Michael Smith

Another regular evening at Mike's house turns into a comic nightmare. Finding himself a stranger in his own apartment, a "world totally fashioned from the effluvia of TV and pop music," Mike is plagued by a mysterious drop ceiling, his dry cleaning, and a host of ghostly visitors. This postmodern comedy of the banal is told as a suspense drama, in which an unseen "we" whispers imperatives to the hapless Mike, whose life becomes a TV game show in a place "somewhere between initiation and renovation." References to such pop trivia as the Partridge Family and the Kingston Trio suggest a collective cultural unconscious of trashy sitcoms, pop songs and brand names. Smith concludes with the outrageous but oddly affecting spectacle of Mike eating Bridge Mix and dancing to Neil Diamond's Forever in Blue Jeans.

A parodic music video that re-envisions the Horatio Alger myth of the American Dream via 1950s-style cultural cliches, advertising and Reagan-era media propaganda. Smith's 'regular guy' Mike embodies a series of all-American male stereotypes, from the classroom to political candidacy, assuming the roles of college prep, cowboy, train engineer, and real estate developer. Set to an ironic jingle recalling of an 'Up with People' anthem, this lampoon of Manifest Destiny concludes with Mike riding, like an ironic Marlboro Man, into the sunset.

Performance artists Smith and Skinner use heavily coded comedic costumes and performance, including extensive play with puppets, to articulate the simultaneous banality and ironic reflexivity of "popular comedy."

Artists Michael Smith and William Wegman — both of whom use conceptual humor as an art-making strategy — collaborated on this satirical commentary on photography, the process of image-making, and the interchange of "high" art and "low" culture. The tape is structured as an instructional guide that advances the "slice of life" method, imparting not only technique, but attitude and approach to the subject of photography. Wegman plays the world-weary artiste, a professional photographer who takes the innocent and earnest Mike under his tutelage. The business of art, the "reality" of the photographic image, and its pervasive role in contemporary culture are among the issues that receive irreverent treatment in this comedic collaboration.

It Starts at Home is a song-and-dance performance sitcom in which our hapless hero Mike encounters his fifteen minutes of fame.

Mike ambles through his mundane activities to the accompaniment of TV theme songs and children's tunes.

Mike emerges from pandemic isolation to discuss repainting the office breakroom with his less-than-enthused colleagues over Zoom. The tone of the meeting is underscored by his co-workers’ minimal engagement and their growing resentment to Mike's prolonged absence from the office.

This piece documents one of Smith's earliest performances of his "Baby Ikki" character, in which he performs in public as an oversized infant in diaper, hat and sunglasses.

Here, "another regular day" in the life of Mike reveals a world completely envisioned and experienced through the images and slogans of the media. Mike enacts his daily routine — waking, shaving, dressing — as if he were in one advertisement after another. His language is the empty jargon of ad copy, his possessions are visualized as consumer products, his environment has the aestheticized, air-brushed look of a lifestyle commercial. In a collapse of image and self, of simulation and reality, Mike's mundane everyday life becomes a seductive TV ad, devoid of content, in which the viewer is exhorted to "make the ordinary extraordinary."

Produced by the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Smith's short video parodies the sort of cultural and educational programming interlude that one might see on European or American public television. Famous Quotes From Art History presents the bon mots of Henri Matisse as drolly recited, in French, by Smith, who then executes Matisse's suggestions with hilarious literalism.