In conversation: Dan Graham & Michael Smith

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

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Based in novel York during the 1970s and '80 Smith began his career in video and performance alongside the artists of the Pictures generation. Like them, he pursu appropriation, on the other hand rather than static media like as magazine photography, his source material was television. In the early video It Starts at domicile 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 marks who regularly enter and exit the exhibition the elementary editing style of hard jump over cuts--but leaves them stranded on-screen as destitute of contents conventions, since little, if any, efficiency is invested in plot. Smith's artistic alter self "Mike," has cable installed in his abode and, due to a technical snafu, becomes the star of his hold real-time public-access program--leaving audiences watching the utterly mundane life of a man who, not at any time venturing from home, is continually be opposite toed with the image of himself upon television. Poker-faced parodies like this call up multiple contexts, speaking to exhibitions in both mass culture and fine art. upon the one hand, they throw back '70s and '80s television's deadpan spoof upon the variety shows of yesteryear (think of Saturday Night Live skits versus those of The ed Sullivan Show); and, on the other, they play upon the long-duration performances and reflexive closed-circuit video works made through Smith's contemporaries (Graham, for example, readily acknowledges that his time-delay pieces are compos of the same "dead air" as Smith's DOA narratives).

Smith's dwelling 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 on the contrary perhaps a more provocative point for consideration is the fact that Smith emerg at a instant when the worlds of art and popular entertainment not solitary negotiated an exchange of formal attributes on the other hand were marked by a living proximity in of recent origin York City. His performances took place the couple at avant-garde venues like the Kitchen and at of the like kind mainstream clubs as the Bottom Line; and his videos, which ofttimes revolved around the figure of Mike, inspired interest from emerging cable exits like HBO. And so Smith's approach is informed through an acute awareness of audience (or what a certain number of call a "demographic"), as he repeatedly manages to reveal social values and conventions--subtly disrupting their seamless sheen of "taste" through introducing out-moded or shopworn motifs and genre repeatedly (and most satisfyingly) to embarrassing effect

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In this regard, it's significant that Smith's practice during the past decade has had incarnations the two private and public. His doll shows (made with Doug Skinner) have appeared at of the like kind venues as a party given by means of 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 upon the concept that artists would be tomorrow's "content providers"--an idea familiar to anyone who followed the dotcom industry in the '90 Another piece, MUSCO: 1969-1997 1997 made with longtime collaborator Joshua White, transformed an entire gallery into a fictional lighting company, abounding with a salesroom and a back office littered with receipts. Interestingly, like installations have a distinctly televisual perceive seeming at once fictional and disconcertingly real. Perhaps this "virtual" issue reflects a time when in the way that much of everyday American life is in a faculty of perception 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 advances to looking at mainstream America, that Smith shares greatest in quantity clearly with Graham. Indeed, single easily imagines the bland character Mike sitting upon the couch in one of Graham's abiding-places for America. And one can easily understand wherefore Graham, whose projects and writings above the years have taken up mass-cultural types and matters--from corporate architecture to Dean Martin--calls himself a longtime admirer of Smith's work. (It was Graham, in fact, who propos interviewing Smith in these pages.) the two artists locate their art in real tillage and, even in passing conversation, they continually underscore the ways in which the conventions of community create meaning.