Drawings: Simple, Obscure And Obtuse

This artist's book chronicles a lifetime of drawings by the performance/video/installation artist Michael Smith. Smith is best known for his alter ego, "Mike," whose blend of satisfaction and yearning, humor and pathos, makes him an all-American anti-hero. Smith's wide range of art activities in television, performance, stand-up and puppet shows, as well as installation, sculpture and video, have influenced a generation of young artists. This book is composed of mostly-unseen material from private notebooks: sketches, notations, diagrams and storyboards, as well as finished and childhood drawings, giving the reader a fly-on-the-wall view into Smith's mind and creative process. Smith's newest video work, created at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, will show at P.S. 1/MoMA, in February of 2007, and a traveling exhibition begins at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas in August, 2007.