signs and symbols

Michelle Handelman: DELIRIUM
PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown)

December 1, 2023 – January 20, 2024    

Opening Reception:
December 1, 2023
6:00 - 8:00pm

signs and symbols is pleased to present DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown), the latest work of visual artist, filmmaker, and writer Michelle Handelman, featuring the iconic No-Wave performer and writer Lydia Lunch alongside choreography by the New York performance duo FlucT.

DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) is the first chapter in Handelman’s epic four-part moving image installation DELIRIUM, an inquiry into the making and unmaking of meaning within hierarchical systems of desire and control. It envisages altered states of consciousness as means of resisting capitalist ideals of production, transfiguring the body and interrogating desire through a visceral, cinematic framework that refuses the production of meaning. DELIRIUM in its entirety will unfold over the upcoming years in four distinct vignettes — PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown), PART TWO: EUPHORIA (The Orgy), PART THREE: CONTROL (The Come Down), PART FOUR: SLEEP (The Release). In each section Handelman directs a central performer whose own work excavates the dark and uncomfortable spaces of political disintegration and circuits of desire through confrontational aesthetics.

“I CRAVE SUBMERGENCE, NOT RELEASE.”  
—Lydia Lunch in DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown)

With this first chapter, DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown), Handelman gives us a meditation on death, violence, and intimacy, as filtered through the destabilizing effects of desire. Featuring downtown No-Wave iconoclast Lydia Lunch and choreography by New York performance duo FLUCT, the exhibition includes multiple projections, low sonic frequencies, custom lighting, and a dark ambient score.

Handelman’s casting of Lunch, widely known for her confrontational spoken word performances and her seminal band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, builds upon their shared experience of using sound and cinema as transformative vehicles for deeply embodied states of rage and pain. Shot on a black stage among smoke and strobing lights, Lunch delivers a monologue written by Handelman, which was inspired by philosophical writings that they shared with one another over the past year — writings on the void, dark matter, and the insatiable death drive.

Unexpectedly, Handelman’s directorial take on Lunch’s evocative voice sees it reduced to prelingual sound — to breath, moans, and grunts. At times, Handelman’s editing stretches and slows Lunch’s voice even to the point of erasure, using Lunch’s voice as a tool with which to probe the limits of the word, alienating the intellect from the body to question the authority granted to language itself.

As Lunch’s voice is reduced to breath, our attention is drawn to the contracting and expanding of the body, the sounds it makes to escape the knowable. Handelman’s monologue, through Lunch’s body, questions means of control and power, from lives within and without its grasp.

Choreographic interludes directed by New York-based performance duo FlucT appear on screen as bodily agents working with and against Lunch’s performance. Founded in 2010 by Sigrid Lauren and Monica Mirabile, FlucT is known for its highly ecstatic, even erratic, movements employing glitches and breaks to question the psychological stakes of American pop culture.

DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) brings FlucT back together to direct a cast of six dancers that includes Lauren and Mirabile themselves. Each dancer brings an indelibly specific and interdisciplinary background — as professional dancers, vocalists, and/or underground performance artists. FlucT assembles this group in various tableaus displaying bodies in alternating states of pleasure, pain, grief, and release. Through Handelman’s lens, these become visceral cinematic structures of collective intimacy and decay. Contracting and expanding in unpredictable and sometimes violent ways, these dancers become an intersubjective mesh of embodied grief and delirious psychic states.

“In much of my previous work there are these moments of explosive imagery that step outside the narrative, functioning as a break, a suspension of linear time within a larger narrative. For DELIRIUM I wanted to make something that was all explosions. Rather than taking you outside the narrative, this structure keeps you inside a constant state of desire, a groundless unfolding that never finds its release, the anti-climax that cinema does so well.”
—Michelle Handelman

DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) is an ambitious new project that positions transgression as a necessary state of knowing and unknowing within the brutalizing context of necropolitical violence and collective grief. Working against control, Handelman offers the ungovernable realm of desire over, and against, attainment and closure. Envisaging a visceral transition from one state to another, while pushing against, and pointing out the limits of the body, of consciousness itself.

“The voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.”
—Roland Barthes, 1977

DELIRIUM is made with support from Creative Capital.

*Accessibility Notice: Written copies of the monologue performed by Lydia Lunch will be available. Please note that the exhibition contains flashing lights, and signs and symbols is located above a flight of 5 stoop steps. The steps have handrails, but the building is not equipped with an elevator or wheelchair lift. We can provide a ramp by advance request.

michelle handelman is a visual artist/filmmaker/writer who makes hypnotic moving image installations that push against the boundaries of gender, race and sexuality. Coming up through the years of the AIDS crisis and Culture Wars, Handelman has built a body of work that confronts the things we collectively fear and deny: sex, death, chaos. Handelman is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee and a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Her work has been shown widely in such venues as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Pompidou Centre, Paris; ICA, London; Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum; PERFORMA, New York; 53 Art Museum, Guangzhou; PARTICIPANT, INC, New York; Lincoln Center, New York; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York; REDCAT, Los Angeles; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin. Recent projects include HUSTLERS & EMPIRES, a commission with SFMOMA (2018); IRMA VEP, THE LAST BREATH, featuring Zackary Drucker (TRANSPARENT) and Flawless Sabrina (THE QUEEN); and BEWARE THE LILY LAW, a moving image installation on transgender inmates featured in the exhibition Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System, curated by Risa Puleo, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2019). Her award-winning film BLOODSISTERS: LEATHER, DYKES AND SADOMASOCHISM (1995) takes an in-depth look at the San Francisco leatherdyke scene during the mid-90s and is recognized as a landmark of queer history.