Sometimes Fucking Helps | Steve Reinke

Medium: Screenprint
Paper Type: BFK
Year: 2020
Edition Size: 20

Dimensions: 15″ x 22″
Published by Spudnik Press Cooperative 
Inscriptions: Edition, Signature (verso)

Sometimes Fucking Helps is taken from one of hundreds of drawings by Steve Reinke, using text sourced from his many notebooks of longer writings. Starting with the idea of single-panel cartoons where the text is fully integrated into the frame, Reinke adopted his current technique of using an eyedropper to draw the text with ink on small sheets of watercolor paper, resulting in drips and letters with liquid edges. The edition includes black and white prints as well as a varied edition of “split fountain” screenprints, where the artist dripped many colors of ink into the screen so they would bleed and squish together as they were printed through the stencil.

Other prints in these portfolios are collections of sinister text images that are an unsettling blend of obtuse, funny, wistful, profound, paradoxical, and crass reflections on the human experience, often referencing philosophers like Nietzsche and Lucian. Phrases range from edgier takes on inspirational quotes like “yr dick smells like my dick” to more poetic and evocative words or phrases, like “amoeba navigates labyrinth.”

Steve Reinke is an artist, writer, and critic who keeps notebooks full of aphorisms, monologues, and paragraph-long ideas. For his many portfolios at Spudnik Press, he strips this writing down into text-based drawings of dripping handwriting, printed onto large scale paper for an authoritative finish. Reinke’s work has been shown at MoMA, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Museum of Ottowa, and the Whitney Biennial. He is currently a professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

“When Stan [Shellebarger] asked me to make some prints with him, I knew I wanted to make prints based on these drawings. The prints are much classier than the drawings: there is a tension. The prints have the regal-ness of the fine decaled paper, the evenly applied ink, and the authoritative size.” – Steve Reinke