Steve Reinke

The work of Steve Reinke (b. 1963) is a departure in logic about the nature of mother and father, and what constitutes a liquid--its name or associations? This edition was commissioned by mumok, Vienna, as part of their engagement with younger artists, whose practices, like Reinke’s, include film and spoken word.

Steve Reinke’s work reminds us that there “may have been a time in which poetry was relevant.” And it reflects in both profound and simple ways what it means to be human. For his text images, Reinke refers to his notebooks, where he collects aphorisms, monologues, and ideas, and distills from them images that refuse to be images, strange hybrids of controlled execution and language let loose. Physical phenomena such as body fluids often make an appearance there—they mark Reinke’s skepticism of traditional psychoanalytic models of subjectivity. In lieu, we encounter an essentially functional interest in the human body and psyche as well as their mystifying relationship to unconscious bodily processes. Poetic as well as provocative, the archetypes of “mother” and “father” join up with the elementary liquids of “milk” and “oil” to build verbal imagery that is anything but pure or innocent.
TEXT FONT: mumok

Photo courtesy The European Media Art Platform (EMAP) and the artist.