Michael Smith

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].