The man closes his office door for what seems like the last time. Around him are a gang of fresh-faced twentysomething co-workers, like a particularly vexatious Gap advert. He stands patiently as they present him with a giant gold watch; seconds later, they are gone. His shoulders sag several inches. He’s yesterday’s guy. The invisible man.
It’s a scene that must have been staged in real-life workplaces the world over. What makes this one different is that this is a piece of conceptual art-cum-dance and I’m watching on a password-protected videofeed courtesy of the Tate gallery. It’s a sneak preview of a piece by the cult American artist Michael Smith that will appear on 10 December. This is performance art, but not as you might have seen it: an amalgam of filmed contemporary dance (the stuff I’m watching) and improv comedy, which will be streamed live online from a lair inside Tate Modern. There’s a perky piano soundtrack. Oh, and the bit after the office scene is a surreal medieval dream sequence, complete with armour, and it’s also a kind of dance. Even the curator, when I call, sounds unsure what Tate is about to unleash. “We have a rough idea,” she hedges.
When we hook up by Skype to Smith’s studio in Texas, the artist seems hazy on the details too. The dance sections have been prefilmed with a young company from Austin, but the live segments will only be finalised in London. Smith himself will star as “Mike”, a character he has played on and off for 40 years – a perpetually hapless, perennially upbeat everyman who sprang to life on the Chicago comedy circuit in the 1970s. With touches of Jacques Tati and a light sprinkling of Beckett, Mike is less a man than an all-American metaphor – a device Smith has used to poke fun at everything from Reaganomics to 1990s New York artworld hysteria. Brows knotted with a peculiar combination of puppyish enthusiasm and quiet desperation, he has rampaged through gallery installations, fringe happenings – and he even memorably starred in his own satirical music video, 1984’s Go For it Mike.
Though they inhabit the same body, there is a difference between Michael (artist) and Mike (character), Smith explains: “He’s more optimistic than me, much more positive. He doesn’t get anxious like I do.” Mike’s storylines have been played out over an eccentric, deadpan series of videos, puppet shows and performances, pitched somewhere between live art and something much harder to categorise (also: much funnier). One of Smith’s works was called Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter and Snack Bar – it was part installation and part satire, a faux federal manual to mock cold war anxieties.
Critics have called Mike a proto-reality TV star, decades before the Osbournes and the Kardashians; others have compared him to the anarchic comic Andy Kaufman. But Smith doesn’t want to talk about all that: he’s more interested in telling me his doppelganger’s backstory. “He had a business that went bankrupt, then he tried to develop a wellness centre. At one stage he was an artist.” There is a dry pause. “Not a very good one.”
In the new piece, called Excuse me!?! ... I’m Looking for the Fountain of Youth, the desperation is not so much quiet as full-blown. As we watch Mike creak his way through a yoga routine, then go through a humiliating search at airport security, he seems to distil many of the indignities and inanities of contemporary life. This material might seem easygoing – but, as Buster Keaton (one of Smith’s heroes) showed, well-targeted laughter can be only too painful.
“Mike believes in the American dream,” says Smith. “He’s always looking for the fountain of youth. But what’s interesting is that as he’s got older, he’s become invisible. He’s sort of slipping away.”
Meanwhile, live art has never been more high-profile. Marina Abramović’s marathon, 700-hour residency at MoMA in 2010, The Artist is Present, was mobbed by 500,000 visitors and became a viral hit. Tate’s own performance series, held in the cavernous spaces of three former oil tanks in Tate Modern in 2012, attracted 2m visitors and will recommence when the extended gallery opens next year. Tate Live itself has seen nearly 150,000 web hits – not bad when you consider that previous instalments have seen the studio transformed into a rococo dining room and a spoof musical masquerading as a trailer for a non-existent film.
Smith sounds bemused to find himself at the cutting edge, but he’s relishing the moment. Straight after his appearance in the Tate series, he’ll be screening a series of films and taking part in a short residency at South London Gallery. “It’s nice to have the work,” he deadpans. Has he worked out what he’s going to show? He sighs. “Not quite yet. There may be some lying to make it sound more interesting.”
Mike, meanwhile, soldiers on: in the final clip of the film we see him surrounded by glimmering stars, staring at a map. He looks confused, but when he strides off it’s with a purposeful swagger. Down but not out.
- Michael Smith’s BMW Tate Live performance will begin online at 8pm GMT on 10 December; for the full lineup, see tate.org.uk. He will be at South London Gallery 10–12 December.
