This is Just a Fuck Film: Noritoshi Hirakawa Polemicizes an Orgy

by David Frazier

This clip was edited from a talk on Sep. 12 by Noritoshi Hirakawa, a Japanese, New York-based artist and producer of a controversial art-porn video called "Water in Milk Exists." You will see that some in the audience at this screening in a Taipei art gallery were ready to take issue with the video. Among them was Manray Hsu, an independent curator and critic who served as co-curator of the 2008 Taipei Biennial and 2006 Liverpool Biennial. Before watching the clip, that may be all you really need to know. After seeing it though, you'll probably be interested in the following, which offers a little more background on the critical fireworks as well as - and this is the reason I'm asking you to hold off - my own strong opinion on the video which I'm airing here for the first time.

As for the basics, "Water in Milk Exists" is a 22-minute work of video art by Lawrence Weiner, who at the age of 67 is considered a legendary New York conceptual artist who first made his name showing in the Leo Castelli Gallery alongside the likes of Andy Warhol. I think it's fair to say that he's also an aging hippie. Hirakawa, who was instrumental as the video's producer, is of a younger generation and known for photos which blur the lines between art and hentai porn genres like upskirts and voyeurism.

As to the work itself, here's how Art Forum described it: "This nonnarrative porn is full of twenty-somethings fucking, sucking, playing, and masturbating in the Swiss Institute’s SoHo loft and a Chinatown photo studio. Scenes alternate between often-thrilling hardcore porn and contrived and tedious philosophical musings about 'personal definitions of reality' and 'string theory.' Like a switch flicked too soon, stimulation teasingly turns on and off." (Read the entire review.)

As one would expect, Art Forum is being generous. Instead of value judgments, we get pseudo-theory. Now I realize most reading this post haven't seen the film - there's way too many blowjobs for it to ever go on YouTube, and like Noritoshi says, it's not the monkey-spanking material ( OGC ) of porn sites. And even if it did go online, it'd probably be labeled something like "Phenomenological Group Orgy" (2.5 stars) and be impossible to find.

But evaluating works like "Water..." is important, and there are very important things people are not saying about it. In other words, there is an 800-pound gorilla in the living room, and it has to do with this: Knowning what the creators are only too happy to explain to us about this work -- that all of the orgy participants in fact work in galleries or other art institutions -- it's hard not to see "Water..." as an unintentional metaphor for the New York art world. The filming is bad, the sound is bad, and the concepts are hopelessly confused. What we are left with is a bunch of people in a white room fucking each other and parroting bad philosophy. Yes, there were bigger ideas there, but whether "Water..." is measured as video art or film, the creators didn't have the skill to bring them across. So what you get if you bother to watch nothing more than a big circle jerk, both literally and intellectually. One can only suppose that this is what the entire New York art scene was doing before the art market crashed last winter. Boo hoo. Fuck me harder.

Hirakwa's points from the Q&A clip may still be valid, but I think he can really only defend this idea of "freedom to experience one's pleasure in public" through his photographs, where he has a very delicate touch. For the moment, I'll let the photos speak for themselves. Here are a few examples:


"D-T, Nakano" from the series "Dreams of Tokyo" (1991)


"The Reason of Life - Iris"(1997)


"The Reason of Life - Iris"(1997)