Gina Buenfeld-Murley: When I first saw What Weakens The Flesh Is The Flesh Itself, back in 2017, as part of James’ exhibition for the Welsh Pavilion at Venice, I left feeling kind of porous, like the world might seep into me the way a glossy image absorbs the oil from a greasy fingertip. For 40 minutes, the images you’d variously amassed from found footage and photographic archives, both personal and belonging to others, lay bare in an unflinching yet tender way, our shared vulnerability both physically and emotionally. And the proximity of these contacts in the film, or perhaps the sustained, insistent, attention to them, discharged an emotional and psychological content that aroused a wholly embodied response in me, like looking at the bodies on-screen made me acutely aware of my own.  

The limits of bodies and how they interface with others, in moments of violence or intimacy, recur throughout: a goldfinch bathes in the water collecting in the upturned palms of a man’s hands, seeming to surrender in a frenzied ecstasy that this trust between them allows; a computer generated crash-test dummy is repeatedly driven over by a car, a deliberate infliction of damage that still translates as a violence to the site of the body despite its virtual rendering; in a military training scene, a commander orders a group of gun-wielding boys to control themselves, as one loses consciousness, collapsing from exhaustion whilst still brandishing his weapon; a dancing figure in a skeleton suit is a portentous reminder of mortality, the contingency of the flesh, condemned to disappear; and elsewhere naked male bodies are instructed by an off-camera voice, to perform acts and gestures—at turns sexual and aggressive. 

How did this work begin, where did you start from and how did you select the material? 

Steve Reinke and James Richards: The work began with James finding the archive of Albrecht Becker’s self-portraits in Berlin’s Schwules Museum*. He spent some weeks in Wales working through the images, layering them, adding other found image elements, rephotographing them. Then he brought them to Chicago—not long before the Venice deadline—and we worked on the video there. In the end, we didn’t use many of these rephotographed Becker images. (Instead we stuck with a more direct presentation of the material.) Still, the process of reworking the archive, dis- and re-embodying it, marked the video.

Becker—and the show’s deadline—became the point of coagulation for that particular video, but the method/process is something that has been ongoing since our first collaboration, Disambiguation, in 2009. We would meet, in either of our respective home cities, or do short residencies at places like the now-defunct Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York. We’d have fun generating and layering footage and things we had collected or produced along the way. Becker became a point from which to edit and draw on a lot of those ongoing experiments.

In a sense, we don’t select the material we use. We use what we have on hand, what we’ve each collected without considering what use it may be put to in the future. The material selects us, or compels us to select it, to engage with it.

GB: The extended opening sequence builds an image of Albrecht Becker in various states of disclosure: dressed in button-down shirts and cardigans, the model of middle-age propriety, disarmingly ordinary; then unclothed, revealing a terrain of tattoos that map his body, various appendages designed for sexual pleasure, genital piercings and weights, belts, and chains, and a grotesque, tuber-like protuberance around his genitalia. His countenance remains defiantly unchanging across the spectrum of innocuous and explicit posturing—performing these two (or more) characters for the camera, playfully and without shame towards his disfigurement, he displays only pride in the body he lives through and the many ways he has interrogated its capacities and limits, its yearnings and desires, inscribing its surface and altering its form in the process of exploration.
Since these are self-portraits, staged by him, one can assume these photographs, seen collectively, form the image he wanted to world to see: how he wanted to be seen, his awareness of his body as an image. How did you come upon this body of photographs and why did you decide to foreground them in the film with this extended sequence?  

SR | JR: Writer and curator Ashkan Sepahvand started a period of research with James at the archives of the Schwules Museum* in Berlin, as part of the development of his exhibition “Odarodle – An imaginary their story of naturepeoples, 1535-2017”.

The photographs very compellingly create their own world, the Becker-world, which is both private and public, but not confessional and not clinical. They are direct, playful and unapologetic. They are not merely documents of an individual’s exhibitionism and masochism. And they do not “reveal” or “confess” a secret life to what Michel Foucault might call the discourses of power/knowledge. Rather, they create their own world, the Becker-world, which we are invited to enter. The video is an expansion of this Becker-world. The Becker-world and all things that resonate with us when thinking of it.

Our first attempts at putting together the film always assumed Becker would be cut into the other passages that we were generating, acting as a recurring motif or chorus. But in the end, it felt better to give them their own space—for Becker to have his own significant chapter at the start, something resonate into it with our series of chimes, reflections and associations.

GB: The title, What Weakens The Flesh Is The Flesh Itself, seems to speak of self-sabotage, or a violence done to one’s self, as well as to acknowledge that we are the events that occur in the body—its sensations, yearnings, desires and aversions, its erotics, and addictions—all those viscerally driven compulsions that we perform in spite of, or perhaps because of, the damage they might do us. Whilst the body might be set against the soul as the finite rather than eternal expression of our beings, this film, and its title, seems to argue there is nothing trivial or superficial about what happens in these bodies through the course of a life—that we are our pain, our longing, our pleasure, our sexuality, our desire, who we love. These forces can’t be avoided, at least not without the price payable for repression, but to surrender to the immanence of the flesh is to know what and who we are. The images of Becker’s body also complicate any hierarchical notion of surface and depth or of body and mind—the two being intrinsically bound. His pursuit of body-modification included paraffin injections to his testicles that caused an irreversible a mastasised growth and ultimately devoured his own penis, as well as countless tattoos, the first of which he gave himself on his penis behind the thinly veiled privacy of his bunk whilst serving in Russia during the Second World War. These forms of self-mutilation inscribed a violence that brought about the emergence of a wounded body, complicating normative notions of pleasure and pain. How did you arrive at this title and what does it suggest about the body and its place in the film? 

SR | JR: Yes, there is only the flesh: no spirit, no mind. And yet the flesh is not just a metonym for the body, but something more. Perhaps the possibilities of an embodiment that can turn in on itself and flow into non-selves. Flesh as a thing both self and non-self. (But the self as a thing that is necessarily flesh.)

GB: In other works, you’ve incorporated images that sit on or somehow corrupt the surface of the body as a threshold between inside and out—organs and orifices (eyes, anuses, mouths) and lesions, bullet wounds or sores that break down the surface into an entropic, or dystopian terrain. Do you think of the body as having a horizon between itself and its world, and if so, how and where is that located?  

SR | JR: That is an interesting way to put it: the body having a horizon between itself and its world. Maybe this is a fine definition of the self, or even of subjectivity. We could state it this way: the subject is the horizon between the body and world (or its world).

We’re reminded of Jakob von Uexküll’s ideas from early in the last century about animals and their Umwelt: their environment, their bubble, how the world appears to each organism as a subjective appearance.

GB: Throughout the film the notion of a doubling appears again and again: the apparition of Becker’s figure is multiplied with collage and multiple exposures; a young boy contemplating his reflection, smiling, knowing yet still innocent; and a spoken account describing a photo of a child, a boy, that’s transferred to the skin of a man, like a tattoo or decal, identical but in reverse. Elsewhere, a caption reads “The mirror is an abject doubling”. What is at stake in that statement, and in the duplications of figures throughout the work?  

SR | JR: There is what he actually did to his body, and the humour with which he portrayed himself amidst this mass of dildoes and piercings, tattoos and injections. One of the really remarkable things about his oeuvre is the way he took the medium of photography and used it as a way to extend what he was doing to his body.

He multiplies himself with collage and double exposure and embellishes his real-life tattoos and piercings with drawing and scratching into the photographic surface. The modified print becomes an extension of the modified body. Masturbation refracted through the lens; cutting becomes an orgy with himself: auto-orgy (only certain types of reproduction allowed).

The film is a series of mise-en-abymes endlessly reflecting, echoing, looking back and finding nothing, only the abys in which one discovers not only emptiness but the self looking back. This is the abject doubling: looking into the abyss (or the endlessly ungrounded mise-en-abyme) and finding—not exactly Nietzsche’s abyss returning the gaze—but you: your self, doubled and abject.

GB: You’ve worked as collaborators for a decade I believe, and earlier this year made a new work together—When We Were Monsters—that we showed at Camden Art Centre as part of “The Botanical Mind”. You were working from different continents, sending material back and forth for one another to respond to, building-up the composition gradually like an exquisite corpse of sorts. How does this process works, how does the form emerge from the material? 

SR | JR: For this one we were mostly in the same place: together at Steve’s place in Chicago, working in his basement studio at different tables, trading material back and forth, shaping it. When we’re apart, it’s basically the same process. For our first collaboration, Disambiguation, we mailed each other files burned on DVD. It seems a different world! That was a long time ago. Now we post things online, which is much faster. The cloud is full of our bits.

Form emerges in two ways (both of which might sound a bit banal). We work to get a particular sequence or 90 second chunk in shape (through audio editing and layering, image editing and processing). And then we work to sequence, or orchestrate, the chunks into a coherently flowing composition (which, of course, involves going back and reshaping the individual chunks). We just go back and forth. Steve thinks of it as “combing” the material, detangling it slowly (although we often work quite fast).

The most recent film we made—When We Were Monsters—had the most drafts (also banal) and for a while seemed like it was going to become two separate films. But they suddenly merged.

Form emerges through reaction. Sometimes quickly cutting into a sequence, seeing what happens, what it is that’s been made happen.

GB: Whilst the sensibility of your work is in many ways non-linguistic—opening-up image and sound to convey meaning in an immediate, non-linear way with mood, atmosphere and affect—language still plays an important role and appears as text throughout the film. Steve, I know your work is really based in writing and you use aphorisms and short phrases in your silkscreen works and text images. What function does language play in this work and what sources do you draw from?

SR | JR: One of the reasons Steve likes collaborating with Jim is that these works have a completely different relationship to writing than his usual monologue-based practice. The language in this film is dispersed in various ways. There isn’t a particular narrator, but a set of speakers. And the logic of arranging the bits of language is usually more musical than discursive (that is, narrative, argument and description are secondary or absent). 

Jim comes up with some of the texts, Steve others. “Come up” rather than “write” because we often start with a particular found text—in this film the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Hervé Guibert are two of the sources—and then rewrite it.

One of the reasons Jim likes collaborating with Steve is that he gets to explore his shy relationship to writing. It’s a channelling and poaching of things he’s been reading in the meantime. 

We have developed his tradition of working with artist friends as voiceover for the work. After massaging and collaging the texts, we then discuss friends to invite to read for us. Dani ReStack, Elijah Burgher, John Neff: each bring their own atmosphere and feeling to the scripts.

GB: James—you appear in this film, in a sequence of archival images from your adolescence. And Steve, you’ve appeared in your work before as well. How do you situate yourselves, the personal and autobiographical, the private and particular, in the context of the archive in general and what it stands for—as it might be understood as a testament to reality, albeit a wholesale, normative measure of what can at best be a limited shorthand for the world as we live it?

SR | JR: We play all the roles. Or, there are no roles, no subjectivity. Or an exploded, dispersed subjectivity. One with no objects, only flows and potentials. Bursting the bubble of the Umwelt only to find another bubble, intersecting bubbles, bubbles expanding and contracting.