Collection Study
Michael E. Smith, Untitled, 2013

Text by Ned McConnell
November 2020

Untitled forms part of the practice of Michael E. Smith (b. 1977) that can be called painting but that crosses over into sculpture and were made between 2006 - present. These works are often set into a painter’s canvas but include objects and materials not usually associated with painting. The works are approximately 50 x 40cm. These works have been acquired by many international public and private collections including: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA. The David Roberts Collection acquired the work in 2014 from Galleria Zero, Milan, Italy.

Untitled, Michael E. Smith is from 2013. Typically of Smith’s work it is created out of remains; an entropic leftover, a set of detritus. Translucent plastic sheeting is stretched around a frame as if a painter’s canvas. Beneath this layer is another made of polyester fur, with a trapezoid shape torn from it to create a jagged-edged window. Within the window a vertical line of tightly wrapped Rhododendron leaves is formed through the centre of the frame, and as if to set the image in an icy stasis, urethane resin has been poured on to the leaves, fixing them like frozen fish in a lake.

Drawing me to Untitled are its materials and the investigation to work out what they are, and through this I am caught off-guard by the realisation that the work is roughly the size of a torso and that the leaves up the centre could be a spine. This bodily presence also brings with it a narrative, the story of the portrait; who is it, why them, where are they now? And a journey; the discarded nature of the material, where were they found, what were they doing there? So startling are these questions that they provoke a burst of laughter. But is the work actually funny? It seems too grim and sad to be comic but perhaps the absurdity of an alienated, urban life is where the dark, ironic humour is situated. The humorous side of Smith’s work is brought forth by the tension inherent in his work, the nervous tick that happens when something is too much and the emotion overwhelms normal sensitivity.

The aim of portraiture is often to bring some understanding of the sitter, however in the hands of Smith it becomes a way of looking inward. We only understand that it may be an unknown person, and we see the delicacy and fragility of the human, we see an interior. If the death mask was a way of preserving a likeness of a loved one then this is a way of preserving a kind of interior force, perhaps the heart or spirit, something that pulls inwards rather than projects outwards.

Uncertainty is a factor of all life, however in a global pandemic, whose end is yet to appear in sight, it is the defining factor of daily existence. Untitled is a work that brings into focus the uncertainty and everyday decay that surrounds us, that which is often unnoticeable. Like the leaves of a Rhododendron or the scrap of polyester on the roadside, but also in relation to the human, that we are all made of matter that is in decline and will one day return to the ground or ether, one way or another. This uncanny atmosphere that makes me jump and shudder is one that is becoming more and more familiar as the world shifts on its axis, culturally, politically, socially and economically.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none.
– Cormac McCarthy, The Road¹

¹ McCarthy, Cormac, The Road. New York: Borzoi Boos, 2006

Michael E. Smith was born in 1977 and grew up in Detroit, Michigan in the United States of America as the city’s famed automobile industry was beginning to decline, leading to a major economic downturn in a previously thriving metropolis. Consequently, many residents moved to the suburbs and former factories and warehouses became vacant, leaving spaces, one can imagine, for clandestine playgrounds to be explored. This sense of economic decline is evident in the materials and objects that Smith uses in his work, almost all of which are domestic, reflecting the uncanny vein running through his practice. Within his sculptural practice in particular there is big space between how and when the materials become a sculpture; a no man’s land, like a sprawling vacant lot in his hometown’s post-industrial sites.

Smith’s interest in this architecture goes further as he often creates his sculptures in situ, bringing a palette of materials in tow, then constructing the sculptures in the exhibition space. Working in this way allows him to create an atmosphere within the space, an almost spiritual realm that is heavy with emotion and tension by utilising the peripheries and seeking out spaces not usually used for exhibiting. He also references this post-industrial sphere with his use of lighting (the lighting is always altered) often to remove as much of the artificial lighting as possible, conceivably a nod to days and nights spent playing in old warehouse sites in Detroit. The unsettling feeling created by the fusion of familiar objects with urban materials that one might find in a local hardware store also speaks to the surroundings and nature of his gathering, possibly from liminal spaces, on the edges of suburbia. One would think Smith spends a great deal of time wandering the streets and markets (and possibly eBay, in a yet more alienated turn) to find these items without a plan as to how they might end up. The spending of time with this detritus can become a way of building narrative with the objects; all of Smith’s works are in some way a portrait, and his relationship with the materials creates a depth to the objects that is layered and emotive.

Whilst the objects are often minimal, discrete entities, they drip and flow with emotion and can almost feel overwhelming in their messiness. The spectrum of Smith’s practice in which Untitled appears takes this further, by creating human scale canvases, which oscillate between painting and sculpture. Catching the viewer between the portal of painting and the thingness of sculpture, shifting between looking through the work into a world and being in the world with the work. This uncanny basis of his practice catches you off-guard, pushing and pulling you when you least expect it, for such still, quiet, elegiac objects they create a reverberation that stretches out and energises the rooms they inhabit. If we imagine the spaces in which Smith discovers his materials are Heterotopias², then the objects are relics of these spaces brought forth to teach us about liminality.

² Foucault, Michel, Of Other Spaces, Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986. Heterotopias: envisioned by Foucault, are liminal spaces that exist somewhere between the real and imagined such as mirrors, graveyards or deserted areas on the outskirts of cities.

The birds were starting to die. While Neil lay in the deep ferns beside the runway he counted three of the dead albatross on wooden slats. A fourth bird tottered past them, flat eyes staring at the lagoon. Too exhausted to take to the air, it sat glumly on the iron railing, unable to read the sky. A dozen of the creatures lay on the bonfire beside the radio-cabin, their wilting plumage like flowers on a funeral pyre.
– J. G. Ballard, Rushing to Paradise³

³ Ballard, J. G., Rushing to Paradise. London: Flamingo, 1994

Entropy is a measure of how evenly energy is distributed in a system. In a physical system, entropy provides a measure of the amount of energy that can be used to do work. The land artist and sculptor Robert Smithson, famous for investigating entropy in works such as Spiral Jetty, 1970 and Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970, described how “the universe will burn out into an all-encompassing sameness”.⁴ The metaphorical reducibility of matter to sameness brought on by decay can be seen as a dystopian or apocalyptic logic that has been exacerbated by the chaotic collision in the past twenty years of the internet, hyper-capitalism and ecological disaster.

⁴ Smithson, Robert. Holt, Nancy (ed.). The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustrations. New York NY: New York University Press, 1979

Untitled is entropic in that it attempts to hold things in stasis (which is the ultimate end game of entropy), the urethane resin fixing the torn polyester, the delicate leaves, as an image of a human, and whilst Smithson wanted to see what would happen if we let things decay, Smith rather portrays that decay through a kind of gentle, albeit at times dark, metaphor of human frailty.

Smith’s use of materials is intuitive - they are selected partly through chance as he is not necessarily looking for them when he finds them, and partly through the way he imbues them with meaning and depth that they otherwise don’t have. If the universe is burning out into sameness as Smithson said, Smith is wringing the last bits of energy from these materials, perhaps projecting phantasms through his unique, ambiguous portraiture. What can this idea of entropy teach us about ecology and our own relationship to the planet? Coming from such an industrial space, both conceptually, biographically and aesthetically it may seem strange to relate Smith’s work to ideas of ecology and the planet. However, our relationship with land is present in many of his works. In Untitled, 2019 he created a work using abandoned kayaks with a theremin inside to represent beached whales, with their melancholic song emanating when interacted with by visitors. Or the older work Untitled, 2011, made from blue plastic in which one can make out the shape of a bird touching another with its beak, in which plastic beetles are stuck, and perhaps ingested by the birds they have become a part of one another. The Rhododendron leaves in Untitled, rolled up like chrysalides, appear like a spine, the backbone of a mammal, here fused with the natural world in a way that urban life often feels separate from.

Rhododendrons symbolise danger in floriography (the language of flowers). This possibly comes from their toxicity; there are reports of many Pompeiian soldiers dying from eating honey made from Rhododendrons, left behind by the Pontic in 67 BCE.⁵ These are references brought to the work by the viewer (or writer). Smith offers no solution or link to these oblique materials, but through this there is a searching to understand connections between the self, humanness and external materials. Surely this is one of the most difficult existential issues at hand within the current climate crisis; to understand and act on our place within the harmony of the planet. It is easy to think of entropy as the slow grinding of matter into dust, homogenous and destroyed, but it also reminds us that everything is made up of a delicate balance, one which humans are destabilising, potentially to the obliteration of our own and many other species’ existence.

⁵ wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhododendron