Steve Reinke

"In the first shot of Reinke’s new feature length video, we see the desert landscape of the American Southwest from a car window. Though shaky and handheld, it is an immediately recognizable and iconic image: the great vistas of Hollywood westerns, of American westward expansion, of monumental modernist land art from the late 20th century. On the soundtrack, Reinke’s unmistakable voice apologizes for beginning the film with a shot of a landscape from a moving car, but what is he to do? The camera is already rolling. This moment encapsulates much of what transpires in the scenes that follow: presenting us with an image, dismissing that image and wryly suggesting he is doing nothing here, that the footage is just unreeling. Reinke’s collection and organization of images and sounds seem casual at first, but ultimately reveal themselves to be heavily mediated and orchestrated."

The artist is inspired the day after seeing Nathaniel Dorsky's "Arboretum Cycle" to make a video engaging with the natural, botanical world. Thinking, as usual, of the difference between poetry and philosophy.

Continues the journey from the final sequence of Ask the Insects. We turn away from the graveyard, enter the schoolyard, approach the old crippled tree spinning and sit under it to draw a little cartoon for the New Yorker, while — through some sort of temporal displacement — New Year’s resolutions are being made.

In this wry confessional video, Steve Reinke appears—shirtless and lavishly tattooed—in a basement, playing archival clips and delivering arch disquisitions on his filmmaking and the ways in which images represent his engagement with the world. Mortality, desire, empathy, and horror all feature as subjects of Reinke’s idiosyncratic erudition, which mutates from sincerity to irony to provocation.

A desktop video in five parts that modestly propose ways of existing with or against history and politics.

I once had a lover who would occasionally transform into a dog — and not even a purebred. Instead, some patchwork mutt of scrappy fur — but not without charm, not without beauty. It happened when I rubbed his prostate a certain way, and then I'd be trapped, I wouldn't be able to pull out. So I'd have to finish fucking him and after a few minutes I'd be released from his butt. Then I'd be really tired, I'd want to take a nap, but he'd want to play so I'd give him a biscuit and take him out for a walk. We'd go to the park and roll down green hills. I'd rub his belly and everyone who passed would rub his belly. They'd say, "Oh what a nice looking dog you have, what a charming mutt."

The artist decides to found his own art school and begins by assembling materials for the library. Finding too many words are available, he glues together the unnecessary pages of books.

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. This volume includes videos 1-14: Excuse of the Real, Family Tree, Watermelon Box, Family Planning, Eleven Dreams, Emergence of Democratic Memory, Speculative Anthropology, Why I Stopped Going to Foreign Films, I Am Not Like You, Barely Human, ROOM, Michael & Lacan, Joke (Version One), and Joke (Version Two).

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. This volume contains videos 79-100: The Boxers, Talk Show, The Hand, I have already, Little Monkeys, Stenor, New York Loves Me, Seventeen Descriptions, Children's Video Collective, Three Dreams, 24 Jokes, Video for Intellectuals, Falling, Notes on the Uncanny, Manifestations/Jouissance, Ants and Bees, Ghosts, Camouflage, Underwear, Candle, Story, and Why I've Decided to Become a Painter.

The starting point was a video tape of projection footage made by the artist Gretchen Bender, who turned clinical images of infections, deformities, and morbid injuries into an abject flicker film. Reinke and Richards expanded Bender’s medical gaze into a broader perspective, combining new sequences and animations, interweaving them to produce a film with a rich soundtrack of audio and spoken word.

Steve Reinke ostensibly turns to the subjects of friendship and intimacy in A Boy Needs A Friend, in particular investigating the notion of queer Nietzschean friendship. Using his signature dry voice-over monologue to tie together an eclectic array of disparate images, ranging from found footage collages to digital animation and cell phone video, Reinke sets forth theories about the identity of Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates, needlepoint doodles, the upsides of owning both U.S and Canadian citizenship, and the ability of corpses to have sex.

In a peculiar combination of eroticism and design asthetics, an attractive young man pleasures himself in his living room while a disembodied voice describes the decor.

Steve Reinke ironically adopts the position of a mainstream documentary filmmaker making a film tracing the slow death of a person with AIDS. The first of Reinke's The Hundred Videos project.

The 35th video in Steve Reinke's "The Hundred Videos" project.

A videotape to placate the 20th century artist Antonin Artaud, who was not very calm. Certainly transgression and nervous energies/violent impulses once went hand-in-hand, but perhaps today requires a calmer, more considered approach.

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. This volume includes videos 15-30: Walking the Dog, After Baudelaire, Language of Rats, Language of Flowers, Introduction to the Logo, Deaf, Squeezing Sorrow from an Ashtray, In the Realm of Perpetual Embarrassment, 80 Prominent Dermatologists, Visuals Elf, Pus Girl, Wish, Disturbed Sleep, Testimonials, Little Faggot, and Long Train Ride.

"Lonely Boy" condenses and combines two films: Wolf Koenig's classic NFB documentary on Paul Anka (also titled Lonely Boy) and a classic gay porn loop from the late 70's The Summer of Kip Noll.

Reinke’s excess of images, language, connections and suggestions creates a cinematic essay on life’s questions. Philosophy, archiving, disease cells, nocturnal animals and art are just a few of the ingredients of his work, which is replete with humour and self-deprecation.

A short film that features a cast of animal characters -- each of a different, though often indeterminate, species -- who struggle with impending astrological despair and engage in absurdist dialogs, confessing various melancholic desires and transgressive secrets in poetic cartoon abjection.

Two sections. In the first, the notorious internet video Shake the Bear, in which a woman shoots and kills a bear and has sex on the body, is described and commented scene by scene. In the second section, archival footage of Grey Owl interacting with beavers is discussed.