Michael E. Smith De Appel, Kunstverein Hannover, S.M.A.K.

Initially conceived to document three solo shows at de Appel in Amsterdam (2015), Kunstverein Hannover (2015), and S.M.A.K. in Ghent (2017), the publication also gathers new commissioned texts and a reprint that shed light on the artist’s decade-plus practice. Martin Germann’s text centers on the phenomenology of Smith’s installation process, revealing the role of context, craftsmanship, and improvisation for his creative act. Chris Sharp attends to the artist’s work from the early days, tackling core concepts of horror, postapocalyptic sublime, and non-signification, and how his installations are to be read as attempts to deepen loss and exhaustion by way of working through them, thereby ‘disarm[ing] the trauma.’ Anthony Huberman captures the struggle of translating Smith’s work into language by reading it through the lens of music. As the artist himself states, his art may be ‘like listening to a cheap cassette player running low on batteries slugging along ‘T.B. Sheets’ by Van Morrison while working as a dishwasher.’