Steve Reinke at Isabella Bortolozzi
Artist: Steve Reinke
Venue: Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
Exhibition Title: The Genital is Superfluous
Date: March 15 – April 9, 2016
Full gallery of video, images, press release and link available after the jump.
Video:
Steve Reinke, Box, 1994, Video, 2 mins, 35 sec, part of the “Bortolozzi Mix”
Images:
Images and video courtesy of Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
Press Release:
I used to doodle a lot, but I don’t doodle so much any more. I am too old to doodle; instead, I needlepoint. I have a bunch of colourful thread, which they call floss, and a firm plastic backing. I get to work without a plan, without a thought, without a care. If a pattern emerges — and one generally does — it develops so slowly that I begin to lose interest and begin to do something else, fucking it up. It takes an hour to do an inch. These are really slow doodles, crafty doodles. Sloppiness is part of the charm. I rarely frame them because I want to be able to turn them over and see their soft underbellies. One could argue that the front is the ego and the bottom is the id, but that is not quite right. Perhaps the back is the Dionysian supplement to the Apollonian perfection of the front. No, no, that makes even less sense. Perhaps they should all just be framed so they can the happy simple life of pictures and not have the burden of objecthood at all. They do mark time, though. I have drawer after drawer of them. They are thoughtless and charming, innocent, undemanding. I can’t exactly say they are life affirming, since they seem to mark a certain indolence, a slight distraction in the slide toward an easy grave. They are much the prettiest, most well-behaved children and so I want to introduce them to you, front and back. I don’t want to stitch them into a giant cushion, I want to use them to stuff the gap between the preconscious and the conscious and then the gap between the unconscious and the preconscious, until they take over your whole psychic life and you become some kind of needlepoint zombie, thinking only texture and abandoned pattern.