A virtually bare exhibition space without its own lighting and without a discernable function. Hard to say that something is actually being »presented» there. We briefly notice two illuminated plastic tubs and move on to the next room. A second later my colleague Nikolaus says: »Something didn’t feel right in there.« So we go back. The feeling Nikolaus mentioned came from an atmospheric ground zero, as if someone had pulled the plug and shut down all the vital functions of the place. And the few things we could make out seemed to have scampered off into the margins of the space, keeping all to themselves. After looking at them more closely for awhile, a thought came to us that still stays with us today: »Here someone is presenting America’s wounded soul at the beginning of the twenty-first century«—the pain and the broken pride of a society that so fervently suppresses its own inhumanity. It is 2008 and we are at Yale, at the MFA thesis exhibition for students of Jessica Stockholder, who introduces us that afternoon to the room’s creator: Michael E. Smith.
In a corner of the exhibition room, one of the two plastic tubs rested on the floor, filled with a hand’s width of greenish water. In the tub, two used tennis socks were crisscrossed, each open end pointing outward in a different direction. A lamp was clamped to the tub’s edge overlooking the frugal aquarium, its light and warmth aimed downward into the cloudy algal bloom, where the pair of socks cowered like motionless fish. Close by, a crystal ball was positioned on top of a radiator. It gathered up the residual traces of light, focusing them into a small, bright point on the wall. No clairvoyance or future here, just a beam of reflected light. On the other side of the room, a radio had tethered itself to a humidifier with its own power cord. Overhead, on the ceiling, a glass cover was missing from a light, and instead of the light bulb, which belonged there, the head of a toothbrush with a burned handle tip was jammed into the socket threads. A soft-drink vending machine hummed quietly in the adjacent room.
Like each of his later exhibitions, this early installation at Yale University was also underpinned by the oppressively silent presence of simple objects, which can barely be spoken about other than in an animistic language, one ascribing them emotions, demeanor, and even a fate: they seem to be hurting, to be cold, are wounded or seek protection, lie alone in the emptiness, or cling to a part of the architecture. Sometimes they prop each other up, lean on or envelope one another, save themselves by crawling under a piece of furniture, or hang unnoticed from the ceiling. Frequently, their surfaces show the literal traces of abuse they were subjected to in the studio. They are scarred and encrusted, sealed off with resins and lacquer, or stuck together with industrial foam. Most are the size of torsos and limbs, or resemble a head in size. Their relationship to the human body is ever-present, and yet they remain among themselves in a world of objects where humans do not feature at all. And if they do, then as a threat.
Michael E. Smith’s work has its roots in Detroit. The birthplace of Fordism once embodied the achievements of the New Deal, promising wageworkers social security and sufficient affluence to partake in consumerist society and enjoy the benefits of progress. Yet the boomtown of the automobile industry overstepped its »limits to growth« long before the 1972 similarly named study by the Club of Rome presaged the future shrinking of the developed world’s economic centers. It was the first major US city to completely collapse after the affluent, mostly white segment of the population pulled its wealth out of the hapless city. The urban and social destruction that followed was unprecedented—it proved however to be only the first example of the disintegration of a community that, having plummeted from the heady heights of its own promises of progress, comes up with nothing better than abandoning broad sections of the populace to the debris of Modernity. Detroit is the first large-scale ruin of prosperity.
Untitled, 2010: Smith has used a telephone cord to construct a bowl similar to those found in ethnological collections, except of course that there it would be made out of a layered spiral of rolled-out clay. Serving as a handle and giving the bowl the look and feel of a pan, is the broken end of a neon tube, shored up with gaffe’s tape. Long-distance communication has been broken off and the light is out—also at the 2010 exhibition at KOW where the bowl appeared. But there is probably nothing more elemental and crucial than a vessel used for drinking or a pan for cooking food. An object, in essence as ancient as one of mankind’s very first arts, namely to produce things to meet practical daily needs, but here recycled backwards as it were, tinkered together out of electrical elements which, not only in Detroit but in many other places around the world, have absolutely no purpose should the power grid be down.
Smith makes use of objects, the vestiges of bygone prosperity, which are found in the niches of a frugal life: discarded clothing items like socks, T-shirts, and hats, household items like bottles and dishes, parts of technical devices or animal cadavers; things readily available in the artist’s surrounds, that had previously met basic human needs of food, warmth, and physical well-being, or served to keep our technology-dependent daily routines up and running. Smith uses them for an art that refrains from adding to what is given. Instead, he transforms his material into a state that still reverberates with the pain and anguish of an existence whose physical and emotional foundations have been destroyed. In 2010 and 2013, he placed in KOW’s upper space three works whose proportions corresponded to a head, a torso, and an arm—parts of a body scattered widely about, their fragments rigidly arranged to the architectural axes of the room. One object consisted of three baseball caps, which were fitted together like a broken paddle wheel, resulting in a portrait bust suffocated under yellow tape.
Smith’s objects seem like physical reconstructions of emotional vulnerability and disfigurement, his exhibitions like an archeology of humanity. They are created from a modest stock of selected and, when needed, prepared materials, which only take their final form on site and insert themselves into particular situations. Material images which have formed an independent strand in Smith’s oeuvre from the very outset appear like scorched, ashen, or scarred skin. Smith takes a similar approach in his videos: Jellyfish, 2011, is a fixed view shot of the leathery-scaly body of a pale pink fish, whose aquarium is so small it only has room to move in place. Miles, 2007, loops a seconds-long film sequence from a concert recording of Miles Davis, whose perspiration-drenched, frizzy hair takes on the form of brain matter in the spotlight. Photographs taken by Smith in Detroit in 2008 present ruinous, partially burned-out, partially collapsing residential houses in the dark of night like hulking, silent cadavers shrinking back from the flash of the camera.
Suffocation, marking time, being at one’s mercy, or succumbing to one’s injuries—this appears at first view to be what this young oeuvre is documenting, presented deathly still before the viewer, lying mostly on the floor. So I was initially surprised— but ultimately it struck me as completely plausible—when Smith made reference to Joseph Beuys during one of our conversations. Beuys’s idea of an art, that would potentially be capable of purifying and healing the body social, seemed to be one of the basic impulses underlying Smith’s work, and offered him a progressive, even solidary perspective, that came unexpected for me. But Smith avoided becoming fettered to Beuys’s symbolism, transferring instead the approach of a convalescent semantics onto the ruinous physique of his objects. With his installation Zeige deine Wunde (Show Your Wound) (1974–75), Beuys had explicitly pointed out that »you must reveal the illness you want to heal,« and hoped, with regard to societal traumas, that his art »provides a way out, if you listen to it carefully.« (Süddeutsche Zeitung from January 26–27, 1980)
An early key work from 2008 demonstrates Smith’s take on this. He sawed apart a small plastic Buddha statue, discarded the figure’s torso, reattaching the head to the body so that it looks like the bulbous nose on the face of a fish head, whose gaping mouth recalls a catfish. Buddha’s hands were lopped off in order to indicate the fish eyes. His facial features have been cut smooth so that the contours of his skull protrude forward much like in computed tomography. Now the catfish is just that not-so-attractive water inhabitant that devours everything in front of its mouth at the muddy bottom, living or dead. That makes it unpalatable but adaptive. Smith dismantles a symbol of higher consciousness and spiritual cleansing—a demarcation from Beuys’s metaphysics—in order to put in its place the image of an unselective organism living close to the dirty sediments of an ecosystem and filtering out what it needs to survive.
The things in and with which we live are more than mere accessories of the self. Especially when they safeguard our survival, they are our existence. At a time when Western societies have surpassed the limits of their growth and have had to switch from expansion to self-preservation, Smith contrasts this era’s environmental and ecological disasters with a materialism of basic needs. Yet his art pointedly refuses to align itself with ascetic ideals proclaiming that »less is more.« Modest lifestyles have long started to spread against the will of those who adopt them, and upward economic redistribution is teaching the middle classes the fear of social decline. For many people, »less« means a bare-bones life, and Smith’s objects trace that threshold of pain in lieu of a body politic that has become deaf to its own needs. They »do« or »experience« what we happily ignore, but what is so familiar to our emotional experience and our physical and spatial perception that the alienation between subject and object melts away and we come so near to the condition of an everyday thing that it awakens our empathy.
Untitled, 2013: A wasps’ nest is lying on the floor, physically fragile and with an opening on one side. The abandoned dwelling of an entire community. On top, with the same external dimensions, a hooded sweatshirt is folded into itself. Like a buffer it protects and warms the empty nest and, it would seem, itself as well. Viewed in the context of the room’s installation, at KOW in 2013, the sweatshirt looks forlornly toward a large bowl a few steps away, over which a T-shirt has been pulled like over the stomach of an overweight teenager. In fact the bowl comes from a bakery and was used for mixing dough. The title of the work, Fat Albert, 2013, quotes a popular cartoon character, as Smith frequently does, in this case a corpulent adolescent. With droopy, empty sleeves, the rounded torso seems to be rowing forward in vain, stuck in place like a tautly stretched drum for beating. Further away is an arm-length, folded pillowcase, whose open, imploring hand is a scoop once used to pass out animal feed.
Dave, 2013: Two shells facing one another are resting on the floor. Pinned between them is a dead pigeon, half pulled voraciously inside the shells, half pensively caught in the middle of an existential fight for life, in which the bird extends a wing upward. Present once again is the protective housing that runs throughout Smith’s work. Lying by itself in the expansive spaces of the Ludwig Forum Aachen, the pair of shells forms a small, outwardly protective, closed-off entity by turning their open and vulnerable sides toward one another. Of course, the pair is also just an empty shell, and, when counting the pigeon cadaver, three dead beings are joined together here. Nevertheless, they stand together like a small community in a hostile environment. Dave, the title, refers to Dave Thomas, the popular founder of the Wendy’s hamburger chain, one of the junk food enterprises that does not increase lifespan in the US. Given that the meat patties of hamburgers are pinned between two buns like the pigeon between the shells, the work and the title are rife with synonymous implications.
Here, as in other works, the powerful influence of Surrealism in the US can still be felt. But what differentiates Smith’s combinations of objects and materials from, for instance, Meret Oppenheim’s famous 1936 fur lined teacup, is that the tremendous unlikelihood of their encounter appears so plausible and that their occasional beguiling poetry is not rooted in fantasy but in a pragmatic sense for survival. For our consumer and throwaway mentalities this alone would be no small shift in perspective. But Smith goes further: he shows the wounds of a culture whose members neither deal with themselves rationally nor with others—not to mention their environment—and increasingly live in the devastation they themselves have caused. If one listens carefully, to continue with Beuys, Smith’s work displays an intelligence for resources, a solicitousness, and finally a sense of reason that we ourselves are lacking on both a private as well as global scale.
Hence, Smith has effaced humans from his art and retained the things that were once close to them, which clothed them and provided them warmth, which fed them or stored their food, which they used as tools, for communicating, or on which a hope could be pinned. He keeps what is left from the lives that his art only ever recalls as something distant, putting in their place a physiology and psychology of things that present themselves as more human, more sensitive, and more responsible than the social world they left behind. Nevertheless, in doing so, Smith inserts »no« apocalyptic visions or post-human sentiment into his work, and a critique of societal conditions is also more of an inference, not the heart of the matter. The world of art is a world of objects that are expendable in case of doubt. Smith introduces things to this world that were expendable elsewhere but which report what is indispensable. They do this in our place and if they show a »way out,« then it is to follow their example and to leave out the rest.
