ART-PRESENTATION: Steve Reinke-Butter

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his first-person video essays. In residence, he worked on his ongoing video essay Final Thoughts, which entailed writing monologues and completing animation that will be part of Human Events: Final Thoughts, Series Five. Earlier components of the series have been widely exhibited, screened and collected, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial and the Berlinale. He is associate professor of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: mumok Archive

Death and life, empathy and cruelty, sex and intimacy, but also the uneasy relationship between the author and his work, are the kind of topics that Reinke engages with in his work, however, he considers human beings not political or moral entities but puppets of microbiotic agendas: instead of the Freudian ego and id, it is bacteria, placentae, and plankton that rule the world in his more recent videos, and “culture” designates not humanistic achievement but life in a petri dish. Butter, Reinke’s first ever solo muse- um show, presents his new video, An Arrow Pointing to a Hole, as well as a selection of his sinister text images and absentminded needlepoints, all of which, in a paradoxically precise manner, tell stories of loss of control, formlessness, and self-abandon. As an artist and writer, Reinke is best known for his monologue-based videos, among them “The Hundred Videos” (1989–1996), which he programmatically conceived as an “early work.” In these five hours of video material, Reinke, by furnishing found, filmed, and animated images with confessional comments, blurs the boundary between documentary and fiction, thus anticipating the narcissistic structure of our current social media landscape. In 2006, Reinke started a new cycle titled “Final Thoughts” to which the work presented at mumok also belongs and which will be concluded at the time of the artist’s death. Whereas questions of libido and eros, “Final Thoughts” dedicated to their antagonists. Reinke is considering the end of things (of language, consciousness, and experience) and thus of his own person. In the nocturnal monologue scene in An Arrow Pointing to a Hole the artist is physically omnipresent—as a face, sonorous voice, and tattooed body—but the existence of a realm beyond this naked manifestation is categorically called into question. Both Reinke’s text images and his needlepoints reify such yearning for a loss of form. Grounded in the practice of notetaking and doodling, they are images that refuse to be images, strange hybrids of precise execution and nebulous contents. The drawings of words and phrases on which the series of silkscreen prints “Portfolio A, B, C, D” (2016–2019) are made with ink dripping from an eye- dropper. The line is hard to control and lends phrases such as “Amoeba Navigates Labyrinth” or “Strong Corpse Weak Ghost” an erratic ex- ression.  Reinke produces them without either plan or intention: one color follows another; patterns emerge and are abandoned. The result is strangely innocent, quasi-abstract objects, their back as important as their front, whose only function is to indicate killed time.

Info: Curator: Manuela Ammer, mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Duration: 6/3-26/10/20, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.mumok.at