For those already familiar with John Smith’s work, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) needs no introduction. For us, it was the introduction to his extensive body of work in film and video. The unpredictable nature of the humour in The Girl Chewing Gum provoked an instant collective response, and ultimately prompted the improbable situation of 14 curating students collaborating on a solo presentation of Smith’s work.
Smith made The Girl Chewing Gum together with Associations (1975) and Leading Light (1975) while still a student of the Film Department at the Royal College of Art. He regards these works as his first fully realised films, and has since made over 40 films, videos and installations, which have been presented internationally in galleries, cinemas and on television.
Associations – the first work encountered in John Smith | Solo Show – contains motifs that re-emerge in subsequent works by Smith. The film builds up a coherent system but rhythmically disrupts its own logic, which as a consequence weakens its authority. The synchronisation and the disjunction of image and sound is also notably present in later works such as Om (1986) and The Black Tower (1985–7). Informed by, but not confined to, a formal use of film language, the polyphony of Smith’s work makes it difficult to pin down to any one approach.
Smith’s questioning of medium continues in his first video work Home Suite (1993–4), which was shown in three parts in the exhibition. Affordable video equipment presented Smith with the opportunity to record a simultaneous voice-over, whereas in his earlier films sound is usually cut against images retrospectively. As in Home Suite, Smith’s commentary runs as a thread throughout the Hotel Diaries series (2001–7), revealing his responses to global political events yet remaining rooted in the security of the mundane.
These threads emerged in Flag Mountain (2009), his most recent work, shown for the first time in this exhibition. Smith’s treatment of the power of images, words and sounds to determine meaning was presented non-chronologically throughout the Royal College of Art galleries. With no single route or prescribed path to follow, the exhibition deliberately left no right way of reading the work other than as a body of work. In contrast, each event in the concurrent public programme took a single work from the exhibition as its point of departure. Within the galleries the invited speakers, including Conor Kelly, Deborah Levy, Laure Provost and William Raban, were asked to make associations between Smith’s practice and their specialist fields of knowledge. The accompanying publication sought to contribute to the show as a visual aid, providing the viewer with a non-literal narrative of Smith’s work.
Although first attracted to the openness of Smith’s work, we were nevertheless conscious that we tended to equate an artist’s works with their sociological and geographical exoticism. By inviting a ‘local’ artist we turned to what was at hand, economical and literally down the street. Doing so affirmed that there is much to say about what is close to us. Acting as a practical case study, John Smith | Solo Show is part of a broader research agenda for the class. Continuing our investigation of the solo show format, a second publication, launched after the close of the exhibition, looks at the prominent role of the monographic exhibition historically, examines its function inside the art world and reflects on its invisible structures. The publication will contain interviews with artists, curators and arts professionals, together with essays, images and histories all revolving around the solo show.
www.johnsmithsoloshow.com