Michael Smith | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Education | Colorado College, Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program |
Known for | Video, installation art, performance, drawing, art |
Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship, Alpert Awards in the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) |
Website | https://michaelsmithartist.com http://www.mikes-world.org |
Michael Smith (born 1951) is an American artist known for his performance, video and installation works. [1] [2] [3] He emerged in the mid-1970s at a time when performance and narrative-based art was beginning to claim space in contemporary art. [4] [5] Included among the Pictures Generation artists, he also appropriated pop culture, using television conventions rather than tropes from static media. [6] [7] 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. [8] [9] [10] [11] Writers have described his videos and immersive installations as "poker-faced parodies" [6] 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. [12] [13] 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." [14]
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. [15] [6] [16] 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. [2] [12] [17] [18] [19] 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. [7] [20] [3] In 2007–8, a retrospective, "Mike's World," was presented at the Blanton Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. [21] [1] [10] 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. [22] [23] [24]
Smith was born in 1951 and raised in a middle-class Jewish family on the south side of Chicago. [12] [16] 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. [12] [16] He was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York City in 1970 and returned again in 1973. [16] [25]
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 Wegman [26] [27] [13] 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. [16] [13] In 1976, Whitney curator Marcia Tucker invited him to perform in a performance series at the museum, providing early validation for his new direction. [12] 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, [26] [12] in which he gained attention through performances at Artists Space, Franklin Furnace, The Kitchen and Castelli Graphics. [16] [28] [2] [5]
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. [25] [16]
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. [13] [12] 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. [26] [3] [12] [29]
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. [29] [30] [6] [31] 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. [29] [6] [14] [13] 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. [26] [4] [3] [30] [29] Most of Smith's work has involved two characters: his everyman or "bland man" performance persona, "Mike," or an oversized infant called "Baby Ikki."
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." [3] [10] [27] [29] 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. [12] [21] [26] [10] 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." [8]
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. [4] [30] [13] 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. [26] [16] 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). [5] [32] [13]
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. [4] [18] [6] 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; [4] [33] [26] 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. [33] In the satirical installation Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter/...Snack Bar (1983), [34] 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. [28] [10] [3]
Some of Smith's subsequent projects included the satirical music video Go For It, Mike (1984); the deadpan OYMA (Outstanding Young Men of America) (1996), which spoofed Reaganomics, the Horatio Alger myth and all-American stereotypes (e.g., the Marlboro Man, individualism); [2] [5] [3] and 1990s adult-oriented puppet/performance collaborations with Doug Skinner, collectively titled Doug & Mike's Adult Entertainment. [29] [13] He also began to reflect on creative production and the business of the art world in the mock-instructional videos The World of Photography (1986, with William Wegman) and How to Curate Your Own Group Exhibition (Do It) (1996). [35] [1] [36]
Smith began to work with artist-director Joshua White in the 1990s. Their collaborative installation MUSCO (1997) presented Mike as the owner of a once successful lighting business, now in the throes of bankruptcy. [8] [37] It included a believable office (grimy fax machine, threadbare carpet, boxes and trash bags resulting from a "reorganization"), a showroom with aging wares and specially created misfires (“Mood Tube” table lamps, satin "Disco-Time" vests), and a promotional video. [37] [38] [8] [29] Artforum's Tom Moody called it an "exhaustively detailed, tragicomic installation … fusing the decline of '60s idealism and the downside of the American dream into a spectacle at once depressing and hilarious"; [37] Dan Cameron declared it an "exhilarating and unbearably sad" journey from countercultural ethic to disco consumption to cutthroat 1990s business competition. [38]
For Open House (1997/2007), they converted the New Museum's basement into the convincingly lived-in basement studio of Mike, then a mediocre conceptual artist whose only success was the timely purchase of the "loft" he is now selling. [20] [39] [29] Complete with examples of Mike's derivative art, tapes of his public access art show ("Interstitial") and squalid details, the show was described by Artforum as "corrosively funny … Hans Haacke meets Jerry Seinfeld" and a peculiarly American version "of failure, of utopian dreams sold down the river of compromise and capitalism." [20] [39] [40] The QuinQuag Arts and Wellness Centre (2001–2) depicted Mike awash in loft-sale and dot-com money and the inadvertent owner of a fictional, mid-century Catskills Utopian artists' colony ("QuinQuag") fallen on hard times. [9] [14] [41] The pointed installation's dowdy exhibits, promotional videos, artifacts and folksy products (e.g., an artist-produced rocker Jackie Kennedy may have purchased for JFK) portray Mike's efforts to resurrect the colony under the auspices of a "Wellness Solutions Group" and corporate retreats. [41] [9] [14]
Smith and White also collaborated on the carnivalesque "Mike's World" traveling retrospective exhibition (2007–8, Blanton Museum and ICA Philadelphia), which featured videos (including an "orientation" based on those at presidential libraries), performances, installations, publications and drawings. [21] [42] [31]
Smith's later work often examines aging. Excuse me!?! ... I’m Looking for the 'Fountain of Youth' (Greene Naftali/Tate Modern, 2015) was a sprawling project of drawings, videos, performance, photographs and a woven tapestry. [43] [3] Its conceptual art-dance-performance piece distilled various late-life indignities—Mike's attempts at yoga, humiliating airport security searches, "encouraged" retirement, the feeling of invisibility—and included a surreal medieval dream sequence, in which an elixir reverts him from a knight into a court jester and then a baby, suggesting the futility of the titular search. [3] [43] Imagine the View from Here (Museo Jumex, 2018–9) critiqued the art world’s relationship to development and reflected on middle-class aging. Occupying the museum’s mezzanine, the exhibition presented tradeshow booths and promotional videos from Smith's long-running, fictional "International Trade and Enrichment Association" (ITEA) project offering art lovers (with Mike as surrogate) a faux, "Fully Curated Timeshare" in the museum as an investment and luxury destination. [44] [11] [45] Reviews described the work's sales pitch combining "the gleefully, ignorant optimism of Mike" and an "essentially underwhelming marketing display" as deadpan and bitingly satirical. [11]
Smith's other recurring performance persona is "Baby Ikki," an oversized infant described as "pre-linguistic, genderless" [12] and gorilla-like, with conspicuous facial hair, oversized diapers, a bonnet and undersized sunglasses. [27] First created in 1975 in Chicago and performed by Smith with a tensed body and impulsive, precisely mimicked movements, the character was a crowd-pleaser that enabled direct audience interaction and elicited a combination of repulsion and concern; [27] [13] in the 1978 video Baby Ikki, he ventures out into traffic, only to be dragged back to the sidewalk, bawling, by a visibly unamused policeman. [46] [31] [36]
Baby Ikki has appeared internationally in performances, videos and installations in New York (Electronic Arts Intermix, MoMA), Los Angeles and Europe. [15] [47] [46] [48] [30] He was featured in a collaborative exhibition with Seth Price, "Playground" (2003, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan), that included an installation of playground toys and video projections depicting him visiting various deserted meeting places. [30] [46] In 2009, Smith collaborated with artist Mike Kelley on a multimedia installation based on Baby Ikki’s adventures at Burning Man, A Voyage of Growth and Discovery (SculptureCenter, 2009; West of Rome, 2010). [12] [46] The project combined aspects of both artists' past work—dancing, dressing up, infantilism—with the festival's ethos of weeklong "radical self-expression." [46] It included an eighteen-foot Baby Ikki junk sculpture and skeletal metal playground structures designed by Kelley and projected video of Ikki at the festival, playing tetherball, dancing, and interacting amid the mass of people. [47] [46]
Smith has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1985) and Herb Alpert Foundation (2012, Visual Arts), [24] awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (2007) and New York Foundation for the Arts (2007, with Joshua White), and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Art Matters, among others. [22] [49] [50] His work belongs to the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, [17] Centre Pompidou, [51] Blanton Museum of Art, [52] Inhotim Institute (Brazil), [53] LWL Museum für Kunst und Kultur (Munster), [54] Migros Museum of Contemporary Art (Zurich), [55] Paley Center for Media, [56] and Walker Art Center, [57] among others. [25]
Raymond Pettibon is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. Pettibon came to prominence in the early 1980s in the southern California punk rock scene, creating posters and album art mainly for groups on SST Records, owned and operated by his older brother, Greg Ginn. He has subsequently become widely recognized in the fine art world for using American iconography variously pulled from literature, art history, philosophy, and religion to politics, sport, and sexuality.
Michael Kelley was an American artist whose work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance, photography, sound and video. He also worked on curatorial projects; collaborated with many other artists and musicians; and left a formidable body of critical and creative writing. He often worked collaboratively and had produced projects with artists Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and John Miller. Writing in The New York Times, in 2012, Holland Cotter described the artist as "one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion."
Scott Benzel is an American visual artist, musician, performance artist, and composer. Benzel is a member of the faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA.
Kenneth Feingold is a contemporary American artist based in New York City. He has been exhibiting his work in video, drawing, film, sculpture, photography, and installations since 1974. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004) and a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship (2003) and has taught at Princeton University and Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science, among others. His works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Liverpool, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Tony Oursler is an American multimedia and installation artist married to Jacqueline Humphries. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the California Institute for the Arts, Valencia, California, in 1979. His art covers a range of mediums, working with video, sculpture, installation, performance, and painting. He lives and works in New York City.
Dashiell A. Snow was an American artist based in New York City. Snow's photographs included scenes of sex, drugs, violence, and the art world; his work often depicted the decadent lifestyle of young New York City artists and their social circle.
Mary Lucier is an American visual artist and pioneer in video art. Concentrating primarily on video and installation since 1973, she has produced numerous multiple- and single-channel pieces that have had a significant impact on the medium.
Terry Alan Fox was an American conceptual artist known for his work in performance art, video, and sound. He was of the first generation conceptual artists and was a central participant in West Coast performance art, video and conceptual art movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fox was active in San Francisco and in Europe, living in Europe in the latter portion of his life.
Jessica Stockholder is a Canadian-American artist known for site-specific installation works and sculptures that are often described as "paintings in space." She came to prominence in the early 1990s with monumental works that challenged boundaries between artwork and display environment as well as between pictorial and physical experience. Her art often presents a "barrage" of bold colors, textures and everyday objects, incorporating floors, walls and ceilings and sometimes spilling out of exhibition sites. Critics suggest that her work is informed by diverse artistic traditions, including abstract expressionism, color field painting, minimalism and Pop art. Since her early career, they have noted in her work an openness to spontaneity, accident and marginality and a rejection of permanency, monetization and disciplinary conventions that Stephen Westfall characterized as an "almost shocking sense of freedom."
Katy Schimert is an American artist known for exhibitions and installations that meld disparate media into cohesive formal and conceptual visual statements arising out of personal experience, myth and empirical knowledge. She interweaves elements of fine and decorative arts, figuration and abstraction in densely layered drawings and sculpture that together suggest elliptical narratives or unfolding, cosmic events. Curator Heidi Zuckerman wrote that Schimert is inspired by "the places where the organized and the chaotic intersect—the scientific and the mythic, the known and the unknown, and the real and the imagined … she creates work that exists where, through fantasy, truth and beauty meet."
Forcefield was an American noise band and art collective, founded in 1997 in Providence, Rhode Island, closely associated with Fort Thunder.
Phyllis Baldino is an American visual artist whose art engages in a conceptual practice that merges performance art, video art, sculpture, and installation in an exploration of human perception. Her single-channel videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix in New York, NY. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Kristin Lucas is a media artist who works in video, performance, installation and on the Internet. Her work explores the impacts of technology on humanity, blurring the boundary between the technological and corporeal. In her work she frequently casts herself as the protagonist in videos and performances where her interactions with technology lead to isolation, and physical and mental contamination.
The Watermill Center is a center for the arts and humanities in Water Mill, New York, founded in 1992 by artist and theater director Robert Wilson.
Judith Barry is an American multimedia artist, writer and educator. Art critics regard her as a pioneer in performance art, video, electronic media and installation art who has contributed significantly to feminist theories of subjectivity and the exploration of public constructions of gender and identity. Her work draws on a diverse background, which includes studies in critical theory and cinema, dance, and training in architecture, design and computer graphics. Rather than employ a signature style, Barry combines multiple disciplines and mediums in immersive, research-based works whose common methodology calls into question technologies of representation and the spatial languages of film, urbanism and the art experience. Critic Kate Linker wrote, "Barry has examined the effects and ideological functions of images in and on society. Her installations and writings … have charted the transformation of representation by different 'machines' of image production, from the spatial ensembles of theater to computer and electronic technologies."
Carole Ann Klonarides is an American curator, video artist, writer and art consultant that has been based in New York and Los Angeles. She has worked in curatorial positions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (1997–2000) and Long Beach Museum of Art (1991–95), curated exhibitions and projects for PS1 and Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Laforet Museum (Tokyo), and Video Data Bank, among others, and been a consultant at the Getty Research Institute. Klonarides emerged as an artist among the loosely defined Pictures Generation group circa 1980; her video work has been presented in numerous museum exhibitions, including "Video and Language: Video As Language", "documenta 8," "New Works for New Spaces: Into the Nineties,", and "The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984", and at institutions such as MoMA, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, Contemporary Arts Center, the New Museum, The Kitchen, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). Her work belongs to the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Getty Museum, Centre Pompidou, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Museu-Fundacão Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), and National Gallery of Canada, and is distributed by the Video Data Bank and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).
Frank Gillette is an American video and installation artist. Interested in the empirical observation of natural phenomena, his early work integrated the viewer's image with prerecorded information. He has been described as a "pioneer in video research [...] with an almost scientific attention for taxonomies and descriptions of ecological systems and environments". His seminal work Wipe Cycle –co-produced with Ira Schneider in 1968– is considered one of the first video installations in art history. Gillette and Schneider exhibited this early "sculptural video installation" in TV as a Creative Medium, the first show in the United States devoted to Video Art. In October 1969, Frank Gillette and Michael Shamberg founded the Raindance Corporation, a "media think-tank [...] that embraced video as an alternative form of cultural communication.
John Sanborn is a key member of the second wave of American video artists that includes Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Dara Birnbaum and Tony Oursler. Sanborn's body of work spans the early days of experimental video art in the 1970s through the heyday of MTV music/videos and interactive art to digital media art of today.
Chrissie Iles is a British-American art curator, critic, and art historian. She is the Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
Shalom Gorewitz is an American visual artist. Gorewitz was among the first generation of artists who used early video technology as an expressive medium. Since the late 1960s, he has created videos that "transform recorded reality through an expressionistic manipulation of images and sound". His artworks often "confront the political conflicts, personal losses, and spiritual rituals of contemporary life". Gorewitz has also made documentary and narrative films.