Interventions

Michael Smit is a Dutch artist with a Dutch father and Australian mother, who grew up initially in Indonesia but mostly the Netherlands, and currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States. With a background in the more traditional forms of art object making as well as in art therapy his work now can be characterized as a practice of temporary, situation-specific, and interventionist processes inserted in beyond-the-gallery sites.
Having left his San Francisco painting studio in the beginning of 2002 for a practice outside in the ‘real’ world, his art is no longer media-centric but rather situation-based, as he makes choices from a wide variety of available media and formats. His projects are an artistic response to the found situations where they are temporarily inserted.
He has come to see artmaking as the creation of new meaning through a creative dialogue. Believing everybody is an artist everyday, at least at times, his works intentionally are placed beyond the traditional art sites and take on ambiguous formats, as an invitation to often accidental, attentive, and inclusive audiences to actively engage in the co-creation of meaningful relations with the world.
In his diverse projects he uses the power of art to have the power of our limited autonomies and identities collectively shine. On the basis of the idea that everything is interconnected, so nothing exists on its own, he believes it is only through the act (or rather process) of art that new meaningful relations are or can be created (; and should be created, if we want to survive as a species).

I instigate and co-create temporary and interventionist art projects and processes. These are aimed at accidental and inclusive audiences, preferably at public sites or situations that are beyond the limitations of the traditional art world. I am more interested in what can happen after I present my artist part than I am in the display of a finished traditional work of art.

Some tag words you could apply to my work are light, space, color, windows, physical exploration, and dialogue.

My practice is not medium-specific but site-specific; its ambiguous forms are always inspired by the artistic and strategic possibilities I first find at a site or situation. The intention is to subtly invite and encourage the audience into an artist process of awareness and dialogue through an familar but ambiguous form. The work activates the site, when activated by the audience.

We increasingly learn everything is related but we still live in a world suffering under exploitation. In contrast to that, art to me is the creation of new meaning through a creative process of back and forth dialogue, between oneself and the surrounding world. So in my eyes the power of art lies exactly in everybody’s ability to actively express the possibilities of connecting meaningfully with the present in any moment, in a two-way relation with the world. Artmaking then is not limited to the experts that we call artists, or the use of the traditional artistic media, or to the traditional places for art. I think everybody is an artist (at times) already but most are not aware of it and feel ‘not creative’ or powerless. My art is about touching on and growing of that potential beyond passive consumption and spectacle. It’s the way my artmaking can be most meaningful to me. If all the good stuff in life results from artmaking (defined in the wider sense), the quality of life, and in fact the survival of our species will depend on artmaking.