squash risotto, and panfried snapper with parsnip purée and balsamic-glazed red onions—on-site for a group of guests that included Renfro, Harvard professor Homi Bhabha, and actor John Malkovich. Watching her in action that evening, Renfro says he was amazed by Carroll’s unique combination of talents. “Mary Ellen’s investigations are fueled by a kind of childish curiosity, but combined with a very sophisticated adult’s resourcefulness. It makes her slightly dangerous. That night at the ICA, for instance, rather than set up a catering zone off-site, in another room, she put all the equipment around the main table, clearly making a point about the process of cooking,” Renfro recalls. “It was about stripping off the sheen of effortlessness and showing that there really is work and love and energy involved in this thing she is doing for you.”
By designing a kitchen sink that’s impossible to ignore, Mary Ellen Carroll has shown herself to be the rare magician who can make a trick more mysterious by revealing how it’s done.