127-B Prince Street
New York, NY 10012
Thursday, April 30 | 8:30PM
Norman Animal: Steve Reinke + Stephanie Barber
Leslie Lohman Prince St. Project Space
127-B Prince Street
New York, NY 10012
Stephanie Barber, Metronome, 16mm, 15min., 1998
Steve Reinke, Rib Gets In The Way, HD video, 52min., 2014
“Nietzsche is the only fun, reasonable way out of any moral or political quagmire.”
In Steve Reinke’s newest long-form video, Rib Gets in the Way, the irreverent artist and essayist ruminates upon mortality, creative (and other) impulses, PrEP and Nietzsche. Assembling a free-form series of vignettes, the final and longest section of the video presents an animated children’s adaptation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), with colorful creatures animated with frequent collaborator, Jessie Mott.
Of her 1998 short, Stephanie Barber notes, “Metronome is both the most straightforward, as well as the most difficult of my films. it is very dear to my heart. the radio play soundtrack is off-set by the intractable image "spaces." the former seems to balance precariously between kitsch and true heartrending emotion and the latter is referencing the asceticism of seventies minimalism (in experimental film) with the impenetrable intellectualism becoming increasingly moving as the film progresses. the marriage of these two elements is an odd tension, the tale of the play, the threat of limb extraction, asks the necessity of the whole and what the elements are which compose complete."
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).
Stephanie Barber is an American writer and artist. She has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media. Many of her videos are concerned with the content, musicality and experiential qualities of language. They ferry viewers through philosophical inquiry with the unexpected oars of play, emotionalism, story, and humor.
Barber’s films and videos have has been screened nationally and internationally in solo and group shows at MoMA, NY, The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for Art, OH, among other galleries, museums and festivals. Her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank and her films can be found at Canyon Cinema and Fandor.com. Her essays, stories and poems have been published in books, magazines and online journals. DAREDEVILS, her first feature, was released in 2013.