Art

Michael Smith has for three decades worked with the figure of the ‘everyman’. Smith’s alter-ego, Mike
(or ‘Blandman’), is a quizzical, comic nomad who wanders through everyday American life, trying to  prise greater meaning from routine banality. Smith’s work has hardly been seen in Britain, and Hales keeps things simple, presenting one video and a series of photographs, both focused on the world of education, in which Smith – and ‘Mike’ – contemplate the hopes and limitations of learning and personal growth.

In the video ‘Portal Exclusion’, Mike embarks on a journey of self-education, using distance-learning software to enrol on an ever-growing list of college courses. Smith’s humour plays out the tragicomedy of the earnest, well-meaning guy, whose gentle naivety keeps him insulated from the bleak reality around him. American society’s market culture, and its work ethic, is ingrained in the pressures of working life; Mike’s journey, escaping from the boredom of white-collar workaday to the supposed free erudition of a university education, instead finds him amassing facts rather than knowledge, regurgitating the jargon of self-improvement, rather than accessing
a grander, richer world.

Alongside is Smith’s ongoing photographic series ‘Class Portraits’, which sees him in cheesy group portraits alongside his various fellow students, from 1999 to the present. The students’ clothes and hairstyles change, while Smith, in his anonymous suit and tie, grows slowly older. It’s a gesture hardly there, but Smith’s placid smile – guileless but knowing – speaks volumes about the nature of ambition, hope, failure and resignation as we play it out in all our ordinary lives.