Steve Reinke

Death and life, empathy and cruelty, sex and intimacy—it’s the “big” questions Reinke is after in his work. In the best Nietzschean manner, Reinke considers human beings not political or moral entities but puppets of microbiotic agendas: Instead of the Freudian ego and id, it is bacteria, placentae, and plankton that rule the world in his more recent videos; “culture” designates not humanistic achievement but life in a petri dish. Butter, the catalogue for Reinke’s first solo museum show, contains not only notes on his new video An Arrow Pointing to a Hole, but also a selection of his sinister text images and absentminded needlepoints, all of which, in a paradoxically precise manner, tell stories of loss of control, formlessness, and self-abandon.