Named after Harry Smith's seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, Anthology of American Folk Song re-inscribes the optimistically paranoid mythological landscape of contemporary America. Reinke illustrates this by saying "they had been unable to believe in the existence of terrorists. After all, none of them had discovered any repressed memories of terrorist abuse. They had focused instead on the more immediate and real threat of serial killers, alien abductors and Satanic ritual abusers." Anthology Of American Folk Song is the first in a series called Final Thoughts, an archive of found and original material collected by Reinke. Anthology is permeated by a sense of menace, standing as an oblique, disparate catalogue of small humiliations, traumas and strange, absurd, occasionally beautiful images and songs that queer the mythologies of a culture in crisis.

“A bracing and stern examination of the American psyche, post 9/11, locates those traditional “American values” of faith, hope and charity squarely within the intersecting spheres of intolerance, hate and stupidity. A tour de force by the master of montage.” (Desert, 6th Internationale Video et Art Electronique Montreal, 2004)

 

Anthology of American Folk Song