Press Release

MICHAEL SMITH
Exhibition from May 28 to September 10, 2000
Curator : Yves Aupetitallot

Born in Chicago, Michael Smith is above all a performance artist. His first character is named "Baby Ikki", a diapered toddler wearing sunglasses and a bonnet. Michael Smith started documenting his performances with videos that over the years have found legitimacy as art pieces in their own right. He is today a performer, a video artist and the author of museum installations that contain his videos and their accessories.
Michael Smith has been developing and refining for numerous years a unique symbolic character, "Mike", Michael's doppelgänger. Mike is an average citizen, as mirrored by the triviality of the artist's name, of limited intelligence and intrepid optimism. Mike plays the role of the salesman in the artist's interpretation of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (performance Bill Loman, Master Salesman), the CEO of a disco lighting company going bankrupt (Musco 1969-1997, presented at the Whitney Museum in New York), an artist forced to sell his Soho loft, hence abandoning a certain lifestyle as well as a strong element of artistic legitimacy (Open House in the New Museum in New York), a candidate for presidency (Go for it Mike, 1984), a video ending with a triumphant Reaganien Mike in the setting of the Marlboro cowboy commercials, Mike as a model of citizenship in the afterwar period, adopting an atomic shelter home in the middle of a bucolic landscape (Mike builds a shelter, 1985), or the average man whose everyday movements are transformed into never ending commercial spots (Mike, 1987), ironically inviting the spectator to see the extraordinary in the ordinary of consumer society. Michael Smith worked with William Wegman on The World of Photography (1986), a satire on artistic methodology.
Similar to the characters of Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati or Kyushi Kurosawa, Mike adds laughter in tragic or uneasy situations with his mastery of understatement through overstatement, exaggerating gestures, facial expressions, language, delivery. Each puzzled glance, each shrug of his shoulders build layers in an archeology of failure, pessimism regarding the "do it yourself" credo of a market oriented society, irony and lucidity in regard to an ever increasing subjection of creativity and cultural behavior to the dictates of the mass media.

The exhibition at Magasin is a retrospective of his major video works displayed in an installation especially created for Grenoble. On this occasion he has produced a new piece, an individualized introduction to the Grenoble project, addressed to the visitors.

The show is completed by his first monographic catalogue raisonné, containing a long interview with John Miller, an illustrated bio-bibliography, and by the release of a new video with a selection of his works, co-produced with bdv (bureau des videos).

MICHAEL SMITH was born in 1951. He lives and works New York.