Archives
micheal smith, outstanding young men america, 9', 1996
courtesy bdv, paris
Born in 1951 in the United States, he lives and works in New York.
Michael Smith first began performing in the mid-1970s, after having tried his hand at being an abstract painter and a minimalist sculptor. He documents his performances through video, which gradually becomes autonomous and acquires the status of an artistic production in its own right, developing a theme of the banal and the everyday that devolves on the central character he plays, Mike, a sort of double of himself. Mike, a basic American male of unfailing optimism, is at times a traveller's clerk, a businessman or a Reaganite presidential candidate. Like many American artists of his generation, Michael Smith practices the crossover, the crossing and mixing of a set of signs and modes of production borrowed from the most ordinary media. He dismantles the mechanisms that mask the ideology behind them and stages them in a comedic fashion. Yves Apetitallot].
With the support of Caisse de dépôts et consignations, Paris.