NTSC/All-Region. 8 discs. Includes 128-page booklet. Color/B&W. Stereo/Mono. Works collected from 1975-2022. "For five decades, Michael Smith's performance art has inhabited bland domestic spaces; mass media and its promise to keep viewers company; and failing business ventures that misread the moment. Through art installations, theater, video, television and live performances, Smith's comedic work lives inside the identity models that both constitute and disassociate our shared experience. His two performance personae, Mike and Baby Ikki, plumb the depths of American culture to perform the discrepancies between what is promulgated by controlling interest and what actually exists in reality of day-to-day worlds. Like culture itself, Smith's is forever in and out of time. Mike's Box is an immersive eight-disc DVD collection of his work up until now. In the 1970s, the idea of the American everyman was rarely questioned. The '50s postwar aspiration for blessed conformity had been a primary objective of the powers that be, continually hammered into everyone's home via that ubiquitous box, the TV set. Although developments in the late '60s offered a new appraisal of everyday life, it was apparent that this approach was not easily processed by the general population, and the status quo remained intact. It felt increasingly urgent to reevaluate old world values with those surfacing in an alienated youth culture. As this alienation continued to grow, it appeared that this was the primary issue that everyone could agree upon. Enter Mike, who, along with his contemporaries on the NYC art scene of the 1970s and '80s (a sprawling group spread across disciplines, including but not limited to Laurie Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Andy Kaufman, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, and the many freaks feeding the nascent Saturday Night Live franchise), was inclined to disengage the frame of reference from the traditional rarified 'white cube' context, and instead insert his practice in relation to everyday life and the institutions exerting control over it. Mike's Box covers Smith's career from the '70s to the present, collecting his infamous and prescient 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 programs and musical theater. Mike's Box also contains the complete collaborative video work of Smith with both Joshua White and Doug Skinner, as well as his team-ups with William Wegman, Seth Price, Mike Kelley and many others. It is accompanied by a richly illustrated book that includes an essay by Tim Griffin, and features 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."