Steve Reinke

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A found footage montage of young men who elicit, in various ways, an empathic response from the viewer that also carries a strongly libidinal charge. Philosopher Levinas speaks about the face, and what it requires of us.

In Reinke’s latest provocation, the words of author Hervé Guibert are made flesh through a montage of “human events” that work to collapse the boundaries between the private and public, the perverse and the prosaic.

A film tribute, portrait and investigation of the set designer, photographer and actor Albrecht Becker. Staying with Becker’s self-portraits, artists Steve Reinke and James Richards pair public and private images in ways that challenge and re-signify one another.

"Atheists Need Theology, Too, the first of seven videos, begins with a poem by Emily Dickinson, To fill a Gap / Insert the Thing that caused it — . All of Human Events, then, could be read as a gloss on the poem. Or, one could choose — or be compelled by their dwindling subconsciouses and roiling microbiomes to choose — any other link in this chain of associations and use that as the starting point." — Steve Reinke

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.

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.

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.

Animals debate the sticky subject of body dysmorphia and the merits of reconstructive surgery in this short animation. "Jessie Mott wrote the script for this, recorded the voices and made the drawings. I constructed the soundtrack and animated her drawings." --Steve Reinke

A five-minute video collaboration between Dani Leventhal and Steve Reinke.

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

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 55-78: Symposium, Jin's Dream, Ghost Production, Minnesota Inventory, Re-enactment of a Performance, Three Examples, Sparky, Black Heart, Box, The End of My Death, Muriel, Attempt to sing, Assplay, Love Among Corpses, Harvey K., Dr. Asselbergs, Corey, My Fear, Dumbo Climax, Apology, How to Build an Igloo, Microscope, Amoeba, and Treehouse.

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 31-54: Lonely Boy, I Love You Too, Charming Mutt, Ice Cream, Instructions for Recovering Forgotten Childhood Memories, Request, Jason, Experiment, Editorial, Understanding Heterosexuality, Pioneer, My Personal Virus, Vision (With Birds), Self Help, My Erotic Double, Sleep, Dream Work, Artifact, Monologue (with Provocation), Child, Windy Morning in April, Love Letter to Doug, Three Plays, and Screen Saver.

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.

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).

"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.

"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.

"We know the air is filled with vibrations we can't hear. We can't consider environment as an object. We know that it's a process While in the case of the astray, we are indeed dealing with an object. It would be extremely interesting to place it in a little anechoic chamber and listen to it through a suitable sound system. Object would become process; we would discover, thanks to a procedure borrowed from science, the meaning of nature through the music of objects." John Cage

There is no void. The world is full.

Canadian Steve Reinke takes brief images from gay porn and turns them into something lyrical and resonant.