In conversation: Dan Graham & Michael Smith

If one story of art during the 1990s was the ever-increasing awareness of its relationship to entertainment--and a corollary interest in social and participatory models of artmaking--then a compelling shadow figure in this narrative is Michael Smith, who joins artist Dan Graham in the second installment of Artforum's series "In Conversation."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Based in New York during the 1970s and '80s, Smith began his career in video and performance alongside the artists of the Pictures generation. Like them, he pursued appropriation, but rather than static media such as magazine photography, his source material was television. In the early video It Starts at Home, 1982, for example, the artist (working in collaboration with Mark Fischer) adopts all the formal hallmarks of situation comedy--the anonymous domestic setting, the instantly recognizable (i.e., barely developed) character types who regularly enter and exit the scene, the elementary editing style of hard jump cuts--but leaves them stranded on-screen as empty conventions, since little, if any, energy is invested in plot. Smith's artistic alter ego, "Mike," has cable installed in his home and, due to a technical snafu, becomes the star of his own real-time public-access program--leaving audiences watching the utterly mundane life of a man who, never venturing from home, is continually confronted with the image of himself on television. Poker-faced parodies like this evoke multiple contexts, speaking to developments in both mass culture and fine art. On the one hand, they reflect '70s and '80s television's deadpan spoofs on the variety shows of yesteryear (think of Saturday Night Live skits versus those of The Ed Sullivan Show); and, on the other, they play on the long-duration performances and reflexive closed-circuit video works made by Smith's contemporaries (Graham, for example, readily acknowledges that his time-delay pieces are composed of the same "dead air" as Smith's DOA narratives).

Smith's Home scenario seems prescient enough today, conjuring the cultivated banality of Big Brother or MTV's Real World as well as the appropriations of Pierre Huyghe in his video installation The Third Memory, 1999. But perhaps a more provocative point for consideration is the fact that Smith emerged at a moment when the worlds of art and popular entertainment not only negotiated an exchange of formal attributes but were marked by a living proximity in New York City. His performances took place both at avant-garde venues like the Kitchen and at such mainstream clubs as the Bottom Line; and his videos, which often revolved around the figure of Mike, inspired interest from emerging cable outlets like HBO. And so Smith's approach is informed by an acute awareness of audience (or what some call a "demographic"), as he repeatedly manages to reveal social values and conventions--subtly disrupting their seamless sheen of "taste" by introducing out-moded or shopworn motifs and genres, often (and most satisfyingly) to embarrassing effect.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In this regard, it's significant that Smith's practice during the past decade has had incarnations both private and public. His puppet shows (made with Doug Skinner) have appeared at such venues as a party given by his friend Mike Kelley. At the same time, Smith has created numerous museum installations, like International Trade and Enrichment Association, 1994-95, a booth laden with promotional materials riffing on the concept that artists would be tomorrow's "content providers"--an idea familiar to anyone who followed the dotcom industry in the '90s. Another piece, MUSCO: 1969-1997, 1997, made with longtime collaborator Joshua White, transformed an entire gallery into a fictional lighting company, replete with a salesroom and a back office littered with receipts. Interestingly, such installations have a distinctly televisual feel, seeming at once fictional and disconcertingly real. Perhaps this "virtual" effect reflects a time when so much of everyday American life is in a sense unreal--tailored for imaginary individuals whose qualities are the aggregate of innumerable focus groups.

It is this kind of flatline humor, used to inspire a double take when it comes to looking at mainstream America, that Smith shares most clearly with Graham. Indeed, one easily imagines the bland character Mike sitting on the couch in one of Graham's Homes for America. And one can easily understand why Graham, whose projects and writings over the years have taken up mass-cultural models and matters--from corporate architecture to Dean Martin--calls himself a longtime admirer of Smith's work. (It was Graham, in fact, who proposed interviewing Smith in these pages.) Both artists locate their art in real culture, and, even in passing conversation, they continually underscore the ways in which the conventions of community create meaning.