Michael Smith (performance artist)

[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.

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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).