Michael Smith

Michael Smith, Imagine the View from Here!, Installation view, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, 2018.

Michael Smith (born March 8, 1951) is an American artist known for his performance, video and installation works. He emerged in the mid-1970s at a time when performance and narrative-based art was beginning to claim space in contemporary art. Included among the Pictures Generation artists, he also appropriated pop culture, using television conventions rather than tropes from static media. 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. Writers have described his videos and immersive installations as "poker-faced parodies" 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."

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. 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. 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.

Early life and career Smith was born in 1951 and raised in a middle-class Jewish family on the south side of Chicago.

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

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. 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. 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.

Michael Smith and Joshua White, MUS-CO, Installation view, Lauren Wittels, NYC, 1997.

Collaborations with Joshua White 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. His work belongs to the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Inhotim Institute (Brazil), LWL Museum für Kunst und Kultur (Munster), Migros Museum of Contemporary Art (Zurich), Paley Center for Media, and Walker Art Center, among others.