Sundown

Steve Reinke / United States / 2023 / European Premiere / 7 min.

synopsis

In the video essay An Arrow Pointing to a Hole (2019), which premiered at the artist's exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, Reinke declares that he is “starting to pay attention to my relationship with paintings.” His video diary, filmed between March 2020 and May 2023, begins in Vienna and continues his search for a pure relationship with audiovisual recordings. “I used to have an extensive archive of images and sounds. I only kept two,” he says here. The first is a portrait of a young man, the second a recording of the song Sundown by the recently deceased folk singer Gordon Lightfoot.

“I haven’t developed a mistrust of images themselves, but I’ve become wary of my relationship to images, which seems to me to have become too libidinal and sadistic. I think the purer and simpler an image is, the less likely that I will defile it, desire it. After all, it is only in the specificities, the little details — the scars, the wounds — that desire is caught, and takes hold.”

Source: author's essay

biography

Steve Reinke creates video art, embroidery, installations and texts. His intimate, disturbing and (self-)ironic video essays often explore themes of physicality, sexuality, desire, dying and art. In the 1990s, he created The Hundred Videos series, which culminated in the filming of his 100th work, and since 2007 he has been working on an “eschatological” project, Final Thoughts, which will conclude with his death. A Canadian artist living in Chicago, he holds the Chair of Art, Theory, Practice at Northwestern University.