Releasing May 30 via Jim O'Rourke's Drag City imprint Moikai, Mike’s Box is an immersive 8-disc DVD set collecting the works of American performance artist Michael Smith. For five decades, Smith has plumbed the depths of American culture — through his two performance personae, Mike and Baby Ikki — to perform the discrepancies between what is promulgated by the powers that be and what actually exists in reality or the day-to-day world. Through art installations, theatre, video, television and live performances, Smith’s comedic work lives inside the identity models that both constitute and disassociate our shared experience.

More than just a career retrospective, Mike’s Box stands as a comprehensive record of Smith's quirky and immeasurable contribution to contemporary performance art and comedy. In the 1970s, the idea of the American everyman was rarely questioned; in many ways, it felt like the 1950s had simply continued on, a decade with no term limit. Smith, along with his contemporaries on the NYC art scene of the 1970s and ‘80s (Laurie Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Andy Kaufman, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, the many freaks feeding the nascent Saturday Night Live franchise), was inclined to widen the frame of reference through embodied parody at a time where the absurdities we now find ourselves culturally awash in (Meta, reality shows) weren’t yet on the table. Presciently, Smith’s early videos, like “Down in the Rec Room”, “It Starts at Home” and “Secret Horror”, suggested that the world we live in is only as normal as we suspect it is — which means, irretrievably strange as well.

Mike’s Box covers Smith's career from the ‘70s to the present, collecting his infamous and satirical performances, installations and videos — many only previously seen at galleries and museums within the fine art context — as well as forms more accessible to a general audience: comedy shows, cable access programmes and musical theatre. Mike’s Box also contains the complete collaborative video work of Smith with both Joshua White and Doug Skinner, his collaborations with William Wegman, Seth Price, Mike Kelley and many others. It is accompanied by a richly illustrated book with an essay by Tim Griffin, featuring documentation from shows exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museo Jumex, along with filmed conversations between the artist, curators and collaborators.