Michael E. Smith
In Hamlet the dead exist twice. There is the Ghost: a spirit in armor who walks the wall, speaks, and makes demands. And there are remains: the skulls the gravedigger tosses out of the earth, bone, rot, matter without a voice. The Elizabethan stage built the division into its architecture. The space beneath the boards was called hell, and the Ghost cries out from under the floor; Hamlet, hearing him move below, calls him old mole. Above, on the wall, the dead have language and grievances. Below, in the churchyard, they have weight. Hamlet is the only character who deals with both: on the battlements he listens to a spirit, in the graveyard he holds what a spirit leaves behind. The border between those scenes is easy to miss, because death looks like one country. It is two.
The criticism of Michael E. Smith has spent fifteen years on the wall of Elsinore. His exhibitions are described in the vocabulary of the specter; a reviewer in Leeds found the rooms haunted by a spectral sense of absence, and the phrase could stand for the whole corpus. It is not wrong about the sensation: his rooms do feel as if someone has just left. But read his checklists, the dry lists of materials a gallery attaches to a show. Sea turtle, catfish, birds, animal snouts, bison scrotums, pet fish, hands. A turtle’s skull resting on a chair. A catfish zipped into a backpack. Pelt, bone, worn cloth. This is the inventory of the churchyard, not of the wall. Smith works with the matter of the dead rather than with its spirit, and a criticism that reads matter as spirit performs an old substitution. Spiritualizing remains has always been the most comfortable way of not looking at them.
Shakespeare has been inside this criticism all along, smuggled in and unnoticed. Chris Sharp opens the first serious essay on Smith, in 2011, with T. S. Eliot’s fear in a handful of dust. Romeo Castellucci, writing in the Bologna catalogue fifteen years later, reaches for Eliot again. And inside The Waste Land, between the handful of dust and the barren plain, one Shakespearean line is quoted twice: those are pearls that were his eyes. It is Ariel’s song from The Tempest, sung over a drowned father. Nothing of him fades; his bones become coral, his eyes become pearls; he suffers a sea-change into something rich and strange. Read as a technical description rather than a consolation, the song describes Smith’s method. Parts of a body are replaced by things, and the replacement enriches: death manufactures coral and pearl, luxury goods. The critics have been quoting the poem that quotes the play, at one remove, without following the chain to its end.
What blocked the way was a diagnosis. Sharp read Smith through Freud: the work of mourning, the lost object taken inside, melancholy. The reading took hold because it names accurately what a viewer feels in those rooms, and that is also its weakness. Melancholy is what the viewer feels. It says nothing about what the artist does. For fifteen years criticism described an effect and called it a method.
The method has an older name. Walter Benjamin, reconstructing the German mourning play of the ruined seventeenth century, gave the name back its rigor: allegory. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. The scene that shows the procedure at work is the last scene of Hamlet. The stage is covered with pieces of bodies, and the pieces will not rejoin on their own. The one thing that can gather them is an external narrative: Horatio promises to explain what happened and begins to move the dead fragments with words. That is allegory taken as an operation rather than a mood — the joining of corpse-parts and their animation from outside, mechanically, with the seams left showing. A symbol promises wholeness. Allegory is honest about disintegration, and so it fastens its fragments in the open.
Now watch Smith’s procedures. In Munich a bread knife rotates on the floor, mounted on a small motor; the blade has been cut into the silhouette of a bat in flight, a good-luck charm and an omen held in one piece of steel. A dead kitchen fragment, given movement by an external machine. Ceiling fans, lasers, a theremin, a loop pedal: his technical park serves one purpose, to lend dead matter a motion it does not possess. There is a soldier in Henry V, Williams, who tells a disguised king what will happen if the war’s cause is rotten: all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry out where they died. Every assemblage Smith fastens is that day arrived early. Severed parts of a social body are joined and made to testify. The pressure his objects exert has little to do with ghosts; it comes from the visible seams, and the joining is a deposition rather than a composition. Greenblatt, writing about the traces the dead leave behind, describes such objects as simulations undertaken in full awareness of the absence of the life they represent.
The viewer this work asks for was drawn by Dürer. The angel of Melencolia I sits among instruments and rebuses and does not solve them; the compass rests, the polyhedron stays uncounted. That is the posture Smith’s rooms require: to remain among the unsolved. An interpretation that cracks the rebus, that announces what the basketball stands for, destroys the state the work produces. This essay is about to break that rule at length. The reader should hold that against it from here, not at the end.
Smith writes one kind of text himself, and it is stricter than most poetry. Every exhibition is accompanied by a checklist: title, materials, dimensions. For most artists this is administrative paper. For Smith it is the only text he publishes, and it has a grammar. Noun, noun. Chair, hose. Backpack, catfish. Drone, towel. Hands, popcorn. Video camera, potato. No verbs. Almost no adjectives, and the few that occur are technical: sea green foam, light diffusing plastic. No histories. The things are listed the way the bodies lie at the end of the play, before Horatio starts talking.
The recruiting scene in Gloucestershire supplies the mirror image. Falstaff musters names: Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble. The able-bodied buy their way out; Shadow is taken because a muster-book needs shadows to fill it, names without bodies, entries that draw a dead man’s pay. Falstaff’s ledger and Smith’s checklist are twin inventories of absence, reversed: names without things, things without names.
Once in sixteen years, the checklist breaks. In the Bologna list of works, between lines of the same verbless bookkeeping, stands this entry: bean bag chairs destroyed by a dog, packing material. A biography tears through the inventory a single time in the entire corpus, and the narrator turns out to be a dog. No one else has been permitted to say what happened to a thing before it reached the room.
There is a second question the graveyard scene asks, and it is economic. Hamlet, holding the skull, traces the afterlife of Alexander: dust, earth, loam, and at last a stopper in a beer barrel. The greatest body of empire ferments its way into household circulation. Remains do not rest; they circulate, and the circulation has prices. Timon of Athens supplies the image: Timon digs in the woods for a root to eat and turns up gold, the thing he wanted least, the thing that cannot stop working. Marx transcribed the speech into the 1844 manuscripts for money’s power to invert every quality into its opposite; whether the play argues that or merely stages it, he did not need to settle, and neither does this. Wanting the remainder and producing treasure: the inversion runs through Smith’s economy, and no one who sells reduction into a luxury market escapes it. The Elizabethan theater ran on the same circulation and knew it. Gentlemen gave suits to their servants in place of wages; the servants sold the clothes to the players; the players walked onstage in the garments of the dead, clothes a spectator in the yard might recognize from home. The first market where remains traded as inventory was a stage.
The playwright was not outside that market. In 1614 a scheme was launched to enclose the common fields at Welcombe, near Stratford; the town’s corporation resolved to resist it. Shakespeare held a lease on half the local tithes, and within two months he entered a covenant with the scheme’s agent, William Replingham, indemnifying him against any loss to his tithe income the enclosure might cause. The surviving documents show self-protection clearly; what they do not show is where he stood, and the ambiguity is the point. The artist of dispossession sat inside the economy of dispossession, covered, unreadable, and productive. Smith occupies the position now: the works sell, the gallery invoices, and none of it refutes the distance the work keeps. Althusser wrote the clause that covers the case — art belongs to ideology and opens an internal distance inside it. Belonging without coinciding. Shakespeare the shareholder, covenanting at Welcombe while Lear was in the repertory, is the founding precedent.
Enclosure is the word that binds the two landscapes, and the rhyme is legal before it is poetic: each withdraws the conditions of life by legal instrument. In Shakespeare’s England the commons were being converted into private land, and the conversion manufactured a new social type: masterless men, people evicted from every order, of whom Poor Tom the Bedlam beggar is the stage portrait. The dissolution of the monasteries had already strewn the country with fresh institutional ruins; the sonnets name them in passing, bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. Smith works among the same kind of wreckage four centuries on. He was born in 1977 in Detroit, a city that has since passed through the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history and through mass water shutoffs for non-payment. A city disconnected for debt produces remains at industrial scale: objects that have outlived their owners and the mode of production that made them. His material arrives from eBay and thrift stores, from the circulation into which deindustrialization dumps the belongings of its dead.
Between two such landscapes history repeats a position rather than a plot. Feudalism dying into capitalism; Fordism dying into finance. Gramsci gave the position its sentence: the old is dying and the new cannot be born, and in the interregnum morbid symptoms appear. The German mourning play grew out of exactly such an interregnum, a Germany gutted by the Thirty Years’ War, its ruins fresh, its theology exhausted; Trauerspiel is the genre-name of interregnum art. It has an American branch, and missing that branch is what produced the ghosts. Philip K. Dick, who lifted a novel’s title straight out of Hamlet, built the American version: simulated normality stretched over a ruin, paranoia in full daylight. Smith belongs there, Michigan daylight and all, and has been read through the European gothic instead. I write from a third such landscape. In the post-Soviet present the circulation of remains has shed its metaphors, and bodies are exchanged for payments at a posted rate. The difference between the spirit of the dead and the matter of the dead is not, from here, an academic distinction.
The histories add one more economy, quieter and closer to Smith’s furniture. A dying king in Henry IV has his crown set beside him on the pillow and hears his son address it as a thing; in the next play the son, now king, lies awake and lists majesty item by item, balm, scepter, ball, sword, mace, robe, and finds that not one of these objects sleeps. He envies the ship-boy asleep on the mast in a storm. Monarchy, audited by its own poet, is a checklist of props with insomnia, and rest in the plays is inversely proportional to property: complete rest is the one asset left to the dispossessed. Now open Smith’s inventories. Beds, mattresses, sleeping bags, bean bags, fleece robes, fleece blankets, bedding. The furniture of the poor’s last property runs the length of the corpus, and every piece of it stands vacated. Sharp titled the first essay on Smith A Complete Rest without pursuing what the histories add: that full rest is what remains when everything else is taken, and in these rooms even that stands empty. Anthony Huberman came closest to the regime when he called Smith’s method a bread-and-water diet, a ration at which the ribs begin to show. Lear supplies the counter-argument that keeps the diet from piety: reason not the need, our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous. The superfluous is what makes a life human. Smith’s reduction walks one ration short of disappearance, and the discomfort of the rooms is the discomfort of that line.
Light in those rooms deserves its own accounting, because one gesture is doing three kinds of work. The first is theatrical and has a pedigree. The opening line of the play that buries Henry V is a lighting instruction: hung be the heavens with black. The heavens were the canopy over the Elizabethan stage, draped in black cloth for tragedy; light announced the genre before a word was spoken. When Smith has the floodlights in Aachen physically removed from the walls, removed rather than switched off, he is executing that line. The second reading is municipal. The Leeds reviewer read the dead lights as a technicians’ strike in a strike year, labor downing tools; close, but the economy is other. In the city Smith comes from, removed light is not refusal of work. It is disconnection for non-payment, transferred into the institution. The third reading comes from the Globe itself, and it turns the gesture over. Shakespeare’s theater played in shared daylight; there is no dimming of lights, Greenblatt notes, no apparatus for isolating a spectator in the dark. Controlled darkness belongs to the bourgeois auditorium of a later century. An exhibition stripped of institutional lighting and left to the sun, works visible only while the day lasts, has been returned to the Globe’s condition: light no institution owns, rationed by weather, one light for everyone. Seizure of the private and restitution of the common, in a single unscrewing.
What such light falls on is mostly emptiness, and the emptiness has a doctrine, written in 1599. The Chorus of Henry V apologizes for the poverty of the stage: can this wooden O hold the fields of France; four or five ragged foils will disgrace the name of Agincourt; piece out our imperfections with your thoughts. Poverty of means plus the conscription of the viewer’s imagination: the first theory of the minimal installation, delivered as an apology. Smith’s near-empty halls run on the Chorus’s doctrine. Two objects and a room, and the visitor is drafted to supply the army. Pasquali, in the Bologna catalogue, calls the void a sounding board, and the acoustic figure is right: the emptiness is the instrument the work is played on.
Time behaves in these rooms the way it behaves in Elsinore. The time is out of joint: not slow, not fast, dislocated at the socket. Shakespeare’s stage never pretended otherwise; in The Winter’s Tale, Time walks on as a character and steps over sixteen years in one speech. Pasquali finds the same mechanics in Smith and states it as a paradox: the blackout acts as an acceleration of history that freezes everyday tools in archaeological stasis. Acceleration that produces stillness is the dislocated joint exactly. Menegoi completes the thought: Smith embalms the present before the viewer’s eyes and posts the viewer as an archaeologist over something still warm. In one underground hall in Bologna the times refuse to translate into one another — ceiling fans in unopened factory boxes, things whose time has not begun; a brass bed, a thing whose time has ended; selenite, a mineral keeping geological time. One chord out of incompatible durations. Shakespeare’s own corpus keeps time this way: the funeral plays of Henry VI were written years before the triumphal life of Henry V, the aftermath composed before the cause, the ruins built first. Smith works in that order, starting from the end-state of things. The portholes in Bologna, pulsing red and blue, are the lights of an emergency service that arrived too late; emergency, in this work, is a starting condition rather than a theme. And the unopened boxes close the loop on novelty itself: the fastest way to manufacture antiquity is to seal something new.
The unopened box carries one more charge. Renaissance culture, Greenblatt argues in his lectures on beauty, held an official ideal: radiant, flawless, unmarked by time and accident. Shakespeare endorsed the ideal and quietly worked against it, finding an unauthorized beauty in marks, stains, scars and wrinkles, because a mark is a biography and a biography is what makes an individual. Smith spent his first decade on the marked side of that line. The Eames chairs he cut apart in Munich carried decades of home recolorings; his cut through the backrest exposed what the museum’s own essay called the design classic’s aorta; the chairs stood as a pair, and Smith glossed the pairing in a sentence of his own, me and you are two. Worn things, in his early rooms, are individuals, scarred into personhood, keeping each other company. The unopened box is the official ideal made literal: flawless, unmarked by time, and therefore without biography. In the same museum Smith installed a Happy Birthday banner from the 1970s, bought in its original wrapper, never once unfurled over a party. A performative that never performed. The sealed thing is not preserved. It is a life declined.
Whether such things are dead at all is a question the work refuses to close, and the refusal has a Shakespearean patent. In the last act of The Winter’s Tale a statue of Hermione stands for viewing; she has been stone for sixteen years; music plays, and she breathes. The scene is built so that the audience never learns whether it has watched a miracle of animation or a living woman who spent sixteen years as her own statue, and Leontes blesses the suspension: if this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating. The Ghost is engineered the same way, spirit of health or goblin damned, and the whole tragedy grows from the impossibility of running the test. Pasquali describes the encounter with Smith’s objects through Mike Kelley’s uncanny and lands on the same undecidable: faced with the doubt of whether the inert conceals a latent life, one can only smile nervously or retreat. The nervous smile is Leontes at the statue. Early Smith holds the question in organics, garments stiffened with resin around a body that is gone while the shape stays. Late Smith holds it in mineral: the selenite logs in Bologna are presented as evolved, ideally sentient offspring of the gallery’s drywall. He asserts no panpsychism and denies none. He builds the situation in which the question of a thing’s life must stay open, because a verdict in either direction kills the phenomenon. The economic name for the suspension is fetish, and the two witnesses stand at either end of its biography: Shakespeare at the birth of the commodity’s uncanny autonomy, when a bond can convert flesh into collateral and a handkerchief outacts the characters around it; Smith at the zombie end, among things that have outlived the mode of production that made them.
Language took Smith sixteen years to reach its own conclusion, and the checklists preserve the path like growth rings. In 2010 the works still carry names, and the names have already been operated on: Sky; Shamu; and mlkw/blkvelcro, which is milk and black velcro with the vowels cut out. Subtraction was applied to spelling before it was applied to naming at all. Then the names go dark for a decade, Untitled upon Untitled, while, by the testimony of his curators, the artist fills notebooks daily with words the way a lyricist does. Writing existed throughout. It was published as silence.
When speech returns it returns in two channels. The first is a jukebox. Smith composes nothing; he quotes the songbook: a Bach chorale, a Nina Simone medley, Ohio Players, Funkadelic, the Memphis blues of Laura Dukes, Willie Nelson, and, in the newest checklists, more bounce, after Zapp. Shakespeare wrote the law that governs this. Those who fall out of the order lose their own language and start quoting ballads: Ophelia, after her father’s death, speaks in fragments of old songs; the Fool answers the collapse of the world with street couplets in the storm. When a language dies with its order, the common songbook remains, the one speech that belonged to no regime and so survived them all. Greenblatt’s ledger of theatrical economies files Lear’s five nevers, the barest line in the language, under appropriation: ordinary language is common property, free for the taking, and the speech of the dead is nobody’s private estate. That is the jukebox’s legal basis. The blues, which Smith calls a musical kind of crying and the root of all art, is the institution of exactly this: private grief pronounced in a form inherited from everyone. And the songbook he quotes is a funk songbook, which matters, because late Smith is funny and his criticism keeps a straight face. The funk metabolism he invokes, taking in the filth and coming out reinforced, is comic at its core, closer to Scooby-Doo than to Grand Guignol, as his own catalogue admits; he has said the rest himself, even when I’m ironic, I am serious. Fools run on the same engine: truth wrapped in nonsense, because naked it does not pass the door. He calls his exhibitions poems, and his one recent New York appearance, at a poetry institution, consisted of mixtapes.
The second channel is shorter and ends the story. Sports equipment recurs through his inventories with a charge Henry V discovered when a crate of tennis balls arrived from France as an insult and he promised to turn the balls to gun-stones: play equipment stands one decree away from ordnance, a toy is a threat container, and Smith’s basketballs bound in black tape hold the threat at one remove. In the newest lists the address turns direct for the first time: a yellow bucket bears the title you can sit here, an invitation, hospitality with a wince in it. And then the terminus. In the Bologna list stands a work titled baskets. Material: baskets. The name equals the substance. In the same seasons: mop, made of a dresser and a mop handle; green, named for the color it produces. Sixteen years of subtraction, vowels first, then names, then verbs, end in tautology: to say the thing and to show the thing have become one act. Language goes no further than this point.
Past it, Smith has built a park of perception machines. A sound work in Cologne holds a tone at sixteen thousand hertz, pitched past the adult ear, audible to children and dogs: Lear’s fifth never, language decayed past syntax into pure beat, continued over the threshold of hearing. A theremin, played without touch. Lasers, ultraviolet, a plasma globe. In a Detroit checklist of 2018 the materials of one work read: laser, cell phones, LSD, plastic. A perception-altering substance entered the inventory as a sculptural material, one line among others. These are things whose function is not to be seen but to alter the seer.
Two entries in the same list turn that direction around. One work is marked not public — bull testicles, listed in the exhibition and withheld from view: a work that exists only in the inventory, which turns out to be the last place where a work can be without being seen. The other is carceral: footage from the cameras of an unnamed disciplinary institution, and a small piece titled alcatraz, glass, water and an air stone, an aquarium aerator named for a prison island, which retroactively glosses the pet fish sealed into a Bologna vitrine beside two VR headsets. The aquarium was always a panopticon with gravel.
All of it adds up to a strategy with a name in Hamlet: inaction. The prince delays, and his delay proves the most destructive force in the play; calculated non-action dismantles a kingdom more surely than any thrust. Smith does almost nothing in a room. He removes the grilles from the ventilation shafts. He unscrews the light. He places two objects on the floor of an empty hall. And the institution around the visitor stops holding, not because it was attacked but because it stopped being maintained. A scene in Henry VI describes the resulting exhibit. The Countess of Auvergne lures the commander Talbot into her castle to display him and mocks what she has caught: is this the man. Talbot answers that she has captured a fraction. I am but shadow of myself, he tells her; my substance is not here. Every object in a Smith exhibition speaks Talbot’s line. What stands in the room is the shadow; the substance — a city, a labor force, the dead — is not here and cannot be brought.
The visitor is issued a part along with the ticket. Everyone watches everyone, the standing instruction of Elsinore, returns as selfie sticks, headsets, blinking portholes, institutional camera feeds; a deposed king in Richard II calls for a mirror to check whether he still exists once no one looks at him as a king, and in Bologna two VR headsets stand fitted with pages of mirror foil, readers reflecting only their own lenses. Hamlet’s answer to a world like that is to stage a play in order to test a spectator, illusion run against illusion as an instrument of verification. A Smith exhibition is a Mousetrap set for the institution and the visitor at once.
And the first words spoken to a dead thing in that world double as the viewer’s instruction. Stay, illusion. You do not know whether the thing before you is a being or a stage effect, and you ask it to remain anyway. The line is not Hamlet’s. Horatio speaks it, in the first scene, to the Ghost, and Horatio is worth following to the end, because his position at the close of the play is a job description. He survives everyone. He orders the bodies carried to a stage and promises the new power an explanation: let me tell you how these things came about. Whoever converts remains into narrative occupies that position, whatever the century calls the post. The curator arranges the remains; the critic supplies the telling; this essay does both, over things that belong to someone else, out of a catalogue that counts itself among the works it documents, since the Bologna list ends by inventorying the book’s own pages, untitled, mixed media on paper, laminated. The document does not stand outside the corpus. The speaker does not stand outside the stage. And Greenblatt’s ledger of what a stage may take without paying holds one more entry, the coldest one: the prime example of the vulnerable, he writes, is the lower classes, who may be represented almost without restraint. The material base of this art is the defenseless, priced at shipping. The material base of this essay is the same. A deposition is also an acquisition; seen from inside the speech, witnessing and appropriation refuse to separate cleanly, and a text that claims otherwise is lying about its own hands.
What the speech has established, before it ends, is a shape. Reality, in these two bodies of work, opens through loss; the life of things stays suspended; time is dislocated rather than flowing; language ends before its subject does. Nobody chooses such an ontology out of temperament. It is issued by a position in history, the one in which an old order has died and a new one cannot be born, and it has now been recorded twice, four centuries apart, by witnesses with no line of inheritance between them. The content has not aged. The position has returned. By the shape of an art, a present can be dated.
Whether one can speak about remains without becoming Horatio, this text does not know. It knows one small thing instead. The tone Smith tuned past the human threshold is pitched for children and dogs; and in sixteen years of inventories, exactly one narrator has been allowed to say what happened to a thing. The creature that hears the work is the creature that told the story. So far, the only witness the inventory has trusted is a dog.
Berlin, July 20, 2026
Michael E. Smith, CC
Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bologna
January 30 – April 26, 2026