Michael E. Smith at Atlantis

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A google search says no one has used to word tumor in any online writing about Smith. Which seems odd, his objects seem awfully affected by a lot of weird malignant lumps, red dots, growths on institution and inflated with resin crusts. Teratomas are a specific type of tumor composed of tissues not normally present at the site, the classic hair and teeth twin in your tummy. You can google pictures of these, they actually look a lot like Smith's more "bodily" objects. Of growths without cause, find a potato in our eye, a DNA corruption, the "categorically promiscuous" things sliding into new subjects like bare knees across asphalt, so that black tar is becoming-blood, and knees ground becoming-asphalt. You can move between categories, your body could become alligator skin, claws inside you.


Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Michael E. Smith at Zero, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry

Darren Bader at Sadie Coles

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Anton Chigurh: Don't put it in your pocket. It's your lucky quarter.
Gas Station Proprietor: Where do you want me to put it?
Anton Chigurh: Anywhere not in your pocket. Where it'll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin. Which it is.

You can see there this is going. Art, like lucky quarters, made indistinguishable from their unordained brethren, just a coin. Thrown into the pile of stuff the anxiety of an artwork lost, returning to common object, which it is.

Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation

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A public's anxiety over the status of the artwork represented in the likes of online quizzes to differentiate children's from famous, a prank gone viral placing glasses on the floor of SFMoMA, or Pierre Brassau. We feel comfort with the artwork identified and labeled, packaged by the camera or work list, catalogue raisonnéd. We appreciate butterflies pinned spread behind glass.  Removed from the packaging artworks and butterflies disperse, cling everywhere, etherealize into suspicion for them. You can never be certain you've seen all the butterflies, their artwork is everywhere. The entire space becomes a distrust of what means and what is merely meaninglessly there. Never really be sure. In Marfa seeing - in the hordes of Judd's objects arranged on tables - a small box repeated amongst many different rooms and asked what this one object of Judd's was: It was a recorder for humidity and sunlight for archival purposes put there by staff, not Judd's at all. Was it meaninglessly there, or should we choose it to mean. For Ireland everything would seemingly be encompassed with open arms, comfort to know. For Smith, building this distrust likely the point. Anxiety artworks.


See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Michael E. Smith at Zero, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry

Group Show at Essex Street

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"Baer repeatedly crunches together heterogeneous visual registers to produce a kind of spatial-temporal pile-up." (-James Cahill) Temporal pile-up like Baer's recent resurgence with body of work difficult to discern if timely or anachronistic. The quote could describe Jana Euler work just as well. But later, "In recent decades, Baer has consistently straddled personal and cosmic registers." Baer a little more shamanistic in the deployment of symbols. But so maybe that's what this exhibition is about, the soft proffering of symbols through thin veils, the different means to do it, Smith's body stuck to walls, Vogel's thrifted objects, Smith's Munch touchups, Baer's past now tinging the present.

Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento

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"Blood is sticky, often surprising people newfound to emergencies who encounter only bodies at pains to remind them of clean superficial images, but you can cut off your hands and glue them to your shoes." Bodily violence, its threat (a body to become goo as any other) is implicit to a work that treats materials as categorically promiscuous (surreal), e.g. if you can put Mario in the gallery sky or ocean's puffer fish under the warbled blue of summer tables, inflate them like footballs with whale ears, aren't you as wiling to place skulls at your knees. The disregard for the categorical order is like gore, crushing bodies.



See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Zero, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry, Tony Conrad's Glass,

Michael E. Smith at Zero

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The body finds disgust in Smith's corporate assembly, partitioned objects which prey on the uncomfort of common technology's reliance on introducing foreign bodies into us.  The associative qualities of halogen glass glued to the skin of gym shorts is ripe and manifold, overflowing with material reference, catheters and syringes and crack pipes and glass in advance of their broken arm's glass into our legs, disparate objects allowing the dissonance's fissure to act as a vacuum of meaning sucking up associations until they only exist vaguely and foreboding. Blood is sticky, often surprising people newfound to emergencies who so often only encountered bodies that are pains to remind them only of clean superficial images, but you can cut off your hands and glue them to your shoes.

See too: Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry

Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

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It's a cliche at this point to say that Smith makes the mundane object estranged. And in a sea of so many surrealists currently operating, less than helpful. Estrangement is today's go-to strategy. Whereas for Kiaer and many other this is a compositional strategy, totemizing the mundane through specific arrangement which feels odd, Smith's is individuated, each object set off so that we can no longer "know" the sculpture, eroding a complete vision, and opening a distrust. A psychological sliver. We cannot know the object, its relation to other objects is broken, either categorically (there is no category to place the object within, surrealist) or psychologically (the unknown threat). The rocking chair I project from the two elegant bones still in contact with the substrate of the real is not the same as the one in your head. This unknown destabilizing of our ability to conceptualize the objects in equitable terms to exchange with another -both objects and other people - (eroding the material semio-substrate with which our exchange is based) breaching a distrust, is its sinister quality.

This is an estrangement of our concept of the object from its material version, this distance is the psychological shivers.


See too : Michael E Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry , Ian Kiaer at Lulu , Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen , Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace

Michael E. Smith at Lulu

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Coming by way of Povera rather than its more normalized pop onslaught, contemporary surrealism a vital materialist adaptation to old modes.  Touching into the same desirous unconscious that packaged products diligently mine a libidinal desire from. It makes today’s surrealism feel "true" in that our access to its machinations is hidden.  Arranging its objects as if knowing something you don’t, organized by a logic you cannot see taste touch or smell, like a monoxide. Surrealism must obfuscate in order to mirror the commodic penchant for touching something sublingual inside us. Like orchids selected over millennia for their ability to drive the Apoideas to lust, products live and die and evolve for their ability to incite within us a desire, a fear, a feeling, a sale. A t-shirt inside a sunflower.

See too : Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry , Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner , Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak , Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum 

Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry

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Always one step ahead of the pack, Smith has moved away from the sparse hide-the-object installationism towards a b-wurtz-like awkward modernism, where objects, though still mysterio, experience no disinclination to proclaim themselves as objects in a gallery, like no-problem, but, often looking more awkward for it, placed with an obtuseness, and never resolve themselves into it in any tidy manner.
From his Yale grad exhibition to now, Smith’s work has moved further into the realm of odd material fetishism, without adornment, in space.
From magazines and fluorescent liquids to weed-whipper-heads covered in oatmeal, to skull-chips, to now lightning rods, and clarinets swallowed snake-like inside pvc tubes, and prehistoric whale ear bone fossils attached to footballs. Moves from dark ambience to clear-view contraptionism of a product-like strangeness.