Being John Smith

Having made his name as a playful and humorous avant-garde artist—with a career spanning half a century and more than 60 films, video works, and installations—John Smith confesses in this autobiographical contemplation that having the most commonplace of all British names “undermines my sense of individuality and self-worth on an almost daily basis.” Search online for “John Smith” and “film” and you’ll find Captain John Smith from Disney’s Pocahontas, he sighs, not him.

Smith uses deadpan humor and his charming voice to take us on a meandering journey into his thoughts about his name, his own mortality, and his legacy as an artist. Onscreen, meanwhile, we see texts that connect these reflections with other preoccupations, such as the desperate state of the world.

Unexpected sounds and other unforeseen and associative connections bear witness to his “idiosyncratic wit and formal inventiveness”—as does the question, which appears on screen, of whether this work lives up to his reputation. A stream of self-consciousness in image and sound by an artist who is always happy when someone asks him whether he is perhaps “the John Smith.”