Michael Smith

Mike's World takes a tightly focused view of a single Michael Smith performance persona, "Mike," as it has developed over the course of many years and through innumerable presentation formats. The character Mike functions metaphorically as a kind of ever-hopeful Candide, adrift in a world of rapid technological advances that he seems incapable of fully comprehending, and stymied by the depersonalization and isolation that have accompanied late twentieth-century life. Ironic in its sharp personification of failure, but also hilarious and poignant, Smith's work mirrors our most human concerns about competency and comfort. Underscoring the hybrid nature of Smith's art, the works reproduced in this colorful paperback book also highlight his last decade of video and installation collaborations with artist-director Joshua White. With contributions by Michael Smith, Jay Sanders, Mike Kelley, Ingrid Schaffner and Regine Basha.

This artist's book chronicles a lifetime of drawings by the performance/video/installation artist Michael Smith. Smith is best known for his alter ego, "Mike," whose blend of satisfaction and yearning, humor and pathos, makes him an all-American anti-hero. Smith's wide range of art activities in television, performance, stand-up and puppet shows, as well as installation, sculpture and video, have influenced a generation of young artists. This book is composed of mostly-unseen material from private notebooks: sketches, notations, diagrams and storyboards, as well as finished and childhood drawings, giving the reader a fly-on-the-wall view into Smith's mind and creative process. Smith's newest video work, created at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, will show at P.S. 1/MoMA in February of 2007, and a traveling exhibition begins at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas in August of the same year.