Michael Smith (born March 8, 1951) is an American artist known for his performance, video and installation works.Johnson, Ken. "An Artist’s Concocted World, Starring Himself, Is Too True to Be Real," The New York Times, May 13, 2008. Retrieved December 3, 2021.Holden, Stephen. "A Variety Show, Avant-Garde Style," The New York Times, December 11, 1987, p. C1. Retrieved December 3, 2021.Dickson, Andrew. "Does your nuclear shelter have a bar? Michael Smith on 40 years of mocking America," The Guardian, December 9, 2015. Retrieved December 1, 2021. He emerged in the mid-1970s at a time when performance and narrative-based art was beginning to claim space in contemporary art.Joselit, David. "'Mike’s World' and 'Air Kissing,'" Artforum, February 2008. Retrieved December 7, 2021.Hixson, Kathryn. "Michael Smith," artUS, Spring 2008, p. 62–3. Included among the Pictures Generation artists, he also appropriated pop culture, using television conventions rather than tropes from static media.Griffin, Tim. "In Conversation: Dan Graham and Michael Smith," Artforum, May 2004. Retrieved December 7, 2021.Lobel, Michael. "The Pictures Generation: Outside the Frame," Artforum, September 2009. Retrieved December 7, 2021. Since 1979, much of Smith's work has centered on an Everyman character, "Mike," that he has portrayed in various domestic, entrepreneurial and artistic endeavors.Smith, Roberta. "Michael Smith and Joshua White," The New York Times, March 28, 1997, p. C26. Retrieved December 3, 2021.Withers, Rachel. "Michael Smith and Joshua White," Artforum, Summer 2002. Retrieved December 7, 2021.McClister, Nell. "Mike’s World: Michael Smith and Joshua White (and other collaborators)," Bomb, Oct 1, 2008. Retrieved December 2, 2021.Castro, Leslie Moody. "Mike’s “Fully Curated Timeshare” — Michael Smith at Museo Jumex," Sightlines, January 23, 2019. Retrieved December 2, 2021. Writers have described his videos and immersive installations as "poker-faced parodies" that sit on the edge between art and entertainment, examining ideas, cultural shifts and absurdities involving the American dream, consumerism, the art world, and aging.Schaffner Ingrid. Ingrid Schaffner, Institute of Contemporary Art interview with Michael Smith, Herb Alpert Award, March 2012. Retrieved December 1, 2021.Fox, Dan. "Only the Lonely," Frieze, April 23, 2014. Retrieved December 3, 2021. Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz called Smith "a consummate explorer of the land of the loser … limning a fine line between reality and satire [in] a genre sometimes called installation verité."Saltz, Jerry. "Nailing Failing," ‘’Village Voice’’, December 2001. Retrieved December 7, 2021.
Smith's early performances took place at avant-garde venues like The Kitchen, Franklin Furnace and Artists Space and downtown clubs such as CBGB and Mudd Club.Taubin, Amy. "Bringing It Back Home," Artforum, January 16, 2014. Retrieved December 7, 2021.Archives of American Art. "Oral history interview with Michael Smith, 2018 July 30-August 1," Smithsonian Institution, 2018. Retrieved December 1, 2021. He eventually performed in other, more mainstream clubs and institutions, such as The Bottom Line, Carolines, the Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art, and produced videos for Saturday Night Live and PBS and a comedy special for Cinemax.The Museum of Modern Art. Michael Smith, Artists. Retrieved December 8, 2021.Alemani, Cecilia. "Television Delivers People, Whitney Museum of American Art," Artforum, January 7, 2008. Retrieved December 7, 2021.Artforum. "Artists Announced for 2008 Whitney Biennial," November 16, 2007. Retrieved October 7, 2021. In later years, he has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Tate Modern, among others.Ziolkowski, Thad. "Michael Smith and Joshua White," Artforum, September 1999. Retrieved December 7, 2021. In 2007–8, a retrospective, "Mike's World," was presented at the Blanton Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.Griffin, Tim. "'Mike's World': Michael Smith & Joshua White (and other collaborators)," Artforum, September 2007. Retrieved December 7, 2021. Smith has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation in addition to a 1985 Guggenheim Fellowship and an Alpert Award in Visual Arts in 2012.Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Michael Smith," Artists, 2007. Retrieved December 8, 2021.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Michael A. Smith," Fellows. Retrieved December 1, 2021.The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Michael Smith, Artists. Retrieved December 1, 2021.
Early life and career Smith was born in 1951 and raised in a middle-class Jewish family on the south side of Chicago. In 1968, he enrolled at Colorado College, where he earned a BA in painting (1973), focusing on abstraction; his older brother Howard, also an abstract painter, was a mentor during this time. He was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York City in 1970 and returned again in 1973.University of Texas at Austin. Michael Smith, Department of Art and Art History, People. Retrieved December 1, 2021.
After college, Smith returned to Chicago to work with his father at his real estate company. During this time, he felt that he had reached a dead-end with painting and his interests gravitated toward avant-garde performance work by artists such as Vito Acconci, Richard Foreman and William WegmanKlonarides, Carole Ann. "Interview with Mike Smith: 'Mike’s World,'" Glasstire, December 12, 2007. Retrieved December 1, 2021.Hochschild, Mary. "Michael Smith," BOMB Magazine, Winter, 1982. Retrieved December 1, 2021. He started going to a weekly open mic in the city and in response developed a performance, "Comedy Hour," which he first gave publicly in his own studio in 1975. In 1976, Whitney curator Marcia Tucker invited him to perform in a performance series at the museum, providing early validation for his new direction. Smith relocated to New York in the fall of 1976, joining an art scene that included Eric Fischl, Barbara Kruger, David Salle and performance artists Eric Bogosian and Stuart Sherman, in which he gained attention through performances at Artists Space, Franklin Furnace, The Kitchen and Castelli Graphics.Lawson, Thomas. "'The End of the World', New Museum," Artforum, April 1984. Retrieved December 7, 2021.
In addition to his art production, Smith has taught performance art at the University of Texas at Austin since 2001, as well as at several other schools.
Work
Smith has produced performance works, commercial television and promotional business video simulations, adult puppet shows, immersive installations, drawings and photographs, often in collaboration with artists and directors such as Mike Kelley, Joshua White, Doug Skinner and Mark Fischer. His deadpan, pathos-laden style of humor draws on influences including 1960s comics Jackie Vernon and fellow Chicagoan Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart, actor-directors Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, absurdist playwrights Samuel Beckett and Alfred Jarry, Voltaire's Candide, and comedy albums and TV shows from his youth.Blair, Dike. "Michael Smith's Bland Ambition," Purple, Summer 2001, p. 94–5.
Smith's work has often pushed the limits of entertainment, comedy and art with unconventional pacing, repetition, precise timing, subversive obtuseness, and a blurring of fiction and reality.Casavecchia, Barbara. "Michael Smith," Frieze, May 5, 2009. Retrieved December 3, 2021.Carroll, Mary Ellen. "Michael Smith," Modern Painters, February 2008, p. 92–3. He often lampoons the practices and promises of the entertainment industry, art world and American capitalism, exploring themes of fitting in, ambition, the obsolescence of "just past" motifs and tastes, failure and aging. Some writers contend that his work prefigured genres and works such as "mockumentaries", reality TV and The Truman Show, and adult-oriented "kid shows" (e.g., South Park); his art is sometimes compared to that of anarchic, hard-to-categorize creators like Andy Kaufman or Albert Brooks. Most of Smith's work has involved two characters: his everyman or "bland man" performance persona, "Mike," or an oversized infant called "Baby Ikki."
"Mike" Smith's "Mike" persona has been described as a bland, naïve, "perpetually hapless, perennially upbeat everyman" or "wise fool," who stubbornly pursues small-time entrepreneurial schemes and social goals with knotted brows and a "peculiar combination of puppyish enthusiasm and quiet desperation." His attempts to achieve the American Dream—through exhausted trends, dominant viewpoints and ad-copy tropes—are presented with a mix of gullibility, can-do Dale Carnegie-like optimism, pathos and culpability and in environments employing knowingly tacky design. New York Times critic Roberta Smith described Mike as "a latter-day Willie Loman, who makes everything in sight ricochet between post-modern irony and a genuine sense of sorrow for the many Mikes drifting across the American landscape."
Mike first appeared in performance works and then video collaborations between Smith and director Mark Fischer. In the video Down in the Rec Room (1979), Mike is presented endlessly waiting in signature boxer shorts for party guests that never arrive and interacting instead with cheesy media personalities heard on the audio track or viewed on a television. Secret Horror (1980) depicted a Muzak-scored nightmare in which Mike's apartment is besieged by a mysteriously dropping ceiling, a "party" attended only by tall ghosts, and 1960s pop-culture imperatives from TV game shows, sitcoms, music and commercial brands. Smith also performed as Mike in USA Free-Style Disco Championship (1979), competing at the twilight of the disco era in a real disco contest at New York's Copacabana nightclub and placing twelfth (last).Wilk, Elvia. "Michael Smith," Frieze, November 14, 2016. Retrieved December 3, 2021.
Art historian David Joselit called It Starts at Home (1982, first shown at the Whitney Museum in the installation Mike's House) "a watershed work" in video art that placed avant-garde practice within the debased rhetoric of the middlebrow TV sitcom and inverted the usual relationship between audience and spectacle. In its play on public access TV, Mike's mundane domestic life is being beamed to the world due to a cable installation snafu, making him inexplicably famous;Lawson, Thomas. "Michael Smith," Artforum, Summer 1982. Retrieved December 7, 2021. among the work's other features were a purported agent (literally, a "deal-making piece of fur" named "Bob") and various disorienting sight gags, doublings and mismatches between the installation's home (also the cable-show set) and the video. In the satirical installation Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter/...Snack Bar (1983),The Museum of Modern Art. Michael Smith, Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter Snack Bar, 1983, Collection. Retrieved January 3, 2022. Smith examined cold-war anxieties by transforming Mike's rec room into a fallout bunker (based on a 1950s FEMA manual), complete with a yellow concrete snack bar and a video game programmed to always lose.