Steve Reinke

Steve Reinke's Archival Imaginary

Gavin Butt & Jon Cairns

What might it mean to have fun in the archives? The pleasure of discovering some new evidence of a hitherto disputed 'fact' is one thing, but what of a pleasure that puts little store by being 'right'? What about wanting more (or less) than the sanctified pleasures of archival work, using its documents and image-banks as the pretext for fantasy and distraction? What of the value of thinking archival material otherwise?

Video documentation of insomnia research; an auto-fellation scene in a gay porn film; a curious attempt to make the dead speak; a monologue off un-PC jokes - these are just some of the things that comprise Steve Reinke's The Hundred Videos. The sheer range and plurality of sources, genres and narratives strikes one from the outset as a marker of the artist's grand ambition: to make one hundred videos before his thirty-sixth birthday. That this project was completed three years ahead of schedule suggests that Reinke is either a peculiarly efficient late 20th century genius or that his achievement amounts to something rather more like a visual folly. Its eccentricity, evident in his idiosyncratic choice of archival materials and bizarre imaginary scenarios, at first bewilders any attempt to make immediate or obvious connections between them. However, by dint of the cumulative effect of viewing each successive video, a different logic of organisation begins to emerge. As we move from one piece to another, Reinke's project begins to resemble a chronicle of ideas, the product of some daily struggle to come up with the next good idea for a video. The diaristic ebb and flow of ideas from one video to the next, bespeaks the weird (il)logic of thought at play within them. As a kind of visual smorgasbord or rebus, The Hundred Videos appears as an archive of the play of desire - of the artist's desire to complete his project.

By foregrounding the desiring body as its animating principle, The Hundred Videos emphasises the subjective attachments that draw us to archival materials. It figures the many facets of a libidinal self whose memories and fantasies are activated by the suggestiveness of various kinds of found footage. Many of these recollections and imaginings cohere under an autobiographical motif though it is not always possible to understand them as being simply of, or about, the artistís own life. The authorial identity of The Hundred Videos is dispersed across the different characters elaborated within it, throwing us off the scent of any ontological quest for the truth of its maker. The work plays with the phantasmatic status of its various ëIís, demonstrating its shifting performative inscription through a series of imaginary personae: the nerdy, hesitant ëIí of the narrator's deadpan voiceover; the ventriloquised 'I' speaking scripted dreams; and the 'Steve' who is loved by the whole of queer New York. Some of the videos entertain such fabulous bodily projections of the 'I' that they take the viewer well into the realm of the surreal. The grotesque creature in 'Barely Human', for example, is an incredible morphological response to the requirements of the narrator's specific sexual desire. In order to view his lovers' orgasmic facial expressions at the right distance whilst still being party to the sexual act, the narrator speaks of wishing to become a multi-limbed trunk which would enable him to stimulate his partners whilst gazing scopohilically upon them from 'a single large rectangular eye'. Working the capacity of desire to inhabit multiple bodies in this way, Reinke invokes the archive as a site for the play and proliferation of the fantasised self.

Reinke's penchant for surreal imaginings leads him to alight upon the weird and absurd in the straight-laced discourses of official wisdom and authorised knowledge. For instance, 'Squeezing Sorrow from an Ashtray' spoofs on the seriousness of a musicological inquiry into the auditory properties of inanimate objects where a piece of Viennese crystalware is 'proven', somewhat improbably, to harbour a rising crescendo of pseudo-classical muzak. Elsewhere, in '80 Prominent Dermatologists', Reinke directs his attention to a commemorative publication from 1952 outlining the scientific contributions of the American Dermatological Society. The video shows us a sequence of formal portraits of the Society's illustrious membership which, the artist's voice informs us, have been selected from those printed in the book. Given the constraints of the short video format which runs throughout The Hundred Videos, only a quarter of these images appear. Whilst initially striking the viewer as an homage to these great men of science, Reinke informs us at the videoís end that his selection of their portraits is based less upon any academic taxonomy than on his libidinal whims: ìI chose not necessarily the most attractive doctors, but the ones I would most like to have sex withî. The bathos of the sexual punchline deflates any 'serious' appraisal of the medical institution and serves to mark the video instead as a performance of Reinke's homoerotic desire. This tactic of undermining recurs in The Hundred Videos not as a strategy of conventional critique but as an occasion for the (re)enactment of self through ready-made material.

From home movies to discoloured 1970s porn flicks, The Hundred Videos exploits the nostalgic affect of worn and degraded materials. It also deploys anachronistic and technically outmoded means, such as its self consciously ëbadí graphic effects: uncool typefaces and eighties style dissolves. This turn towards sources and techniques which have been neglected or rendered obsolete, is mirrored by Reinke's attentions to downgraded, 'low' genres of representation. Drawing upon a vast storehouse of popular cultural imagery from, for example, talk shows, pornography, and childhood games, The Hundred Videos makes demotic cultural forms and techniques the focus for its peculiar brand of archival practice. Even when Reinke turns to more institutionalised sources of scientific truth and authority, he deliberately chooses the allure of ëoldí science whose truth claims have thereby been distanced, or perhaps even discredited, by the passage of time. Reinke's affectionate re-animation of such dated forms might be understood as a feature of the 'necrophilic economy' of his camp sensibility. Indeed, taken as a whole, The Hundred Videos might be seen as exploring the consequences of unleashing the disruptive possibilities of camp within cultural archives. One of these consequences is the peculiar effect that camp has upon the 'serious' business of making meaning. As Christopher Isherwood wrote in 1952, camp is not about making fun of the serious, 'but making fun out of it'. As if in keeping with this understanding, Reinke obscures the logic of a scientific experiment from a 1970s Open University television programme in order to comically accent the patina of its dated visuals and earnest pedagogic voiceover. In this way, he rearticulates moribund or vernacular representations, not in terms of a kind of alternative epistemology, but rather in the interests of a technology of pleasure and humour.

The Hundred Videos' campy take on the culturally discredited alerts us to the degree to which Reinke's archival investments are informed by modes of queer reading. In particular, Reinke performs identifications which might be deemed 'not really there' according to dominant models of reading and interpretation. The male narrator of 'Muriel', for example, identifies with the female protagonist within the scenario of a classic Hollywood romance (ìI remember when he took me to the fair. I put on ribbons and my prettiest dressî). Similarly, in 'Lonely Boy', Reinke ventriloquises his homoerotic desire for a young male starlet through footage of screaming girl fans. Such cross gender identifications queer the apparent heterosexual logic of the visual narratives on offer and trouble the very evidential status of the image itself in 'telling' us about sexuality. This questioning of evidence extends elsewhere to The Hundred Videos' playfulness with the historical record. Did Neil Armstrong really say 'One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankindí upon setting foot on the moon, as the official line would have it, or did he, in fact make a dedication to his much loved and lost childhood pet? ('I can imagine Sparky up here now, in a little doggy space suit and I wish I'd brought along a frisbee'). By imagining the duplicity of the historical record, even to such absurd extremes, Reinke queers the apparent self-evidence of archival material, as well as pointing to the role of 'inappropriate' libidinal attachments and fantasies in making history otherwise.

Childhood imagination and infantile memory loom large in the project. As an alternative to adult rationality, childish play provides Reinke with a resource of images, experiences and fantasies, which resist the conventional empirical logic of the archive. 'Pus Girl', the superhero incarnation of a young girl isolated by her skin condition, is an exemplary staging of the kinds of wish-fulfilment and role-playing common to childhood. Though of little significance to empirical thought, such youthful inventiveness is celebrated by Reinke as a necessary psychic mechanism for survival in a hostile world. Elsewhere, in 'Corey', the artist gives voice to the yearnings of awakening sexuality in an anonymous adolescent's letter to a youth league bowling champ. The tone of the narratorís voice falls somewhere between the desperation of a lonely (queer?) teen and the over-earnest fawning of a potential stalker. Though the clinically informed archival practices of psychoanalysis might embrace such narratives as evidence for an aetiology of adult neuroses, Reinke refuses to make any diagnostic judgements, preferring instead to leave such 'cases' open. Indeed The Hundred Videos, in its exploration of the phantasmatic conditions of archival practice, is at pains to distance itself from psychoanalysisí symptomatising of psychic phenomena. For instance, in 'Michael and Lacan', Reinke makes fun of the explanatory desire of psychoanalysis to comprehend the psychic dynamics of a trashed transvestite babbling to camera. Psychoanalytical jargon and quasi-scientific diagrams are seen to float freely from the subject they purport to define, appearing more as interpretive projection rather than any necessary analytic 'truth'.

Many of the individual videos are marked by the 'project-ness' of the work as a whole. The imperative to finish by the artist's self-imposed deadline dictates a certain pace to the construction of the work and frequently orientates Reinke towards the mundane resources of his immediate environment. Either he takes his new video camera for a walk around the block as one would a dog, or he muses idly on the sexual proclivities of a series of men passing by on the street. In another piece, he has the 'bright idea' of asking his (male) friends to take their clothes off where he finds them, whether at home or at work, if for no other reason than to complete the video. The voyeuristic spectacle one expects is undercut both by the participant's casual acceptance of the film-maker's request, as well as the un-erotic, matter of fact way in which they strip for the camera (one of them carries on a business discussion with a female colleague whilst stripping). In spite of the ambitious scope of Reinke's enterprise, each of the component videos works to resist the architecture of significant meaning, or to provide a unified or readable 'message'. Instead they happily content themselves with the pleasures of televisual distraction.

If Reinke's work can be seen to be lacking in big themes, then this is because it deliberately looks elsewhere, eschewing grand scale significance. Like the subject of one of Reinke's documentary-style pieces - the little known inventor, Dr. Asselbergs - Reinke prefers to be known instead for his small, unassuming ideas. Though Asselbergs is famous for his development of the instant mashed potato flake, Reinke's video focuses upon his infrared apple peeler, a device which was never taken up commercially. The artist seems tickled by this machine since it has gone unrecognised by everyone excepting, it seems, Dr. Asselbergs himself. Reinke is not interested, of course, in recuperating such an invention for a history of 'great ideas'. This would be to mistake him for a conventional archivist. Instead the artist allows the (in)significance of the good doctor's invention to reverberate across the myriad ideas contained within The Hundred Videos. By turns both fantastic and mundane, brilliant and dumb, Reinke's work is testimony to those ideas, unrecognised as such, which we nevertheless act upon, or have acted upon us, in our everyday lives.

The Hundred Videos was simultaneously presented at Peer, Shoreditch Town Hall, London and Soho House, London, 20 January - 27 February 2000. We would like to thank Ingrid Swenson for providing the necessary materials for completion of this text, and Steve Reinke for permission to reproduce his work.

Andrew Ross, 'Uses of Camp', in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, Routledge, 1989, p. 152.

Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening, Methuen, London, 1954, p. 125.

See Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993.

Even when Reinke turns to pornographic representations which figure gay desire explicitly, they become a trigger for the narrator's particular fetishistic fantasies and memories of specific sexual encounters. In spite of the graphic nature of these images they are not exhausted by their sheer visibility, but are variously animated by the narrator's phantasmatic projections.