Steve Reinke on www.tank.tv, until April 7th 2009

Steve Reinke
15th March - 7th April 2009
on www.tank.tv

“In a city so dense with smart psychoanalytic cinema, Reinke wields the language of the unconscious as lightly as a portable video camera. He plays with the thinness of images and the inadequacy of words, the gap between language and desire. [ . . . ] Though Reinke fills these videos with his own thoughts, revealing the most intimate things about his fantasies, his childhood, his family, there is an ironic note that undercuts the confessional quality, as if Reinke hesitated to burden the viewer. [ . . . ] Not masochistically but quasiscientifically, Reinke mortifies the flesh in order to isolate desire: if you cannot both be and have, Reinke chooses to have.”
Laura U. Marks, Artforum, May 1995.

tank.tv is pleased to present a selection of work from Steve Reinke including thirty two videos from his series 'The Hundred Videos' as well as 'Painter', 'Regarding the Pain of Susan Sontag (Notes on Camp)' and 'The Fallen'.

Reinke is a prolific storyteller who enjoys sapping his self-righteous counterparts. As suggested by the title of The Hundred Videos (1989-1996), the volume of his output is monumental. In most of his work and in this series - a large part of which is shown on tank.tv - the procedure that underlies these brief videos consists of an exploration of the voice and of the role of the narrator. In situations engaging with topics as diverse as literature, sex, science and art, Reinke’s voice questions the consistency of the relation between what one sees and what is happening. Reinke’s comments distract the viewer from the meaning imposed by the images while at the same time, speaking in the first person, he creates an interlace of fictional, subjective and documentary elements. Moreover, the content of his films carries a seductive provocation and is prone to make one’s teeth gnash or laugh. In Regarding the Pain of Susan Sontag (Notes on Camp), Reinke films a cemetery full of gravestones with the name “Reinke”. “Every stone bears my name. If Oprah is every woman, I am every corpse” says the voice-over. Revealing the artist’s disbelief in self-esteem, this also perhaps represents a foretaste of the artist’s lifetime project which will explore deaths and ends, called Final Thoughts…

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his work in video. He lives in Toronto and Chicago, where he is Associate Professor of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University. His work is screened widely and is in several collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Pompidou (Paris), and the National Gallery (Ottawa).

Steve Reinke’s thirty two selections from The Hundred Videos and more will be on www.tank.tv from the 15th March - 7th April 2009 before moving to tank.tv’s online archive of over 600 previously exhibited videos.