“At some point you see somebody do a lot of the same thing and call them a hack. And then I thought, How do you become a hack? At least hacks make a living.”
Over a year ago, a mutual friend let the artist Michael Smith know I was interested in doing an interview with him. The friend showed Smith the previous piece I’d published, an interview with someone also named Michael. Smith’s only response, as far as I know, was, “Which Mike is he going to interview next?”
Before long, Smith invited me and the friend to sit in his living room, which had an armchair and a television and several small paintings resting on a shelf he’d installed near the ceiling. Smith talked about the walnuts he’d been putting in his oatmeal and asked what the protocol was for throwing away old batteries. He talked about studying painting when he was young—before the performance work, the videos, the installations, the drawings; before the character of Mike or Baby Ikki ever stood onstage in front of an audience—and about how the head of the Whitney Independent Study Program let him stay for an extra semester because he was so tidy. He liked to sweep, he said. And from what I could tell, this was still true. His house was very tidy.
Michael Smith was born in Chicago in 1951, and after he lost interest in painting, he started going to an open mic at a hamburger restaurant. Notes he took there were the germ of his early Chicago performances, like Comedy Routine, where he walks the outline of a stage, empties shaving cream into a tin, and pies himself in the face. “What are you doing, Mike?” asks a voice on tape, and it’s a good question. Smith explored it through early, prop-heavy performances, and in the ’80s he fleshed out the character of Mike in gem after gem of collaborative video. There’s It Starts at Home, in which Mike gets his own reality show; and Secret Horror, in which unexpected ghosts show up for a come-as-you-are party after Mike wakes in terror one night to the sudden appearance of an ugly new drop ceiling in his home.
Mike isn’t Michael Smith; or, put another way, Smith is the artist, and Mike, the art. He’s the protagonist of many of Smith’s videos and performances, an everyman with a lineage in the work of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. Sitting in his living room that night, I couldn’t help but feel like I was sitting among objects charged with potential. The space had the energy of a set. Everything was ready to use. There was the kitchen table where he ate, the broom, a window. At some point I got up to use the toilet.
This interview took place in Smith’s studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, about eighteen months after we first met. We sat together at a metal table, drinking coffee.
—Hayden Bennett
I. The Coffee
MICHAEL SMITH: Thanks so much for the coffee.
THE BELIEVER: Have you ever been to Qahwah House, this place?
MS: That Yemeni place around the corner? I have. It’s so popular.
BLVR: Yeah.
MS: Somebody who visited, they picked up a coffee from the same place. And then I picked one up. It’s quite strong, which I appreciate.
BLVR: Can you talk a bit about the genesis of Mike? The character.
MS: I would always refer to myself as Mike because most people call me Michael. Mike just sounded funny. My brother would say, “Hey, Mike.” It was this kind of diminutive way of talking to myself. I don’t know about belittling; it was just, different—familiar or something.
BLVR: Estrangement through that familiarity, maybe. Do you remember when Mike started asking himself, “I wonder what I’m going to do today?” It’s a question that often drives his narrative.
MS: A lot of the character came from the voice [speaking slowly], “Hmm, I wonder what I’ll do.” And then it’s pretty flat-footed. He checks his list. Or he makes his list. Maybe it gives a sense that he’s got some free time.
BLVR: Yeah, every morning there is a new to-do list. There’s more coffee. It got me thinking a lot about repetition. Repetition with Mike never really gets old. It’s hopeful, like something’s coming.
MS: I think that has to do with my process. I sit down; I wonder, What am I going to write about today?
BLVR: There’s no real anxiety for him.
MS: No, that’s the thing I have respect for about Mike. He doesn’t get anxious like me. I mean, he gets baffled. Flummoxed and stuff. Maybe the Baby expresses more of that.
BLVR: Oh, totally. You’re very nice to Mike, how you set him up.
MS: Probably indirectly, it’s me being nice to myself, which is good to see. Sometimes I don’t know how to do that.
BLVR: There’s an openness, too, that got me wondering whether the Quaker meetings you used to go to had a lasting influence.
MS: At the time they did. I was really young.
BLVR: How old?
MS: I went to college when I was seventeen, and then I started going to meetings. A friend of mine, a professor—we became friendly. He went to Quaker meetings. It was also a way to establish a stance against the war. I actually went to them in New York.
BLVR: Conscientious objection for Vietnam, yeah. The way Mike is—it feels like there’s something about Friends meetings and the idea of presence with one another.
MS: I appreciate that connection. But I never emptied my head, really. I never thought about it. It’s possible there was a connection, because I was more open then, but I wasn’t a very spiritual guy. Neither is Mike.
BLVR: Receptiveness is what’s crucial to him; that’s what I’m thinking about.
MS: I mean, he is kind of a sponge—he takes in and there’s not much he gives out. Unfortunately, I think I’m finding that the overlap between me and him is getting more and more apparent.
BLVR: What is?
MS: Oh, the distance between us is really tightening up as I get older. I’m slowing down. We’re meeting together, and physically, I feel very close to him. A lot of his themes now relate to my own physical aging. That’s becoming the subject matter.
BLVR: It used to feel like there was a gap?
MS: Yeah. Before, I had a sense of Mike as a younger person who was invisible. That’s what it is. I’m an older person now and I understand this idea of invisibility, which happens as you get older. Mike was kind of invisible before I was. We’re catching up to each other.
BLVR: In the early performances, after you stopped painting, you were thinking about Nixon’s silent majority and a character who was as bland as possible—Blandman.
MS: I wrote to ask a lot of people who Blandman was. It was mostly foods that I got back—doughy, bland foods.
BLVR: Blandman sort of became Mike, right? You said that before your first video, Down in the Rec Room, Mike was basically a hat rack for props.
MS: Yeah, he was a plinth to hold stuff. I was trying to flesh out his character with props.
BLVR: What changed?
MS: I had a place for him. With Rec Room I came upon a beginning and an ending. Like, Oh, he’s gonna have a party? Oh, the party is not happening? I was trying to deal with an arc that gets deflated completely. Even though the set was very minimal—it’s a really impoverished set—it suggested a certain place in society, a standing. That’s how I figured out Mike. I was approximating him, and the more I worked with him, the more certain themes presented themselves and it made sense for him to go up against those themes.
BLVR: There is a funny permanence to what’s on the set—the armchair, the mailbox, the television. They all get used, and more than once. I’m thinking about how often Mike goes up against an external voice, telling him what to do. The tape machine, the television. There’s often a voice that’s almost goading him.
MS: Richard Foreman was a big influence.
BLVR: Is he funny?
MS: Some people may not find his stuff funny, but when I first saw him, I found it hilarious.
BLVR: That voice on the tape evolves into characters who call the shots for Mike, at least in the ’80s videos. One of my favorites is this little hairpiece in It Starts at Home. He’s a producer who gets Mike onto TV, something like a reality show before there was such a thing. He’s an authoritative hairpiece in a chair, surrounded by cigar smoke. Proto-Steinbrenner from Seinfeld.
MS: That was very strange. That was something my mother made for her cat.
BLVR: I didn’t know that. Oh my god.
MS: Yeah, no, she made that little mink thing. I think it was something she had left over from a coat or something. And it was a little toy. She was a seamstress. And she said, “You can have it.”
BLVR: That’s so funny. Eric Bogosian did the voice?
MS: Eric did a really good voice for him. There was some very good dialogue written. I mean, there were many more people working on it than me.
BLVR: It was a nice thing about getting to watch the DVDs—seeing names and thinking, Oh yeah, they were all hanging out. Did Bogosian write the dialogue?
MS: No, a lot of it was written by Dike Blair and Barbara Kruger.
BLVR: I remember one name surprised me.
MS: Maybe Randy Cohen? He was the original ethicist. He was part of my group of friends. A bunch of my friends got together and did that. Eric Fischl, Barbara Bloom, Carole Ann Klonarides.
Still from “It Starts at Home,” 1982. Courtesy of the artist.
BLVR: Your friend group was generative for Mike.
MS: I’m very happy you were able to watch the DVDs.
BLVR: It’s rare to have such an accessible record of performance art—there’s a whole world in there.
MS: Yeah. I learned from the people I worked with. Especially in terms of making or inhabiting a set. For It Starts at Home, I worked with the painter Power Boothe. For the Fallout Shelter installation at MoMA, I worked with the artist, now poet, Alan Herman. He was a total pro. He had done Super Bowl commercials. I picked up a certain sensibility. Mike is always missing it a little. That also relates to me. I’m constantly a little behind.
BLVR: I mean, there can be a sadness when Mike fully accomplishes a task, or fills out the to-do list. I’m thinking of Portal Excursion, when he learns two words out of the dictionary every day. After he’s learned the words, there’s this sense of exhaustion.
MS: I take it to the absurd, but that was a true story about my uncle. He told me to pick two words every day from the dictionary.
BLVR: Did you?
MS: No.
BLVR: [Laughs] The way Mike describes the project, there’s real wonder in it. Two new words.
MS: He takes pleasure in those small things. Excuse me, may I use the restroom? I’m asking your permission.
Read the rest over at The Believer.