Blanton Museum of Art
Through December 30, 2007
The University of Texas at Austin
MLK at Congress
(200 East MLK)
Austin, Texas 78701
This fall, the Blanton Museum of Art is home to Mike's World, the first major retrospective of internationally renowned performance/video/installation artist Michael Smith and his New York-based collaborator, director/artist Joshua White. This extraordinary exhibition features some 30 years of videos, installation environments, and other performance-related materials detailing the adventures of "Mike," a sweet but hapless Everyman character created by Smith, and his hilariously awkward and ineffectual search for a piece of the American Dream. Following its debut in Austin, Mike's World will travel to the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia (April 24-August 3, 2008).
Mike's World takes a tightly focused view of a single Michael Smith performance persona as it has developed over the course of many years and through innumerable presentation formats. The character "Mike" functions metaphorically as a kind of ever-hopeful Candide, adrift in a world of rapid technological advancement that he seems incapable of fully comprehending. Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, curator of American and contemporary art and organizer of the exhibition, explained, "Direct and accessible, Smith's exquisite use of humor as a strategy for empathy and identification is rooted in the artist/audience relationships of performance. Yet the work's amplification and variation owes much to its visual, conceptualist sources. Underscoring the hybrid nature of Smith's accomplishment, the works selected for the exhibition also will highlight the collaborative creative process in which Smith has engaged over the years, including his most recent series of video and installation collaborations with artist-director Joshua White."
The exhibition's immersive installation has been designed by Michael Smith and Joshua White as a self-contained theatrical set, a strange yet familiar alternative universe inhabited by "Mike." Alive with sound and the myriad textures of the stuff of daily life, the expansive space is densely packed with opportunities to view video in every conceivable format. Two new Blanton commissions serve as the introduction to the exhibition: a five-minute "orientation room" video by Smith and White reprising the story of "Mike," and a video montage projected onto a spherical screen, itself surrounded by a photographic timeline that charts the
character's history.
