I agonized over what present to bring Baby Ikki, the character that artist Michael Smith has been performing for over 30 years, for Ikki’s 50th birthday. Gifts were encouraged. The Ikki performance, featuring the artist as a genderless and diapered baby was only a part of Soccer Club Club’s “Return to the Rec Room,” a retrospective of Smith’s multivalent and decades-long career poking fun at the absurdity, frustration, and sometimes heartbreaking sincerity of life under late capitalism. Coinciding with the release of Mike’s Box, an eight-DVD box set of Smith’s performances and interviews alongside a catalog of the artist’s work from the 70s to the present day, the show features an assortment of Smith’s drawings, video pieces, and installations.
Smith uses his characters, like Ikki and “Mike”—an everyman with many ideas who fails at most all of them—to navigate (or perhaps more aptly fuck with) the strictures we all encounter as we grow up, age, and try to be a person in the world. Sometimes it can be hard to tell Smith’s exact thoughts on his subject as the artist is an inheritor of Buster Keaton’s style of doomed humor, as in his 1980 video Secret Horror in which Mike is invited to a party in his own house all while not understanding why or even how he’s there. Mike is often not in on the joke, which makes me wonder, are we? It’s this shared second-guessing, this not-so-secret cluelessness, that lies at the heart of Smith’s work, the realization that “I know that guy . . . I might be that guy.”
Credit: Michael Vallera
These ideas of second-guessing, ritual, and repetition pervade Smith’s performances, especially those featuring Ikki. Even though Ikki is positioned as a tabula rasa (see Ikki’s blank amazement at Burning Man in the 2009 video A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, made with Mike Kelley), I don’t think that’s the whole story. I’m of the mind that babies, like all of us, are swirling, messy little bundles of chaotic impulses and bodily functions. Ikki’s not so much a blank slate but the raw material of being afraid, kinda stupid, kinda scared, and doing your best to make your way through life.
P.S. Michael, if you’re reading this, I had a stuffed animal ready for Ikki, but I forgot it at home. I’m the one who dropped the watermelon hand sanitizer into the bottle bag. Babies, like all of us, need clean hands.
“A Return to the Rec Room”
Through 6/21: Mon–Fri 10 AM–6 PM, Soccer Club Club, 2923 N. Cicero, soccerclub.club
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