Guy Richards Smit

Guy Richards Smit (born 1970) is an American performance artist, painter, and singer-songwriter in the band Maxi Geil! & PlayColt. He has shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, also in London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Valencia, Paris, Dublin, and Havana, among other places. He is represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.

Background and family His Dutch father, J. W. Smit, was a Dutch language and literature professor at Columbia University and an expert on French composer Hector Berlioz. His Dutch-American mother, Pamela Richards, was a professor of library history. (She died in 1999, and his father in 2006. ) Smit's sister, Marijke, is an urban planner who works with a green architectural firm in the Bay Area. His two older half-brothers (from his father's first marriage) are both in creative fields in the Netherlands: One, Tijn Smit, played keyboard on the Playcolt song, "Here Comes Maxi."

Education As a Manhattan teen, Smit was in a number of Alternative rock bands. He studied abroad for a year at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam as an undergraduate at Parsons, Smit graduated in 1996. ) Blake Gopnik the Washington Post has written that there are "hints of Andy Kaufman" in the work, saying, "Watch the videos with the sound turned off, and you'd sometimes swear you were watching real footage of someone with some kind of a career in comedy—no comic genius, maybe, but someone who's got the timing and manner down."

From 1999 to 2007 Smit was represented by Roebling Hall in New York City.

Comics In 2008, Smit started to put Grossmalerman into comic book form, where he saw wider narrative possibility: Smit majored in illustration while at Parsons and has told ArtNews, "If you were to shoot [dismemberment], you’d have to do all kinds of angles. But in a comic, these types of exaggerated happenings can be worked into a story far more easily. It was a chance to develop this character even more." The second issue, published in 2011, featured Grossmalerman being kidnapped and stabbed in a group therapy session.

Sitcom-style series The Grossmalerman comics in turn nudged the video work into sitcom form, with more actors, real world settings, and theme music; a line from the latter is "Don't greet the future on bended knees / Or go to Chelsea in faded jeans / Unless they're / From Japan." In an episode set in the Hamptons, a visiting art critic, played by writer-performer Kenny Mellman, Herb of Kiki and Herb, describes the painter's work is "Matisse-ish." Another is set in Grossmalerman's studio where he falls in love with his pill-popping model (Andrea Hendrickson). Episode 5, also set in the studio, involves male visitors (Mellman and the frontman of New York City's Les Savy Fav Tim Harrington, among others) taking turns hitting on the model. News is also shared of the painter's show in Moscow being held for random. Another episode had the troubled artist visited by Jean-Michel Basquiat's ghost who only relates some unhealthy career advice while Grossmalerman's model lies unconscious on a table in the background.

Smit paints all of the work attributed to his alter egos in all of his installations and videos. In "Studio Visit," for example, the characters spend time looking at a large painting in Alex Katz-like colors of the crotches of several people amusingly and impossibly tangled together. The next month, he announces that his interest in trading up in representation to Hauser & Wirth, comparing himself to oligarchic and banker-collectors.

Simultaneously in 2013, Grossmalerman wrote a column for the art and culture website Hyperallergic.com. The first was an explicit call for an intern: "If you need a shoulder to cry on, cry on mine.... Your twenties are a tough time and I’m happy to hold you and to stroke your luminous golden locks. I mean, if you’re into that. No pressure." Another tells a tale of being tasered and kidnapped at the Armory Show, and in another entry, he describes falling in love with his gallery's assistant, his fifth such experience.

Online series, 2015 Smit and Mellman returned for a five-episode series all set at Grossmalerman's studio in Brooklyn, this time with Mellman co-starring as Grossmalerman's studio assistant, Neil. New York performance artist Jibz Cameron plays Joyce, the artist's girlfriend, Scissor Sisters' Ana Matronic and off-Broadway actress Jenn Harris as visiting art dealers, Louise and Regina of Windsor & Gristle. Funded by a Kickstarter campaign with artist and videomaker Joshua White directing in front of a live studio audience,

The series was released to Kickstarter funders, and then from April 17 on YouTube. It was re-released on November 11 on PasteMagazine.com every Wednesday on the Grossmalerman site through December 12. Paste magazine noted the dual sitcom, art-world-targeting nature of the work, saying "its free-wheeling absurdity comes off a bit like that beloved classic The Young Ones," recalling the cult 1980s MTV classic.

Maxi Geil! His name translating to "really horny" in German,

The band includes his wife Rebecca Chamberlain, also on vocals, John Allen on lead guitar, and Mark Ephraim on rhythm guitar and others. With songs with titles like "I Will Leave You First" and "Making Love in the Sunshine," the group's music has been described as "anti-sentimental." In the latter song, for example, the band "request your presence in the bathroom / When the music stops," and in "The Artist's Lament," Maxi croons "I want your vagina around the head of my prick." and have played in New York City and London, and released two albums. A Message to mMy Audience, their first full-length effort in 2004 in which the TV actress Zoe Lister-Jones (now known for her work on Whitney) appeared, as well as half-brother Tijn Smit, who played keyboard on the song, "Here Comes Maxi." ) as a porn actor who suddenly grows some self-dignity in the middle of a shoot and flees.

When Maxi appears at a press conference to give his resignation speech, he accuses his peers for letting commodification ruin their work: "Have we been reduced as people to simply a couple of cheap fetishes? You let your imaginations run wild, and this is what you came up with? ... You people are libertines with the souls of bureaucrats, and I'm constantly amazed at your limitations." Smit told The Washington Post that this speech was "thinly veiled" criticism of his art world contemporaries. After revealing his return to theater, future projects, and new interest in dance, Maxi breaks into the song "Please Remember Me," in which he exhorts, "I've got a hard on for a station in your memories" and "I've got a bag of tricks, of images and / melodies/ I'm designed to keep your heart and mind so / ill at ease." But when he and Giselle finally meet and set out to find themselves, they end up shopping: This is Smit's attack on the notion of self-exploration in the work of his contemporaries that he feels have "forgotten the notion of exploration, of contradicting oneself, of trying to broaden one's horizons." debuted at MoMA during its fall 2004 reopening. Maxi Geil! & PlayColt also played at the event. and artist Matt Jones also star.

Paintings and installations A Mountain of Skulls and Not One I Recognize, 2008–2010 For a solo exhibition at Fred gallery in London, Smit produced about ten videos with simple scenarios that appeared on different-sized screens around the space. All the videos shared the same soundtrack Smit wrote with band member Mark Ephraim and New York-based new musician Okkyung Lee, with Smit intoning over Ephraim's rhythm guitar and Lee's cello. Each video was based on a drawing and had two or three actors involved in a theme of either power or obsession. Video artist John Pilson plays a doctor in one, to Matthew Shawlin's patient, who await an important diagnosis. In another, Bodine Alexander plays a woman waiting for her male companion in a bathroom as he pees; all the while they exchanging dreamy, knowing glances. In a third, performance artist Neal Medlyn and actress Zoe Lister-Jones (now known for her work on the TV show Whitney) play two GIs presumably in Iraq or Afghanistan exploring the human wreckage inside a structure they have just bombed. The remaining videos included artists Carol Bove, Will Cotton and Mina Chang, as actors.

Jason Cacioppo, the cameraman on all the videos, used many camera moves of 1970s European cinema, like that of Rainer Werner Fassbinder where zooms and pans are used to squeeze as much pathos and meaning out of each scene. Smit painted portraits of each actor in costume after the video production in either watercolor or oil and hung them with the videos in the installation.

Paintings, in watercolor, oil, or both are in or all of the Grossmalerman and Maxi Geil videos and installations. Powhida noted a "calculated feeling of disinterest" in the style. The series continues into the present, with headlines referencing the 2016 presidential candidates and the spate of police brutality in the U.S., and is entitled NY Times. Online magazine Crave wrote that the series, painted in a range from constrained to loose, "stole the show." Smit's gallerist related that the work was "a mediation on vanitas, power, desire, and failure" and noted the installation's popularity with selfie takers. Smit will present over 100 in the series for his forthcoming show at Charles James Gallery in Los Angeles.

Personal life He is married to Rebecca Chamberlain, a visual artist and member of Max Geil! & PlayColt. They have two sons.