[Reader-list] www.tank.tv: Now Showing: Steve Reinke, until 7th April 2009

[tank.tv press]

*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.


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Now showing:
'Straight to Video'
Grizedale Arts on film 2000 - 2008
1st December - 31st December 2008.

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Tyler Coburn, Tomorrow Unlimited

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