Black and White Photograph
Image: 15.737 × 10.68 in. (27 × 40 cm.)
Paper: 16 x 20 in. (40.64 x 50.8 cm

The performance — Whatever It Takes took place on February 3, 2007 in Memphis, Tennessee where Mary Ellen Carroll had an exhibition at the Power House curated by Peter Fleissig. Carroll donned a polar bear mascot suit — a plurality of comedians were surveyed and ultimately the comic Demetri Martin noted that the polar bear was the funniest mascot. This determination was the impetus for a mascot suit to be made and allowed Carroll the choice ‘to be’ an escaped Haley, the female polar bear that FedEx relocated from Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo to the Memphis Zoo in 2006. This was another work in their doppelgänger series, expanding being to animism. Wearing the suit, Carroll climbed the ninety-foot dead smokestack at the exhibition space the Power House where they were having an exhibition in the former power station for the main train station in Memphis, while carrying an Illy tin filled with their father’s ashes as an “auto-fiction” prop. When the top of the smokestack was reached,  Carroll opened the patented resealable Illy container and poured half of the remains down the chimney, reserving the rest the work Illy.

In that decade, there had been a rash of escaped animals from zoos who posed a threat to humans. In 2007 the gorilla Bokito escaped from his enclosure in Amsterdam and attacked a woman who made daily visits to see him. A primate expert attributed the gorilla’s behavior to puberty and the woman’s to …. Whatever It Takes makes comic reference to this phenomenon, though recourse on the part of the viewer to King Kong is perhaps inevitable. The piece has at its foundation the notion of corporate sponsorship and bears the influence of the daredevil performance work of Yves Klein and Roman Signer; the philosophical investigation of humor by Henri Bergson, Swift, is invoked as well. Bergson describes satire as akin to watching a marionette being manipulated. The viewer thinks that someone else is pulling the strings, only to realize that comedy or satiric art succeeds because of the complicity of the audience in relation to the performer: We are the ones actually pulling the strings, as the audience is an integral part of the making of the work of art.