Steve Reinke is joining us to share his ongoing video essay Final Thoughts alongside a showcase of his other short essay work in The Genital is Superfluous: Final Thoughts, Series Four.

Final Thoughts is Reinke’s on-going video essay. Components will be added until his death.

The Genital is Superfluous: Final Thoughts, Series Four follows a previous program Rib Gets in the Way: Final Thoughts, Series Three which was made for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In that video, the narrator, having recently turned 50, takes stock of his life and decides which projects to continue and which to abandon.

Throughout this program, Reinke tries different methods to structure his disparate, aphoristic materials into compellingly coherent essays. In his video, The Natural Look, constructed from footage found on-line, it takes as its theme all things placental and structures itself around a movement from the human, through the animal and vegetal, to the mineral. Particular aphorisms of Clarice Lispector and E. M. Cioran structure this journey. A Boy Needs a Friend takes friendship as its ostensible theme, but really is about queer bonding.In Welcome to David Wojnarowicz Week, the narrator proposes a new holiday and outlines, day by day, how he celebrated it in 2016. Through his unique diaristic approach, Reinke adopts an intimate, frankly confessional voice, full of humor and good-will. He will be in attendance for discussion following the film talking about his approach to the essay, identity, and performance.

The Natural Look, 37 min., 2014

A Boy Needs a Friend, 22 min., 2015

Welcome to David Wojnarowicz Week, 14 min., 2016

Also showing a Final Thoughts, Series Five work-in-progress, Semen is the Piss of Dreams!

The Natural Look was commissioned by Impakt, Utrecht through the European Media Foundation and Goethe Institute as part of MoveOn. It has been in several group exhibitions including “Giving Up the Ghost” at Transmission in Glasgow and “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash” curated by Ed Atkins and James Richards for Isabella Bortolozzi’s Eden Eden in Berlin. A Boy Needs a Friend premiered at the 2016 Berlinale where it was a finalist for the Teddy Award for best short. It has screened at many festivals, including the NYFF and Ann Arbor, where to won a prize for being funniest. Welcome to David Wojnarowicz Week premiered at the Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery and has screened at the BFI London Film Festival.

“Reinke’s videos are a methodical stress-testing of our emotional capacities through tonal short-circuiting. It’s funner than it sounds submitting to psychological bondage…When Reinke, in “The Genital is superfluous,” says of the drunk shirtless men wrestling wetly on formica flooring that they “want to go back to the placental state” it’s been so pummeling getting there you submit to it, believe him.” – Contemporary Art Writing Daily

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his work in video. His work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the National Gallery (Ottawa), and has screened at many festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Oberhausen and the New York Video Festival. In 2006 he received the Bell Canada Video Award. A book of his scripts, “Everybody Loves Nothing,” was recently published by Coach House. He has also edited several books, most recently (with Chris Gehman) “The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema.” He has a blog, www.fennelplunger.com, as well as a site that archives his work, www.myrectumisnotagrave.com. His research interests include digital video production, motion graphics/animation, rhetorical and narrative strategies for visual art, the voice and psychoanalysis