Guy Richards Smit

Guy Richards Smit (born 1970) is an American performance artist, painter, and singer-songwriter in the band Max Geil! & PlayColt. He has shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Valencia, Dublin, and Havana, among other places, and was represented by Roebling Hall in New York City from 1999 to 2007.[1]

Background

As a teen in Manhattan, Smit was in a number of alt-rock bands. He studied abroad for a year at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam as an undergraduate at Parsons, and lived for a year in Berlin before entering the MFA program at Rutgers where he learned of the work of Michael Smith. He graduated in 1996.[2]

Family

His Dutch father was J. W. Smit, a Dutch language and literature professor at Columbia University and a world expert on French composer Hector Berlioz. His mother, Pamela Richards, was a professor of library history and a Knickerbocker. (She passed away in 1999, and his father in 2006.)[2] Smit's great, great, great grandfather on his mother's side was Gulian Verplanck, who represented New York in US Congress from 1825 to 1833 and later ran for mayor of New York in the city's first open mayoral election. His maternal grandmother was a Billy Rose dancer and appeared as one of Salvador Dalí's nearly nude statues in his infamous Dream of Venus live diorama in the 1939 New York World's Fair.[3]

Smit's sister, Marijke, is an urban planner who works with the green architectural firm Project Frog in the Bay Area. He has two older half-brothers, both also in creative fields in the Netherlands: One, Tijn Smit, played keyboard on the Playcolt song, "Here Comes Maxi."[4] He is married to Rebecca Chamberlain, a visual artist and member of Max Geil! & PlayColt. They have two sons.

Career

Grossmalerman

first videos

The subject of an ongoing performance and video series that started in 1996, Jonathan Grossmalerman, whose last name is pig-German for "big painter guy," is a successful, alcoholic New York painter who has moved into low-end stand-up comedy.[2] He has successfully conquered the art world, recorded an album, written a book, and delved into movie-making. (The latter is explained in Jonathan in Purgatory (1999) as a feature titled Sally which ends with David Salle dying during an operation for reconstructive plastic surgery.[5]) Blake Gopnik the Washington Post has written that there are "hints of Andy Kaufman" in the work, saying, "Watch the videos with the sound turned off, and you'd sometimes swear you were watching real footage of someone with some kind of a career in comedy--no comic genius, maybe, but someone who's got the timing and manner down".[2] In a performance shot in New York to look like it was in Cologne, Grossmalerman denounces Joseph Beuys, somewhat of a national treasure there. In another video, Jonathan Gets Clean (2000), the artist, in recovery, visits his Chelsea art dealer, played by real Chelsea art dealer John Post Lee who insists on paying the artists in cocaine then calls the police on him.[6] Stand up has become yet another medium by which Grossmalerman siphons off his angst.

comics

In 2008, Smit started to put Grossmalerman in comic book form, where he saw wider narrative possibility. He told ArtNews, “If you were to shoot [dismemberment], you’d have to do all kinds of angles. But in a comic, these types of exaggerated happenings can be worked into a story far more easily. It was a chance to develop this character even more.”[7] The second issue, published in 2011, featured Grossmalerman being kidnapped and stabbed in a group therapy session, among other things.[8] Indeed, Smit has a background in two dimensional work, having majored in illustration while at Parsons.

sitcom-style videos

The Grossmalerman comics in turn nudged the video work into sitcom form, with more actors, real world settings, and theme music; a line from the latter is "Don't greet the future on bended knees / Or go to Chelsea in faded jeans / Unless they're / From Japan." One episode is set in the Hamptons, and the visiting art critic, played by writer-performer Kenny Mellman, the Tony award-nominated Herb of Kiki and Herb, describes the painter's work is "Matisse-ish."[9][10] Another is set in Grossmalerman's studio where he falls in love with his pill-popping model, played by Andrea Hendrickson, whom Smit found on Craigslist. Episode 5, in the same setting, involves male visitors to the studio (Mellman and the frontman of New York City's Les Savy Fav Tim Harrington, among others) taking turns hitting on the model. News is also shared of the painter's show in Moscow being held for random for €20 million. A recent episode had the troubled artist visited by Jean-Michel Basquiat's ghost who only shows up to relate some unhealthy career advice while Grossmalerman's model lies unconscious on a table.

Smit paints all of the work attributed to his alter egos in the installations and videos. In "Studio Visit," for example, the characters spend time looking at a large painting in Alex Katz-like colors of the crotches of several people amusingly and impossibly tangled together.[9]

columns in ArtReview and Hyperallergic.com

In 2013, Grossmalerman started an opinion column in ArtReview. In one he complains about the criticism he received during his time on an art panel with Christian Viveros-Fauné playing himself.[11] The following month, he announces that his interest in trading up in representation to Hauser & Wirth, comparing himself to oligarchic and banker-collectors who "share my unhinged hunger for absolute freedom and champagne and incredible awesomeness!"[12]

In February 2013, Grossmalerman started a column for the art blogazine Hyperallergic.com. The first was an explicit call for an intern: "If you need a shoulder to cry on, cry on mine.... Your twenties are a tough time and I’m happy to hold you and to stroke your luminous golden locks. I mean, if you’re into that. No pressure."[13] Another tells a tale of being tasered and kidnapped at the Armory Show,[14] and in a recent entry, he describes falling in love with his gallery's assistant, his fifth.[15]

Maxi Geil!

His name translating to "really horny" in German, with an exclamation point,[16] Maxi Geil! is a New Wave pop star[2] loosely based on '70s and '80s Dutch rock star Herman Brood. Smit writes the songs for the band, Maxi Geil! & PlayColt, the music a variety of pop that blends influences from Brian Ferry, Roxy Music, and David Bowie from his Ziggy Stardust era. Smit also mentions the L.A.-based Sparks as a major influence. There seems to be less irony in the playing of this character than in Grossmalerman: Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post suggested this might be the artist's truer alter ego[2] whereas Roberta Smith of the New York Times detected a lessening of irony over time. William Powhida, writing in the Brooklyn Rail in 2004, read the fictional persona as representing "the underlying, uncensored desires and impulses of his audience."[16]

In addition to Smit on vocals, the band includes his now-wife Rebecca Chamberlain, also on vocals, John Allen on lead guitar, and Mark Ephraim on rhythm guitar as well as others.[17] With songs with titles like "I Will Leave You First" and "Making Love in the Sunshine," the group's music has been described as "anti-sentimental."[18] "Making Love in the Sunshine," for example, the band "request[s] your presence in the bathroom / When the music stops," and in "The Artist's Lament," Maxi croons "I want your vagina around the head of my prick."[16] The band themselves describe themselves as "French pop / German pop / Italian pop"[19] and have played a number of times in New York City and London,[20][21] and released two albums. A Message To My Audience, their first full-length effort in 2004[4] in which the TV actress Zoe Lister-Jones appeared, as well as half-brother Tijn Smit, who played keyboard on the song, "Here Comes Maxi."[4] The band released their second album, Strange Sensation, in 2007.

The Ballad of Bad Orpheus, 2000

In this 22-minute video, a cruel ship captain (Smit) keeps his crewmen, played by New York performance artist Michael Smith and sculptor Tony Matelli, in thrall with his golden voice until they are finally able to overcome him.

Nausea 2, 2004

The most ambitious in the Maxi Geil! video series is an hour-long rock musical starring Smit and Chamberlain, as porn stars Maxi Geil! and Giselle Thrust (played by Rebecca Chamberlain) who have reached crossroads in their careers. A second plot involves a young amateur, Annie Ball (Lister Jones), whose own debut is interrupted by Maxi getting sick on set. The cast includes a bevy of Brooklynites, people from Luis Fernandez as Maxi's stern manager, Christian Viveros-Fauné, Smit's actual gallerist and art critic as a member of the Spanish press to hilarious effect, to actor Leo Fitzpatrick (Kids and The Wire) as a porn actor who suddenly grows dignity in the middle of a shoot and runs away.

When Maxi appears at a press conference to give his resignation speech, he accuses his peers for letting commodification ruin their work: "Have we been reduced as people to simply a couple of cheap fetishes? You let your imaginations run wild, and this is what you came up with? ... You people are libertines with the souls of bureaucrats, and I'm constantly amazed at your limitations." Smit told the Washington Post that this speech was "thinly veiled" criticism of his art world contemporaries. After revealing his return to theater, future projects, and new interest in dance, Maxi breaks into the song "Please Remember Me," in which he exhorts, "I've got a hard on for a station in your memories" and "I've got a bag of tricks, of images and / melodies/ I'm designed to keep your heart and mind so / ill at ease." But when he and Giselle finally meet and set out to find themselves, they end up only shopping: This is Smit's attack on the notion of self-exploration in the work of his contemporaries that he feels have "forgotten the notion of exploration, of contradicting oneself, of trying to broaden one's horizons." [2]

Gopnik of The Washington Post wrote, "The confusion between the roles of Smit and Geil—and between Geil [as] rock star and director, and Geil, the ... fictional porn king—make the artwork appealingly complex. It's as though Smit takes the premise of a mockumentary such as This is Spinal Tap, then gives it the density and even subtle conherence of good contemporary art." The writer also notes that the work leads to other questions. "The ambition that made Geil a star... also leads him into making work that pushes him beyond where his true talent lies. So should Geil stick with what he's good at, however modest it turns out to be, or try his hand at stuff that may turn out to be absurd musical pornography? Which is better, satisfying competence or interesting incoherence, even failure?"[2] Art critic John Haber wrote that he found the work "hilarious, not to mention less pretentious than a Matthew Barney epic cycle," and "more coherent."[22]

Other songs in Nausea 2 include one sung by Lister Jones with her friends at Café Clitswell ("I can't speak / I can't remark / I can only hold my head up high") and "The Love I Lose," the first part sung by Giselle after she is fired and runs errands in Culver City, the last by Maxi in his dressing room before his resignation speech.

The work, funded by Roebling Hall and an Indiana art museum, debuted at MoMA during its fall 2004 reopening. Maxi Geil! & PlayColt also played at the event.[2]

A Message to My Audience, installation, 2009

This installation at Roebling Hall's first Manhattan space (above Fanelli's in SoHo) included three videos played on a screen in front of a bed with satin sheets and pillowcases. The videos are a "Zebra Countdown Video Klasse," footage of live performances of three songs that, among other things, indicate the band's fictitious level of international fame in an '80s glam style.[16] In the live performance of "Strange Sensation," Maxi arrives late and attempts to express the meaning of the song to a troupe of modern dancers who act out the song's love story. In the performance of "The Artist's Lament," Maxi-playing-Smit ends up covered in blood trying to make sense of the creative process. The bed in the installation is also surrounded by Smit's paintings of Maxi and his band.

Making Love in the Sunshine music video, 2013

Shot by the New York video artist John Pilson, the video stars Maxi as a werewolf and Chamberlain as a maiden cavorting in the Scottish highlands (actually the Catskills, near the couple's summer home). Village men, played by the other members of Playcolt, nymphs, and trolls abound, and a contemporary homeless man makes a funny appearance sifting through garbage. Performer and burlesque tap dancer Jen Zakrzewski and artist Matt Jones also star.

As himself

A Mountain of Skulls and Not One I Recognize, 2008-2010

For a solo exhibition at Fred gallery in London, Smit eschewed his inclination for verbal commentary and humor and produced about ten videos with simple scenarios that appeared on different-sized screens around the space. All the videos shared the same soundtrack Smit had written with band member Mark Ephraim and New York-based new musician Okkyung Lee, with Smit intoning over Ephraim's rhythm guitar and Lee's cello. Each video was based on a drawing and had two or three actors involved in a theme of either power or obsession. Video artist John Pilson plays a doctor in one, to Matthew Shawlin's patient, who await an important diagnosis. In another, Bodine Alexander plays a woman waiting for her male companion in a bathroom as he pees; all the while they exchanging dreamy, knowing glances. In a third, performance artist Neal Medlyn and actress Zoe Lister-Jones (now known for her work on the TV show Whitney) play two GI's presumably in Iraq or Afghanistan exploring the human wreckage inside a structure they have just bombed. The remaining videos included artists Carol Bove, Will Cotton, and Mina Chang as actors.

Jason Cacioppo, the cameraman on all the videos, used many camera moves of '70s European cinema, like that of Rainer Werner Fassbinder where zooms and pans are used to squeeze as much pathos and meaning out of each scene. Smit painted portraits of each actor in costume after the video production in either watercolor or oil and hung them with the videos in the installation.

Paintings

Paintings, in watercolor, oil, or both are in or all of the Grossmalerman and Maxi Geil videos and installations. Powhida noted a "calculated feeling of disinterest" in the style.[16] Smit has also produced flat works under his own name. In 2007, for example, he painted a series of made-up newspapers headlines and photos. Headlines such as "U.S. Troops Pledge Loyalty to Maktada al-Sadr" were by turns satirical and like "Who Shall Be the Helen of My Tragedy?" by turns plaintive.[22]

References

  1. ↑ "Guy Richards Smit". Vimeo.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 Gopnik, Blake (December 11, 2004). "Stepping Out of Character and Into His Art". The Washington Post.
  3. ↑ Schaffner, Ingrid. Photogr. by Eric Schaal, Salvador Dalí's "Dream of Venus": The Surrealist Funhouse from the 1939 World's Fair. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 "Maxi Geil! & Playcolt – A Message To My Audience playlist". Discogs.
  5. ↑ "Jonathan in Purgatory". YouTube.
  6. ↑ Smith, Roberta (March 31, 2000). "ART IN REVIEW; Guy Richard Smit". New York Times.
  7. ↑ Miranda, Carolina. "Comic Relief". ArtNews.
  8. ↑ Chayka, Lyle (January 19, 2011). "A Portrait of the Artist in Comix". Hyperallergic.com.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Chayka, Kyle. "Grossmalerman! "The Studio Visit"". Hyperallergic.com.
  10. ↑ "Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway". Internet Broadway Database.
  11. ↑ Grossmalerman, Jonathan. "Crime and Punishment".
  12. ↑ Grossmalerman, Jonathan. "Waiting for the call from H&W".
  13. ↑ "Intern Wanted". Hyperallergic.com.
  14. ↑ "The Case of the Vanishing Grossmalerman, Part 1". Hyperallergic.com.
  15. ↑ "I Will Not Fall in Love With the New Gallery Assistant". Hyperallergic.com.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 "Guy Richards Smit". The Brooklyn Rail.
  17. ↑ "Maxi Geil! and PlayColt". Fred Ltd.
  18. ↑ Johnson, Ken. "ART IN REVIEW; 'Tomorrow'". The New York Times.
  19. ↑ "Maxi Geil! & PlayColt". Myspace.
  20. ↑ "Maxi Geil! and Playcolt with Neal Medlyn". Joe's Pub.
  21. ↑ "Maxi Geil! & Playcolt Setlist at The Annex, New York, NY". setlist.fm.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 "Emily Jacir, Guy Richards Smit, and Political Art". Haber's Art Reviews.

External links