Mike's Box

Disc 1: Michael Smith Performances 1970s

In Michael Smith’s early sketches, with their deadpan delivery, physical antics, and absurdist riffs on art and entertainment, it is possible to trace the evolution of themes as his work transitioned from formalist painting to performance and comedy. Routines structured around inventive props, sound cues, and costume changes anticipate his unique engagement with the conventions of popular culture. Later prompted by Mike Kelley to reflect on these skits and nebulous characters, which Kelley appreciated for their ambiguity, Smith replied: “I was more of a hat rack than a defined character with a particular hat. There’s a rawness to those pieces that, at the time I was doing them, was very exciting but also confusing for me. It made me feel kind of naked and vulnerable. I was clear on the process, but it conflicted with my desire to make a simple story.”

Disc 2: Michael Smith Down in the Rec Room

Smith’s persona Mike, a character who has been a primary vehicle throughout his career, began life as “Blandman,” an extrapolated pun on the British term for non-pedigreed land owners: “blanded gentry.” Earlier drawings and performances, especially Let’s See What’s in the Refrigerator and A Day with Mike, sketch out this anti-hero of middle-class America. Down in the Rec Room gives him a storyline.

Like Voltaire’s Candide, Mike is of dubious legitimacy, his place in the world forever in doubt. Tension between his private and public selves creates a classic Mike-situation when his desire to be the life of the party runs afoul of his neurotic, reclusive personality. Notes for Rec Room —performed in-progress at Franklin Furnace — was handily staged near a bathroom, and Smith used the flushing toilet as a poetic refrain for Mike, who would disappear into the bathroom for uncomfortable stretches of time and emerge disheveled in boxer shorts and a holey t-shirt.

Through its subsequent performances, the Rec Room set crystallized, distilling Mike’s un-hip suburban vibe —beginning with the backdrop of the rec room itself, where the fantasies of many an awkward adolescent are nurtured, disconnected from the reality upstairs. A surreal but minimal set design, including a solitary panel of venetian blinds, a pine tree air freshener, and a drum kit hung near the ceiling, conjures a world governed by strange associations and non sequiturs, a topsy-turvy view of middle-class domesticity with a psychological resonance amplified by Mike’s presence. Like the personas of Keaton, Chaplin, or Tati, Mike is a man flummoxed by the age he lives in — an odd but endearing guy who is eager to please, as he demonstrates through hilarious flourishes like tap-dance routines about wadded Kleenex or studiously flamboyant disco moves. At its crisis, Down in the Rec Room establishes an indelible symbol of breached privacy: Mike’s toilet, seat up, broadcast on television for all to see.

This disc shows the progression of Down in the Rec Room from a transitional piece, somewhere between prop drama and character sketch, to more polished performances, ultimately staged for video. In this and subsequent works, Smith uses the syntax of television and film to expand his portrayal of Mike and refine his choreography, accompanied by elaborate sound cues and music. Camera frames and edits enable Smith to experiment with new sight gags, like zooming in to reveal Mike’s giant, personalized brass belt buckle, or to capture the dumbfounded expressions on his pliable face.

Disc 3: Michael Smith Performances 1980s

The Reagan era launched Smith’s Mike persona into full formation. Mike’s bumbling attempts to ride the waves of entrepreneurship and consumerism makes him an accidental anti-yuppie — a loafer whose very existence tarnishes the gleam of free enterprise. At the same time that Smith was exploring more ambitious storylines for Mike and slicker production values in videos and installations such as It Starts at Home (1982) and Mike Builds a Shelter (1985), he also staged several live performances that reference the tropes of Broadway shows, musical theater, and vaudeville. Presented in the context of the Downtown Art scene of the late 70s and early 80s — which was generally rebelling against a revival of 50s-vintage conservatism — his satirical productions have the oversized, brightly-colored silliness of Saturday morning TV, diluted by adult anxieties.

Disc 4: Michael Smith Performances: The Remixes

In this series of performances, Smith seizes the artist’s talk as yet another stage, though in this context his roster of personas, especially Mike, become meta-personas, as they are also the major projects of Smith’s oeuvre. A version of Michael Smith, close to the actual Michael Smith but still a figment of convention, wryly outlines the arc of his career from fourth generation Abstract Expressionist, to one fateful day in 1979 when he found an invitation to the USA Freestyle Disco Championship at the Copacabana. By deflecting the self-seriousness that can drag down an artist’s monolog about their work, or a museum’s canonization of a cultural era, Smith resists explaining away a career that continues to sidestep classification.

Disc 5: Michael Smith Baby Ikki

Baby Ikki was born in Smith’s studio in Chicago in 1975, crawling into a performance with his iconic uniform of saggy nappy, crocheted bonnet, and undersized sunglasses. Though in his first appearance the Baby spoke, Smith preferred to freeze Ikki at 18 months in a pre-lingual state, keeping the character gender-ambiguous and just learning to walk. The performance of the Baby is primarily physical, a feat of tensed muscles and stiffened joints that produces a carefully choreographed clumsiness. Unlike his primary persona Mike, Ikki is a character Smith enters into certain improvisatory situations, where the friction of his discomfiting presence can be milked to its fullest potential.

Disc 6: Michael Smith Videos & Installations

High production values and well-honed storylines intensify the disharmony of private neurosis and public exposure that defines Mike. Taking advantage of art and television commissions through the Artists Cable Project, TV on TV, the CAT fund at KTCA, Saturday Night Live, and Cinemax (often working with director and editor Mark Fischer), as well as collaborations with artists and musicians such as William Wegman, Dike Blair and Barbara Kruger, Eric Bogosian, A. Leroy, and Mark Bingham, Smith ratcheted up the scale of Mike’s many worlds. From his earliest existence as a lone figure in underwear, Mike graduated to become a variety show star, lifestyle brand, entrepreneur, sweepstakes nominee, and aspiring creative — extending these roles to comment on American culture at a moment when art and mass media were blurring.

Disc 7: Michael Smith & Joshua White Collaborations

Smith first started working with Joshua White in the early 1990s when he was also collaborating with Doug Skinner on Doug and Mike’s Adult Entertainment, which White directed. Producing elaborate narrative videos and installations together for almost twenty years, an important dynamic formed that draws on White’s unique trajectory as a professional and innovator in the entertainment industry. In 1967, White founded the Joshua Light Show, a group of artists who explored the synesthesia of light and music. JLS was in residence at rock promoter Bill Graham’s Filmore East club in New York, where they provided psychedelic displays to accompany the likes of Janis Joplin, The Doors, and Jimi Hendrix. White went on to a career in television, directing episodes of Seinfeld, The Max Headroom Show, and Club MTV, as well as Laurie Anderson’s experimental music video O Superman. Teaming up with White amped up the cross-pollination of art and entertainment at the core of Smith’s projects featuring the attention-starved Mike, who is always eager to attach himself to the next big thing.

Disc 8: Doug Skinner & Michael Smith Doug and Mike’s Adult

Long before cable brought crude, absurdist sketch comedy to the Cartoon Network, Smith was collaborating with Doug Skinner on a risqué puppet show called Doug and Mike’s Adult Entertainment, which began as a childish version of an adult nightclub act and gradually became increasingly invested in the narrative of its characters.

Smith and Skinner were charismatic emcees who ceded to their Doug and Mike puppet doppelgangers and to a cast that also included wannabe creatives Shane and Cory, the potty-mouthed adolescent nephews, Kevin and Jason, and Mr. Toilet. The rapport between Smith and Skinner makes for a hilarious comedy extravaganza. A sitcom show shrunk to puppet size, Doug and Mike’s Adult Entertainment treats audiences to a spectacular array of narrative skits staged with ingenious sets and props.

Doug Skinner has contributed to The Fortean Times, Fate, Weirdo, Nickelodeon, and other fine publications. His translations include Three Dreams (Giovanni Battista Nazari, Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks) and Captain Cap (Alphonse Allais, Black Scat). A collection of his picture stories, The Unknown Adjective, was published by Black Scat in 2014. He has written many scores for theater and dance, most conspicuously for Bill Irwin’s The Regard of Flight. TV and movie appearances include Martin Mull’s Talent Takes a Holiday, Ed, Crocodile Dundee II, and a smattering of commercials.