{"id":4652,"title":"What is Grace in All This Madness: The Videotapes of Dan Reeves","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/what-grace-all-madness-videotapes-dan-reeves","version":"20901ca821d788c0a7b13c16357e7b0e14513eba5f64d2dfffd0605a319d9cfa","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:00.9243283+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Marita Sturken"}],"authorKeys":["Sturken, Marita"],"subjects":["Interviews"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Afterimage","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Visual Studies Workshop","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"Summer 1985","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Rochester, New York","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"13","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"1 and 2","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0864","url":null},{"label":"Interviewee","value":"Dan Reeves","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022What is Grace in All This Madness: The Videotapes of Dan Reeves.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/what-grace-all-madness-videotapes-dan-reeves.","publication":"Marita Sturken. What is Grace in All This Madness: The Videotapes of Dan Reeves. Afterimage. vol. 13, no. 1 and 2. Visual Studies Workshop. Summer 1985.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4652.ris"},"links":[],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":36558},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":583}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"There are certain artists for whom the process of making art appears to be an infinitely personal one, a release, a surge of emotion, a powerful need to express themselves. Their emotional and spiritual growth is often remarkably visible in the fabric of their work-almost painfully transparent. It is in this category of artists that I would place Dan Reeves, a video artist whose work explores contemporary issues such as socially-condoned violence and the human potential for destruction, as well as spiritual issues of human existence and divine nature. Throughout all of Reeves\u0027s videotapes there is a pervasive feeling of the artist\u0027s presence, psyche, and spirit, of the artist using the medium as a means of understanding himself. Reeves\u0027s tapes are also a primary example of work that transcends and calls into question standard categories of documentary, narrative, and personal expression. While he has dealt with \u0022documentary\u0022 issues--violence, war, nuclear arms--Reeves has done so with a mixture of styles combining narrative, found footage, image manipulation, text, and personal experiences. He describes his early interest in \u0022the personal narrative, the narrative that escapes being told in our culture,\u0022 and \u0022in the potential of sculpting and changing material--collage, metamorphosis, transformation, synthesis.\u0022\u0027 When discussing his work and his concepts of art, Reeves invariably returns to \u0022truly distilled and thoughtful poetry,\u0022 as his most important inspiration. Fittingly, the evolution of his work demonstrates a development from a somewhat self-conscious and revelatory use of language to a refined and spare understanding of the relationship of poetry and image. Reeves began making film and videotapes in 1979; he previously worked with sculpture and photography, and continues to do so. His work can be seen in two groupings--the first deals with political and social issues, and the second explores spiritual and philosophical issues. Two tapes have eclipsed their predecessors: Smothering Dreams, a tape that Reeves made in 1982 about his experience of combat in Vietnam, and the more recent Sabda (1984), a visual essay about human existence composed with imagery from India and structured on ancient Indian poetry. While diametrically opposed in both approach and content, both tapes force us to confront certain issues as they confront us also with their maker-his questions, struggles, desire for understanding, and beliefs. The progression from the aggressive and stylized Smothering Dreams to the meditative contemplation of Sabda reveals in many ways the maturing of an artist-the realization of a style. Reeves\u0027s development into an artist was unusual. Leaving high school at age 16, he enlisted in the Marines at age 17 in 1965. He characterizes himself at this time as sensitive, politically naive, and philosophically curious-reading Sartre and war novels at the same time and writing poetry in boot camp. In 1968, he was in a platoon that was almost obliterated in an ambush during the Vietnam War; he returned to the United States wounded and extremely bitter about the war. During the next 12 years, he worked in the anti-war movement, did subsistence farming in Maine, went to Ithaca College in upstate New York where he studied film and photography, and worked in assemblage sculpture, painting, and photography. He also spent a lot of time at the National Film Archives in Washington, D.C., compiling a collection of found footage. In May 1978, Reeves went to India for four months to travel and study meditation, which he calls \u0022a watershed experience .... I was approaching 30 and it really changed my whole outlook about myself and even more importantly about my ability to do my work without anxiety about what would result.\u0022 Upon his return, Reeves got a job at the Educational Television Center of Cornell University and discovered video. Collaborating on both image and sound with audio artist Jon L. Hilton, he produced his first tape, Thousands Watch, a short, image-processed work that deals with the issue of nuclear suicide. The tape\u0027s central metaphor is derived from a 1936 Universal newsreel of a crowd looking on while a young man stands on the ledge of a tall building threatening to, and eventually succeeding in, committing suicide. It begins with an image of time-lapse colorized clouds racing across the sky at a frenzied pace while a low siren wail emerges on the soundtrack. This sound forms a pulsing heartbeat and builds into a tense crescendo as the tape progresses. Intercut with it are excerpts of familiar historical voices--Truman announcing the dropping of the bomb and Kennedy stating at the U.N. that \u0022we all share this small planet.\u0022 Images from the newsreel-- the lurid headline of \u0022Thousands Watch!\u0022, the crowds gathering and watching in fascination, the huddled figure on the building\u0027s ledge-are juxtaposed with images of war, nuclear explosions, the hands of a corpse being ritualistically folded again and again, as well as footage from the 1958 Brussels World Fair of circuses, amusement parks, automated milk machines, and postwar prosperity and glee. Dense and tightly woven, the tape seems to accelerate stylistically and verge toward self-destruction. I knew that I wanted to make a very simple statement about nuclear weapons as a form of mass suicide. That ability to make things smaller and smaller, to repeat things, to build perhaps a more meaningful and powerful total image in a short amount of time, and in video appealed to me. The hands being folded on the body again and again indicate a stretching to an infinity of death. When I think of nuclear war, I think of this unimaginable multitude of deaths. In the newsreel, people stand in the street watching somebody who is obviously thinking seriously of taking his life. It immediately occurred to me how similar was our own situation. At that time in 1979, right before Three Mile Island, not many people were thinking about nuclear war in any serious way. It made me think about how vacant our consciousness was, and how we are just going on with life as usual in the workaday world while the nuclear arsenals continue to build. Throughout this period, the focus of Reeves\u0027s interest was not only the political issues of nuclear war, but the more intrinsic question of what motivates human beings to pick up arms and do harm to one another. At the root of this questioning was, of course, his own experience in Vietnam, and he decided to find a means of dealing with that memory and to confront the experience of combat on videotape. He was also motivated to express himself because of the kind of material that was being generated commercially about the war: \u0022Seeing what was being done, that\u0027s what really pushed me to make Smothering Dreams. When I saw The Deer Hunter I walked out. I was so disgusted at the presentation of the North Vietnamese as a subhuman species.\u0022 In collaboration with Hilton, he first produced Body Count (1980), a tape that acts as a kind of preliminary sketch, and then finished Smothering Dreams in 1981. Smothering Dreams is a work replete with catharsis and personal anguish. Reeves describes it as the result of \u002212 1/2 years of living with a memory that just would not leave me alone.\u0022 The exorcism of that memory, the desire to understand why it happened and what led him to that situation, are the primary currents underlying the work. It is especially compelling in the way it translates pain and emotion to the screen. Reeves describes the incident that was the impetus for the tape: [My platoon] was positioned in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and we began to search and destroy villages. They had started some sort of pacification program, so we would get up early and be loaded into helicopters and armored personnel carriers and would surround a village before the light would break. Intelligence officers with translators would set up these large PA systems and tell everybody to get out of bed, and we would then move into the village and begin to interrogate people. Men without ID cards were tied up and taken back to the perimeter of the compound for interrogation. We would take sniper fire and a lot of artillery fire from across the DMZ. As each week and month went by, it began to be more and more like war, but it also quickly become apparent to the people that I was hanging out with--who were listening to Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead with incredible four-track stereo machines plugged into generators in the middle of the jungle--that we were expendable. We would be asked to take a certain area and hold it for a day or two with a calculated loss of life, that was written into the project if you will-they knew they might have 15-20% casualties. I began to question the morality of it, and the efficiency of it-how much of a waste it all was, fighting to liberate a people who were in the process of liberating themselves. I began to have a healthy respect for the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army as citizens of the country, who were so committed to liberating that country that they would do anything .... But I had to be knocked off my horse completely. Even in spite of seeing all that death and destruction, it had to be brought home, served up in total living color. I had to be scared out of my wits to have it reach the center of my being. When the ambush took place, I had been in Vietnam about 9 or 10 months. That day, I remember feeling a heightened sense of \u0022something is going to happen to me . . . .\u0022 There were 33 people in this platoon. We were given a radio message to set up what was called a blocking force, which is a glorified name for just sitting and waiting for troops to be pushed towards you by other troops. They gave us the wrong information and we rolled into a graveyard with 33 of us sitting on top of this vehicle. Vietnamese graveyards are composed of mounds of dirt, and in these mounds of dirt were several companies of North Vietnamese troops with heavy machine guns, rocket launchers, mortars, and very well-timed and aimed artillery. We rolled in there and got slaughtered. I remember hearing someone say, \u0022There they are.\u0022 The lieutenant and I were sitting in the front of the vehicle and we both jumped off at the same time, but between the time that we jumped off and hit the ground, he was totally riveted with machine-gun fire, and he was right next to me. Just as I hit the ground, a rocket went off behind me and blew my clothing off. I didn\u0027t know it at the time but it cracked one of my eardrums and blew the other one out, so I wasn\u0027t hearing all that well. We all got in behind this vehicle, and the people who weren\u0027t dead or dying were fighting back, so later there were a lot of medals given out. We were pinned down there for four or five hours; eventually I was med-evaced out by helicopter. The helicopter went out and came back in, and as it came back in it was laced with machine-gun fire. I became terrified. We finally got out of there and got to the hospital-this was the beginning of the Tet Offensive, January 20, 1968 to a place called Dong Ha, but as soon as we got out of the helicopter, the North Vietnamese began to shell the place. We were lying on tables having our wounds inspected and we had to run outside and get in sandbagged bunkers. Then every hospital I went to got shelled, so although my wounds were fairly serious, for a while it looked like they might keep me in the country. Just thinking about it makes me shake. Terror, guilt at having survived, anger, and bitterness at the waste of life are the emotions Reeves wove into the fabric of Smothering Dreams. While it is a deeply personal work, events and realities are collaged in it so that they take on a universal quality rather than simply telling one person\u0027s story. Says Reeves, \u0022I didn\u0027t want to make any sort of dignified, coherent statement, because I don\u0027t think that there is one about Vietnam or war or ","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":36558,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}