BIOGRAPHY

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his monologue-based video essays. His work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), MACBA (Barcelona) and National Gallery (Ottawa). He has shown work at many film festivals including Sundance, Berlinale, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, BFI London and the New York FF. He has been in many exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial 2014. He is represented by Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi (Berlin).

The Toronto International Film Festival named his The Hundred Videos (1989 — 1996) one of the 150 essential works In Canadian cinematic history. In 2006 he received the Bell Canada Video Award. A collection of his writings, The Shimmering Beast, was published in 2011. He has co-edited several anthologies, most recently Blast Counter Blast (with Anthony Elms) and The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (with Chris Gehman).

He also works as a curator and critic, most notably assembling a box set of George Kuchar's video work for the Video Data Bank and programming, with Jon Davies, the 2023 Flaherty Film Seminar: Queer World-Mending. His research interests include rhetorical and narrative strategies for visual art, artists' writing, queer Nietzsche, the voice and psychoanalysis.

He is Professor and Chair of Art, Theory, Practice at Northwestern University.


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FRAMES OF REFERENCE, SPRING 2024
STEVE REINKE

PROGRAM ONE: SELECTED VIDEOS, 1995-2016
Tuesday, March 26th - 7pm
Ukrop Auditorium, Robins School, University of Richmond
 
78. Treehouse (1995, from The Hundred Videos)
I am looking for ways to map myself onto other things.

80. Talk Show (1996, from The Hundred Videos)
Every human is exactly interchangeable.
 
87. Children’s Video Collective (1996, from The Hundred Videos)
In the early seventies I was a founding member of the Children's Video Collective.
 
Anal Masturbation and Object Loss (2002, from Interim Videos)
"Ever on the lookout for learning opportunities, Reinke envisions an art institute where you don’t have to make anything, and with a library full of books glued together. All the information’s there—you just don’t have to bother reading it!"
—New York Video Festival (2002)
 
Ask the Insects (2005, from Final Thoughts, Series One)
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
 
Regarding the Pain of Susan Sontag (Notes on Camp), (2006, from Final Thoughts, Series One)
"This video continues the journey from the final sequence of Ask the Insects. We turn away from the graveyard, enter the schoolyard, approach the old crippled tree spinning, and sit under it to draw a little cartoon for The New Yorker, while — through some sort of temporal displacement — New Year’s resolutions are being made."
 
Great Blood Sacrifice (2010, from The Tiny Ventriloquist: Final Thoughts, Series Two)
A walk through the primordial landscape of the high desert of New Mexico, down the cliffs to a water reservoir. This is the place where love dies. All meaning is drained from the world, though pure affect drops from the sky.

Not Torn (Asunder from the Very Start), (2010, from The Tiny Ventriloquist: Final Thoughts, Series Two)
Completed for the Public Domain commissioning project from SAW Video in collaboration with the National Library and Archive Canada. Two sections: In the first section, archival footage of a dance recital from the Marial Mosher studio, at the Capitol Theatre in Halifax, 1939. The soundtrack for this section is constructed from a song my five year-old niece made up and recorded on her mother's cell phone, various folk songs and Marshall McLuhan's 1968 album, The Medium is the Massage. The second section weaves together home movies from a single family with written and spoken text. An essay on memory and the archive.
 
My Name is Karlheinz Stockhausen (2010, from The Tiny Ventriloquist: Final Thoughts, Series Two)
Adapted, quite loosely, from interviews with the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in the late 60s and early 70s. Vera Frenkel voices Karlheinz Stockhausen. Chemical factories, ear germs and astral projections mark the end of modernism.

79. The Boxers (1996, from The Hundred Videos)
Pure sensation.
 
76. Microscope (1995, from The Hundred Videos)
Whenever I look into a microscope, I feel like I am looking inside of something. A barrier seems to have been broken.
 
Welcome to David Wojnarowicz Week (2016, from The Genital is Superfluous: Final Thoughts, Series Four)
Welcome to David Wojnarowicz Week is the follow up to A Boy Needs a Friend. Reinke proposes a new holiday with the motto MORE RAGE LESS DISGUST: David Wojnarowicz Week and takes us through his seven days of celebration.Plankton, Kafka, Bette Davis, Wednesday afternoon visits with friends, more plankton, burning villages, Hollis Frampton, Sammy Davis Jr. as a libidinal machine producing sadness, opera, disembowelment, and poetry.
 
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PROGRAM TWO: SELECTED VIDEOS, 1989-2023
Wednesday, March 27th - 7pm
Ukrop Auditorium, Robins School, University of Richmond

34. Ice Cream (1993, from The Hundred Videos)
“Sometimes it takes a while to figure out what it is we really want. At certain times many different things can look very good, but usually it is something very specific we crave - something we may not even have a name for as we have never come across it. This is the basic impulse that results in the invention of new and unlikely ice cream flavors.”
 
40. Understanding Heterosexuality (1994, from The Hundred Videos)
"I've always been curious about heterosexuality. The fact that heterosexuals exist seems to me improbable - but you just have to throw a rock and you're likely to hit one - they're everywhere."
 
71. Corey (1995, from The Hundred Videos)
“Dear Corey, Do you have any pen pals?”
 
01. Excuse of the Real (1989, from The Hundred Videos)
This tape examines the various discourses which surround AIDS as a cultural phenomenon vs. AIDS as a disease of individuals. In voice-over, a video maker describes his plans for making a documentary about a person with AIDS. The monologue progresses from a straight-forward, if ironic, voice to one which employs black humour and lyrical asides. Visuals consist of home movies, originally super-8, jarringly edited in repeated patterns. The video concludes with a scene which may or may not be part of the proposed documentary.
 
75. How to Build an Igloo (1995, from The Hundred Videos)
Condensed version of the NFB classic.
 
Blood & Cinnamon (2010, collaboration w/ Jessie Mott)
Forest creatures gather to witness a possibly diabolical birth. The cartoon animals, discuss, diagnose and speculate about their disintegrating bodies and psyches. The follow-up to Everybody. Text and drawings by Jessie Mott, animation by Steve Reinke.
 
"In Blood & Cinnamon Mott’s creatures discuss existential crises as they flip and rotate and disappear from view."
--F News Magazine, December, 2010
 
Father, Limping Through a Field of Clover (2021, from Human Events: Final Thoughts, Series Five)
"I woke up today thinking I was a dying moose. It's Thursday, October 28th, 2021 and I woke up today thinking that I was a moose slowly bleeding to death of dozens of wounds and contusions. I must have been dreaming something like that, I guess — because I woke up thinking it. A majestic, buoyant moose — but you know, with those big heads you can’t even really turn around to lick or even see any of the blood."
 
A Boy Needs a Friend (2015, from The Genital is Superfluous: Final Thoughts, Series Four)
Steve Reinke ostensibly turns to the subjects of friendship and intimacy in A Boy Needs A Friend, in particular investigating the notion of queer Nietzschean friendship. Using his signature dry voice-over monologue to tie together an eclectic array of disparate images, ranging from found footage collages to digital animation and cell phone video, Reinke sets forth theories about the identity of Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates, needlepoint doodles, the upsides of owning both U.S and Canadian citizenship, and the ability of corpses to have sex. 
 
"The title, A Boy Needs A Friend, is both a pathetic plea and just a fact."  
– Steve Reinke
 
Sundown (2023, from Human Events: Final Thoughts, Series Five)
A video diary from March 2020 to May 2023: years that cover the diarist's museum show in Vienna, Covid, the death of Gordon Lightfoot and his mother, what it means to be a queer Nietzschean and why tattoos are always untimely.
 

PROGRAM THREE: STREAMING ACCESS
Monday, March 26th to Friday, March 29th
 
Rib Gets In the Way (2014, from Final Thoughts, Series Three)
"Steve Reinke has long been lauded for his irreverent, philosophical, and often acerbic works, which typically adopt the form of personal essays to wryly bend and reread wide-ranging topics from pop culture to sex to theories of visual perception and beyond. Reinke’s video included in the 2014 Biennial, Rib Gets in the Way, is narrated in the first person by Reinke, and addresses mortality, the body, the archive, and the embodiment of a life’s work.” -- The Whitney Biennial 

"I trust artists who upset me. I like to feel confused. There is so much I don’t know, and so much to learn. This was my way of mind after watching the fifty-three minutes of Steve Reinke’s video Rib Gets In the Way at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. The important survey of contemporary American art features a record number of Chicago artists, including Reinke, a professor of art at Northwestern University who premiered an epic, unsettling video artwork. It is essentially a nature documentary—human nature, that is. Narrating with the cadence and candor of Carl Sagan, Reinke tours the black market of the soul. Behold, he seems to say, this is how to make art as a prophylaxis against death. I wish my review could solely be about Reinke’s video, for the more I revisit it, the more it wrenches my brain and heart. There is so much art to like in this edition of the Whitney Biennial, a packed exhibition with as many points of entry as there are complicated objects. Reinke’s video exemplifies a type of emotional intelligence demanded by many of the works on display." — Jason Foumberg, New City