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Ask the Insects

Steve Reinke

2005 00:08:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3DV video

Description

Nine micro-essays on animation and death--with many appearances including Goethe, Pink Floyd and Bambi--leads to a final encounter and introduction.

“Part home-made science (before it became doctrine and law), part animated video reverie, Reinke's brief and episodic compression is an incendiary release that opens by announcing the death of the author, of any audience capable of pulling its fragments together, or better, of dissolving into its tissues, of allowing the body to change shape, to identify, for instance, with an insect. Or a stone. It begins with the death of the reader and ends with the death of the author, and between he stops along the way to muse on rain falling up, the “useless biodiversity” of insects ("life is mostly decoration"), signal deconstruction and beautiful noise, and burning books. His style is abrupt and associative: he jumps and jumps again, producing these small beautiful abysses that no one can see. He has produced something invisible to treasure, an impossible movie, which refuses to adhere to memory's sound-byte continuums. It is waiting for a new body to store or restore it. And while it is waiting it speak, like a lover on the phone."

--Mike Hoolboom, International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2006

"The prodigal Reinke returns, as if he never left. The same small town, with only steps between youth and old age... once you climb the hill."

--The Images Festival, Toronto, 2006

About Steve Reinke

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his videos. His work is screened widely and is in several collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Pompidou (Paris), and the National Gallery (Ottawa).  His tapes typically have diaristic or collage formats, and his autobiographical voice-overs share his desires and pop culture appraisals with endearing wit. 

Born in a village in northern Ontario, he is currently associate professor of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University. In the 1990's he produced the ambitious omnibus The Hundred Videos (1996), and a book of his scripts, Everybody Loves Nothing: Scripts 1997-2005 was published by Coach House (Toronto). He has also co-edited several books, including By the Skin of Their Tongues: Artist Video Scripts (co-edited with Nelson Henricks, 1997),  Lux: A Decade of Artists' Film and Video (with Tom Taylor, 2000), and The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (with Chris Gehman, 2005).

"Reinke is so skilled and at ease with the video medium that he seems to have no fear or hesitation addressing just about any topic that human beings might get tangled in, from sex and evermore bizarre rituals of attraction and betrayal through to some of the most frivolous but poignant obsessions and self-delusions that people indulge in to keep despair or boredom at bay."
--Ross Gibson, How Photographs Are Stored in the Brain, Remembrance and the Moving Image catalog (2003)