THE ARTISTIC PRACTICE OF MICHAEL E. SMITH

Michael E. Smith’s images and objects are portraits, making collages from smithereens of reality.  Smith’s exhibitions are improvisations. On site, he creates assemblages and installations out of profane objects, which are associated with social precarious situations and are marked by their everyday use. They are simple objects of an unassuming life, reduced to the necessary. Repositories that provide shelter or conserve. Or that are close to the human body like clothing and food or that appear corporeal themselves, like when the surface of an image resembles scarred skin.

The characters, to which Smith often alludes in his work, are ambivalent. Leadbelly, Miles Davis, Tupac Shakur, Isiah Thomas, Twiggy Ramirez assume the dual role of heroes and antiheroes; they are successful and yet hated, or they are loved but nevertheless failed. This makes them realistic and tangible. Smith portrays such ambivalent figures and abstracts them. He designs them as traces, signs, memory, and moments of identification.

Thereby Smith turns against the self-idealization of the American society, considering it as ignorant.  He corresponds to Walter Benjamin’s Destructive Character, who destroys false ideals in order to blaze a trail between their ruins – without idealizing the newly  acquired perspective. He does this without accusation or judgment. As a portraitist of the early 21st Century American social reality, Michael E. Smith is a realist and a non-idealist. The vanishing point of his aesthetic praxis is the belief in a hermeneutic of empathy: reading his works means to feel pain, fear, and distraction, as a healing process that is the actual object and impetus of reception.

The individualism, which the western societies conventionalized and idealized ad nauseam, appears as a traumatic existence against the background of a social repression that is systematically suppressed. Smith’s work stems from a deep skepticism towards his own social world, which, nevertheless, remains the only mental realm for orientation. Not an orientation inside a greater societal matrix, but rather a devotion of one’s life to a concrete collective, whose solidarity is perhaps exemplary.

The Detroit-born artist (1977) belongs to a tradition of social-oriented art practice. His motives of social self-purification resemble Joseph Beuys, yet are partly ironically, partly pragmatically twisted and replace Beuys’s shamanism and object mysticism with influences from Hip Hop and Soul. 

 Alexander Koch and Nikolaus Oberhuber, Berlin, October 2008