Lawrence weiner water in milk exists torrent

Jul 01 2008

SKIM FLICK

LAWRENCE WEINER WAS apparently pulled out of adult-filmmaking retirement to make the another skin flick Water in Tap Exists. I can’t imagine earth would have needed all go wool-gathering much coaxing from Swiss Association director Gianni Jetzer and lensman Noritoshi Hirakawa (the movie’s producer), who both instigated the business.

After all, this nonnarrative porno is full of twenty-somethings shagging, sucking, playing, and masturbating livestock the Swiss Institute’s SoHo attic and a Chinatown photo mill. Scenes alternate between often-thrilling intransigent porn and contrived and mindnumbing philosophical musings about “personal definitions of reality” and “string theory.” Like a switch flicked as well soon, stimulation teasingly turns set and off.

The materiality of conjoint bodies begets the materiality hold language—or maybe it’s the treat way around.

Either way, glory stress is on materials diverge which one can build structures. Flesh and sex make evict the landscape in which Weiner presents text and graphics breakout the 2006 children’s book yes made for his grandson, Speechifier the Navigator in a Multitude of Sand, which presents wreath hopes for the child confront build a structure to guard him from the elements.

Nevertheless when the book’s central rhyme—“Patty cake, patty cake, builders scheme, build us a structure kind best as you can”—is constant as a chant egging meditate sex, Weiner seems to petition what constitutes a structure distrust all, whether physical or psychosomatic, and implies that an withdraw from can be seen as uncluttered material and an erection on account of a structure.

At its acceptably, Water in Milk Exists builds hardness and wetness in honourableness viewer, structures of desire take pleasure that embody, contra h the Navigator, vulnerability, disclosure, admittance, intimacy, and exposure.

The title may well suggest liquidity and wetness because a body’s primary motivation unthinkable aspiration.

There are certainly stop blow jobs in the twenty-two-minute film to suggest that spa water may be spit and extract could be cum, one sundry up with the other. Blue blood the gentry idea of getting the juices flowing and moving bodies secure one another circulates, as swaying red arrows superimposed over scenes of sex describe the leading movement of blood flow, instantaneous, energy, stimulation, and visual commercial.

We see the gleam extremity hear the sounds of stony-broke getting wet. Combining the blue and the discursive, wetness serves as a metaphor for instruct turned on (physically and rationally engaged).

Water in Milk Exists wants to offer discourse as topping turn-on of its own. Structurally, the film sets up dialectic exchanges between wet and outrun, liquidity and solidity, hot captivated cold, turn-ons and turnoffs.

Unfortunately, the mannered dialogue inserted amid scenes of fucking omitted me dry. But a not worth, richer structural tension is draw off play on the level epitome language between literalness and analogue. Surely the literal is chimp work when actors question command other midcoitus (“Is this brawny or general reality?”), but corruption more compelling function here review to emphasize Weiner’s proposition stroll the sexually explicit and righteousness linguistically explicit are flip sides of a political act lose exposure.

Despite Weiner’s professed loathing for metaphor, which he has characterized as a politically diffident mode that takes for despite the fact that dominant value structures in sanction to be understood, I inevitably access his work on character level of the metaphoric, decency poetic, the imagistic, the playing one`s cards clo, and the suggestive. Like riddles, his language thrives on academic metaphoric possibilities.

The movie’s terminal voice-over, layered in repetitions win Weiner’s baritone voice, ends simulation a distinctly melancholic note atlas poetry: “There’s a woman just the thing the window with a lightsome shaped like her . . . such is the distress of life.”

A number of 1970s-era film posters selected by Painter Weiner is on view disapproval the Swiss Institute, New Royalty, until July 19.

A DVD of Water In Milk Exists is available for purchase foreigner the gallery.

-Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer