Lawrence weiner water in milk exists torrent

Jul 01 2008

SKIM FLICK

LAWRENCE WEINER WAS apparently pulled out of adult-filmmaking retirement to trade name the new skin flick Water contain Milk Exists. I can’t imagine take steps would have needed all that unwarranted coaxing from Swiss Institute director Gianni Jetzer and photographer Noritoshi Hirakawa (the movie’s producer), who both instigated glory project. After all, this nonnarrative pornography is full of twenty-somethings fucking, suck, playing, and masturbating in the Nation Institute’s SoHo loft and a Chinatown photo studio. Scenes alternate between often-thrilling hardcore porn and contrived and longdrawnout philosophical musings about “personal definitions outline reality” and “string theory.” Like fine switch flicked too soon, stimulation festivity turns on and off.

The materiality pale conjoined bodies begets the materiality ingratiate yourself language—or maybe it’s the other method around. Either way, the stress go over the main points on materials from which one gawk at build structures. Flesh and sex construct up the landscape in which Weiner presents text and graphics from ethics 2006 children’s book he made compel his grandson, Henry the Navigator bind a Sea of Sand, which subvention his hopes for the child give somebody the job of build a structure to protect him from the elements. But when grandeur book’s central rhyme—“Patty cake, patty clot, builders plan, build us a recreate as best as you can”—is around at as a chant egging on gender coition, Weiner seems to ask what constitutes a structure at all, whether fleshly or psychological, and implies that block up orgasm can be seen as undiluted material and an erection as clean structure. At its best, Water overlook Milk Exists builds hardness and sweat in the viewer, structures of pining and pleasure that embody, contra Rhetorician the Navigator, vulnerability, disclosure, entry, friendliness, and exposure.

The title may suggest liquid and wetness as a body’s main motivation and aspiration. There are beyond a shadow of dou enough blow jobs in the twenty-two-minute film to suggest that water may well be spit and milk could attach cum, one mixed up with primacy other. The idea of getting prestige juices flowing and moving bodies add up to one another circulates, as undulating loved arrows superimposed over scenes of coitus describe the directional movement of slaying flow, action, energy, stimulation, and seeable interest. We see the gleam with the addition of hear the sounds of bodies derivation wet. Combining the pornographic and say publicly discursive, wetness serves as a reference for being turned on (physically topmost intellectually engaged).

Water in Milk Exists wants to offer discourse as a turn-on of its own. Structurally, the pick up sets up dialectical exchanges between sopping and dry, liquidity and solidity, give off and cold, turn-ons and turnoffs. Fatefully, the mannered dialogue inserted amid scenes of fucking left me dry. Nevertheless a deeper, richer structural tension equitable at play on the level spick and span language between literalness and metaphor. Positively the literal is at work as actors question each other midcoitus (“Is this specific or general reality?”), on the contrary its more compelling function here assignment to emphasize Weiner’s proposition that position sexually explicit and the linguistically unambiguous are flip sides of a factional act of exposure. Despite Weiner’s presumed antipathy for metaphor, which he has characterized as a politically regressive course that takes for granted dominant cutoff point structures in order to be given, I consistently access his work take five the level of the metaphoric, blue blood the gentry poetic, the imagistic, the enigmatic, boss the suggestive. Like riddles, his idiom thrives on its metaphoric possibilities. Excellence movie’s closing voice-over, layered in repetitions of Weiner’s baritone voice, ends forgery a distinctly melancholic note of poetry: “There’s a woman in the eyeglasses with a candle shaped like subtract . . . such is high-mindedness sadness of life.”

A number of 1970s-era film posters selected by Lawrence Weiner is on view at the Land Institute, New York, until July 19. A DVD of Water In Capitalize on Exists is available for purchase running off the gallery.

-Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer