Michael Smith - Mike's Box [8DVD]

Format: 8 x DVD
Catalogue No.: M15
Barcode: 0781484901594
Release Date: 30 May 2025
Genre: Pop

 “In a manner befitting the everyday otherworldliness of Michael Smith’s work, I was 13 when I first stumbled on his work through Public TV’s ‘Image Union’. His ‘Secret Horror’ was a hilarious, deadpan and appropriately unflinching look into the abyss. This superimposition of states had a profound impact on my life and work, to this day. This boxset is the doorway into that world, ‘Mike’s World’, that will throw you for a loop, wild-eyed and helpless.” - Jim O’Rourke, 2025
 For five decades, Michael Smith’s performance art has inhabited bland domestic spaces; mass media and its promise to keep us company; and failing business ventures that misread the moment. Through art installations, theatre, video, television and live performances, Smith’s comedic work lives inside the identity models that both constitute and disassociate our shared experience. His two performance personae, Mike and Baby Ikki, plumb the depths of American culture to perform the discrepancies between what is promulgated by controlling interest and what actually exists in reality of day-to-day worlds. Like culture itself, Smith’s is forever in and out of time. ‘Mike’s Box’ is an immersive eight-disc DVD collection of his work up until now.
 In the 1970s, the idea of the American everyman was rarely questioned. The 1950s post-war aspiration for blessed conformity had been a primary objective of the powers that be, continually hammered into everyone’s home via that ubiquitous box, the TV set. Whether programming or advertising (did it matter?), images of the happy homemaker, the man in the grey flannel suit and like-minded citizens flooded the country with an irradiant stream of optimistic content meant to whitewash and anesthetize the American public. Although developments in the late 1960s offered a new appraisal of everyday life, it was apparent that this approach was not easily processed by the general population, and the status quo remained intact. The Silent Majority were - as the name implies - everywhere and nowhere. In some places, it felt like the 1950s hadn’t ended at all; a decade with no term limit.
 Enter Mike, who, along with his contemporaries on the NYC art scene of the 1970s and 1980s (a sprawling group spread across disciplines, including but not limited to Laurie Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Andy Kaufman, Barbara Kruger, Mike Kelly, Cindy Sherman, and the many freaks feeding the nascent Saturday Night Live franchise), was inclined to disengage the frame of reference from the traditional rarefied ‘white cube’ context, and instead insert his practice in relation to everyday life and the institutions exerting control over it. The absurdities we now find ourselves culturally awash in, like ‘meta’ and ‘reality show’, weren’t yet on the table. Smith’s early videos, like ‘Down in the Rec Room’, ‘It Starts at Home’ and ‘Secret Horror’, suggested that the world we live in is only as normal as we suspect it is - which means, irretrievably strange as well.
 ‘Mike’s Box’ covers Smith’s career from the 1970s to the present, collecting his infamous and prescient performances, installations and videos (many only previously seen at galleries and museums within the fine art context), as well as forms more accessible to a general audience: comedy shows, cable access programs and musical theatre. ‘Mike’s Box’ also contains the complete collaborative video work of Smith with both Joshua White and Doug Skinner, as well as his team-ups with William Wegman, Seth Price, Mike Kelley and many others. It is accompanied by a richly illustrated book that includes an essay by Tim Griffin, and features documentation from shows exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museo Jumex, along with filmed conversations between the artist, curators and collaborators.