What does it mean to be ‘common’ or overlooked in a neoliberal society that preaches the extraordinary?

In the English-speaking world, ‘John Smith’ is the generic name par excellence. In the UK alone, around 30,000 people bear this name – an awkward reality for anyone called John Smith who might wish to underscore his individuality. This conundrum is the point of departure for Being John Smith (2024), the most recent film by John Smith, a British artist renowned for elevating the unspectacular.

The work spans Smith’s life story: from school failures to his emergence as an avant-garde filmmaker, from his cancer treatment to reflections on global politics today. Image, voice, and text are intertwined in an autobiographical meditation on nothing less than the meaning of art and existence itself. Despite its thematic weight, the film is devoid of pathos; in fact, it is a humorous, at times political, at times touching exploration of everyday life full of irony and honesty.

Smith’s films unfold at the intersection of conceptual art, structural film, and documentary, revolving around his own life and immediate surroundings. In Being John Smith, mysterious covered buildings repeatedly appear – surreal sights that are yet emblematic of the living conditions in Hackney, East London, where Smith resides. In this heavily gentrified former working-class district, affluent newcomers buy Victorian houses and often add attic extensions, resulting in temporary shrouds that mark this transformation.

In Dad’s Stick (2012), the second of three films on view in the exhibition, Smith pays homage to his father by showcasing several of his personal tools to examine the texture of memory and the things people leave behind. One of these objects is a stick used to stir paint that has had its end cut off to reveal a tree-ring-like structure of many layers, a time capsule of over fifty years of personal history. 

Over the years, Smith’s practice has evolved: while he has frequently featured in his own films, he now increasingly foregrounds autobiographical detail. In his exhibition at the Secession, he weaves a complex network of personal iconography across three films, interlaced with photographs and objects – including images of himself and his great-grandfather in their respective workshops, coat hangers, and coffee tables titled Coffee Table Books made from coffee table books. Through reenactment, mirroring, and rescaling, such cross-references unfold gradually, inviting cumulative decoding.

This layered and delayed construction of meaning also characterizes The Black Tower (1985–1987). The film alternates between conventional storytelling and visual abstraction, incorporating colour fields that slowly transform into representational images. In this way, it builds a psychological bond between narrator and viewer, while repeatedly disrupting illusion by foregrounding its own construction. An offscreen voice introduces a man haunted by a tower that seems to follow him around London. Both humorous and unsettling, the narrative steadily escalates into a horror-like scenario in which the protagonist loses the ability to distinguish between reality and the paranormal.

In the mid-1970s, Smith shared the widespread interest in challenging the illusionism of mainstream cinema and subverting apparent divisions between abstraction and representation, between the personal and the political. He did so alongside colleagues from the Royal College of Art, where he trained, and members of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC). From the beginning, he was also fascinated by the capacity of sound – especially of the spoken word – to shape perception or conjure images. Smith handles image, sound, and text flexibly: instead of synchronizing them, he works with interruptions and disruptions – and a lot of black screen in between. He explains: ‘I’m not afraid of having darkness in films because that’s where the imagination works. I really love sound and darkness.’

This approach is evident in Being John Smith: intimate confessions about fears, doubts, and political views appear not as spoken monologues but as onscreen text. Its emotional content clashes with the form of the caption and its air of objectivity and authority. By contrast, Smith’s calm voice guides us without any emotional tremors.

At the end of Being John Smith, we see a crowd of over 40,000 people at a Pulp concert singing along to the band’s 1995 smash hit Common People. The moment makes for a reflection not only on class dynamics but also on communion and the affective power of art – on what it means to be together, with or without an all-too-common name. 

John Smith Special at the Austrian Film Museum

Saturday, 13 September, 6 pm and 8:30 pm; the artist will be present.

In conjunction with his solo exhibition and in collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum, John Smith has put together two unmissable screening programmes featuring films spanning his entire oeuvre, including his iconic 1976 film The Girl Chewing Gum, episodes from The Hotel Diaries (2001–2007), and Worst Case Scenario (2001–2003), which was shot in Vienna.

In cooperation with the Austrian Film Museum