Ever attuned to the conceits of the art world, Steve Reinke declared that his aim was to ‘complete one hundred videos before the year 2000 and my thirty-sixth birthday. These will constitute my work as a young artist.’ In 1997 Reinke had already finished the one hundred videos, well ahead of schedule.Most of Reinke’s videotapes are short, as if made for the MTV generation, or perhaps those viewers with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). More particularly, they are part of a tradition of literature that Reinke’s peculiar style and voice belong to – that of Franz Kafka’s reworking of myths of Western culture so as to introduce, because they assume a quasi-logical form, paradoxes that the reader stumbles over. Except, in Reinke’s case, the tapes’ narrators think them completely reasonable. Reinke’s works, like Kafka’s parables and paradoxes, are populated by children and small animals (or other organisms), ghosts and the dead. Actually, in his tapes there is no longer a distinction between the living and the dead; rather, we find one continuum of the pre-dead, the dead, and the undead, all of which speak. As the narrator of one of the tapes says, ‘while there may be no love among corpses, there is conversation’, so these tapes include a host of voices. These voices are emitted as if from a writing machine – their function is to produce sentences. So doing, words thereby bring forth new symptoms, disorders, and monsters of nature.
