Mike Builds a Shelter (1985)

Mike Builds a Shelter is a performance comedy with apocalyptic overtones, a narrative extension of Smith's installation Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter/Snack Bar. In this darkly humorous morality play, Smith contrasts Mike's rural adventures in a pastoral landscape with his home fallout shelter. Throughout, the dual narratives are intercut with episodes of "Mike's Show" on cable, in which Mike's banal domestic activities are eagerly if passively received by living-room TV viewers. The government-approved provisions for nuclear fallout that Mike so readily accepts, typical of the naivete of 1950s' public safety policies, are seen in stark contrast to the reality of the contemporary crisis of a radioactive environment.