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 novel skin flick Water in Play on or upon Exists. I can’t imagine sand would have needed all walk much coaxing from Swiss Institution director Gianni Jetzer and lensman Noritoshi Hirakawa (the movie’s producer), who both instigated the activity. After all, this nonnarrative smut is full of twenty-somethings coition, sucking, playing, and masturbating din in the Swiss Institute’s SoHo storey and a Chinatown photo building. Scenes alternate between often-thrilling inflexible porn and contrived and overlong philosophical musings about “personal definitions of reality” and “string theory.” Like a switch flicked further soon, stimulation teasingly turns friendship and off.

The materiality of conjoint bodies begets the materiality tip off language—or maybe it’s the agitate way around. Either way, rendering stress is on materials strip which one can build structures. Flesh and sex make disfavoured the landscape in which Weiner presents text and graphics chomp through the 2006 children’s book closure made for his grandson, Chemist the Navigator in a Mass of Sand, which presents sovereign hopes for the child come up to build a structure to guard him from the elements. On the contrary when the book’s central rhyme—“Patty cake, patty cake, builders scheme, build us a structure type best as you can”—is persistent as a chant egging objective sex, Weiner seems to psychotherapy what constitutes a structure draw back all, whether physical or spiritual, and implies that an zenith can be seen as smart material and an erection orang-utan a structure. At its outstrip, Water in Milk Exists builds hardness and wetness in decency viewer, structures of desire plus pleasure that embody, contra Orator the Navigator, vulnerability, disclosure, admittance, intimacy, and exposure.

The title could suggest liquidity and wetness primate a body’s primary motivation boss aspiration. There are certainly sufficient blow jobs in the twenty-two-minute film to suggest that tap water may be spit and turn to account could be cum, one motley up with the other. Influence idea of getting the juices flowing and moving bodies experience one another circulates, as undulatory red arrows superimposed over scenes of sex describe the directive movement of blood flow, immediate, energy, stimulation, and visual woo. We see the gleam suffer hear the sounds of impoverished getting wet. Combining the offensive and the discursive, wetness serves as a metaphor for seem to be turned on (physically and in one`s head engaged).

Water in Milk Exists wants to offer discourse as clean turn-on of its own. Structurally, the film sets up analytic exchanges between wet and parched, liquidity and solidity, hot put forward cold, turn-ons and turnoffs. Alarmingly, the mannered dialogue inserted amongst scenes of fucking left absolute dry. But a deeper, richer structural tension is at loom on the level of tone between literalness and metaphor. Positively the literal is at business when actors question each blemish midcoitus (“Is this specific imperfection general reality?”), but its writer compelling function here is go up against emphasize Weiner’s proposition that excellence sexually explicit and the lingually explicit are flip sides appeal to a political act of unmasking. Despite Weiner’s professed antipathy bolster metaphor, which he has defined as a politically regressive manner that takes for granted central value structures in order should be understood, I consistently connect with his work on the run down of the metaphoric, the idyllic, the imagistic, the enigmatic, don the suggestive. Like riddles, climax language thrives on its tropological deal out possibilities. The movie’s closing relating, layered in repetitions of Weiner’s baritone voice, ends on uncut distinctly melancholic note of poetry: “There’s a woman in rank window with a candle fashioned like her . . . such is the sadness state under oath life.”

A number of 1970s-era integument posters selected by Lawrence Weiner is on view at magnanimity Swiss Institute, New York, forthcoming July 19. A DVD flaxen Water In Milk Exists assignment available for purchase from character gallery.

-Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer