Inside a Constant State of Desire: Michelle Handelman’s “DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown)” at signs and symbols

Lydia Lunch has always had a voice able to shake audiences to their core. What was once a grating piercing howl in Teenage Jesus and the Jerks has roughened into a gravel-strewn growl that can be sultry and animalistic in equal measure. In November, I saw Lunch perform at TV Eye in the final show of Retrovirus, her band that excavates her greatest sonic assaults from 8 Eyed Spy to her solo albums to, my favorite, the short-lived project with members of The Birthday Party, Honeymoon in Red (an album whose absence on streaming platforms I continually grieve). While the Retrovirus interpretation of Honeymoon in Red’s “Still Burning,” originally sung by Rowland Howard, was as spellbinding as it was deafening, what remains clearest in my memory from that show is Lunch’s banter between songs, threatening to climb in our homes before 13.13’s “Lock Your Door” and referencing women’s fixation on serial killers and true crime (“Everyone wants to date a serial killer until they get one”). It was not so much what she said but how she said it, diving into the guttural end of her register to emphasize a point, almost erasing her voice completely for a breathy snarl. Otherworldly, monstrous even—and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.

It’s this quality of Lunch’s voice that Michelle Handelman harnesses and brings to the dually haunting and sensuous fore in her current smoke, neon, and strobe light-filled black-and-white three-channel video installation DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) at signs and symbols. The first part of an ambitious four-part project DELIRIUM (with the other enticingly named parts, PART TWO: EUPHORIA (The Orgy), PART THREE: CONTROL (The Come Down), and PART FOUR: SLEEP (The Release), forthcoming), DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) stars Lunch as the installation’s central witchy figure. Appearing after a billowing thick dusty cloud like the stem of a nuclear blast’s mushroom cloud (Lunch would emerge post-nuclear annihilation), she is dressed in a prickly spiked collar and elegantly frightening long-nailed claw-like gloves, reminiscent of those Cardi B has worn on the red carpet. As she mesmerizingly caresses, massages, and stretches an unidentifiable black oozing substance between her gloved fingers like an ASMR slime video, her image sometimes fracturing and colliding into an uncanny Rorschach test-like abstraction, Lunch recites a monologue penned by Handelman based on writings shared between the two. Featuring a few recognizable Lydia-isms such as “The war is never over,” which is also the title of Beth B’s excellent documentary on Lunch, the monologue—a poem really, I’d argue—traces the entanglement of violence and desire. “In this country, violence and hatred/Are a particular form of intimacy/A fetish,” Lunch says. And later: “Maybe violence is a form of rebirth/And blood is just memory without language.”

Michelle Handelman, DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown), 2023-2025, 3-channel, 4K video, 2-minute excerpt. © Michelle Handelman; Courtesy of the artist.

Like my experience at the Retrovirus show, Handelman communicates this death drive intersection even further in DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) by honing in on Lunch’s nonverbal utterances. With an installation as immersive sonically as it is visually, the viewer feels enwrapped by Lunch’s crackling throaty hums, repeatedly delivered between rasping breaths, both predatory and alluring. At one point in the around seventeen-minute looped installation, all three screens begin to flash as long breaths quicken into panicked pants while a buzzing soundscape increases its pitch and ferocity. Is Lunch asphyxiating behind the gigantic sheet of plastic as seen in the video? Or is this disembodied breath fleeing from certain bloody murder like in a horror film? Or is it the tense climax to orgasm? The transition from huffing hyperventilation to whining moans answers that question.

But heavy breathing is not the only part of DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) that lingers in that space between terror and turned-on. Lunch is joined, often but not always in the two adjacent screens, by a compellingly feverish group of performers, choreographed by New York performance duo FlucT. Featuring the FlucT founders themselves, Sigrid Lauren and Monica Mirabile, along with four others (Aeirrinn Ricks, Kate Williams, Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu, and Madison Wada), the performers act as a silent physical chorus to Lunch’s solo figure like a Macbethian gaggle of co-witches, decked in cut-out costumes resembling dystopian fetish gear with exaggerated beguiling metallic streamer eyelashes. Apart from a few instances in which a singular dancer appears, at times making frantic neck-grasping choking movements (again, danger and desire), the performers typically exist in multiples as if put in a collective trance. They press up against a pane of glass, roll across the three screens, and captivatingly flail to the surging intensity of sound. Their facial expressions are as much a part of the choreography as their bodily movements—wide eyes that roll back in, appropriately, delirium or gawk in amplified awe at strings of the same nocturnal emission slime dripping between Lunch’s gloved fingers and distorted lips that rub and smear against glass. At one point, the performers separate into sitting circles of threes with their backs pressed together. In tandem, they all shoot forward with their mouths agape. Handelman focuses on Mirabile’s face. Without corresponding sound, this expression treads the line between silent screaming and gasping in ecstasy.

Mining the overlap between violence and desire is not new territory for Handelman as seen in, for example, all the car wreck inferno imagery in her 2018 video installation Hustlers & Empires. Nor is it new for Lunch either. Like Handelman’s previous video installations, whether the presence of Shannon Funchess, John Kelly, and Viva Ruiz in Hustlers & Empires or the intergenerational pairing of Flawless Sabrina and Zackary Drucker in Irma Vep, The Last Breath, the casting choice of Lunch is symbolic. For many of us, Lydia Lunch is yowling abrasive transgression personified, a body—and voice—that burst through Lower Manhattan stages and underground cinema screens in a whirlwind of violence, fucking, and grim diagnoses of our capitalistic patriarchal society. In fact, Lunch’s monologue recitation in Handelman’s installation deliberately places itself in a lineage of Lunch’s prior cinematic rants, including The Gun Is Loaded and Beth B’s Thanatopsis (“Men are so afraid to die that they have to kill everyone in sight”).

Despite the kindred obsessions in both of their previous works, DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) doesn’t retread old territory. There is an oblique and even, with all the flashing neon lights creating the illusion of a forward-moving trajectory, abstract quality to the video that is distinct from Handelman’s other installations, which typically have more of a narrative interspersed with pockets of impressionistic interludes. Though its themes are not hard to suss out, DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) contains a hefty and enigmatic dose of mystery. And it’s not just the occasional presence of a shadowy figure wearing a bejeweled mask like the cover of Lingua Ignota’s album SINNER GET READY, swishing around in a costume of metallic plastic foil streamers. Beyond the action happening on screen, some of the mystery derives from questions surrounding exactly where this action is happening. Most of the video installation takes place in an inky abyss, sometimes with a stage. Beyond the bounds of the video itself, the viewer is also drawn into this void by the installation in the gallery, which features an enveloping sound and several precisely placed purple neon lights. One hangs directly above and behind the bench for viewers. While sitting, I was acutely aware of its presence behind me, glowing, warm, and quite possibly dangerous.

So, exactly where the hell (or in hell) are we? Is this death, as the title of the installation indicates? Is it a space beyond death in which to grieve, well, everything—not only those who have died but, as Lunch says, “that which has died” in the ongoing necro-capitalist disaster we currently live in? It’s impossible to pin down decisively.

Instead, the installation leaves open the potential for viewers’ own associations. For instance, this out-of-time non-space reminds me of the chilling pitch-dark liquid void in which Scarlett Johansson’s gorgeous alien creature (another witchy protagonist), credited simply as “The Female,” drags gullibly horny men after luring them into her van in Jonathan Glazer’s delightfully unsettling 2013 film Under the Skin. It’s not just the constant presence of the oily dark matter gunk with which multiple figures play. The music in DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) at times recalls the continuous slow and heavy, almost dripping, minimalistic beat and screeching whine of Mica Levi’s memorable score for Glazer’s film. Like Handelman’s installation, The Female’s void also offers, as Lunch evokes, submergence, absence, and erasure as the men crumple like paper into its endless depths.

Yet whereas The Female’s male victims are rendered helpless flaccid skin sheets after following the trail of her undressing allure to their own fatal submergence, there is, conversely, a kind of transgressive power found within the pull to absence in DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown). This becomes apparent within Lunch’s monologue as here submergence is not forced but craved. It’s perhaps through this submergence, through this death drive self-shattering, through “singing from an erased place in the universe” that new possibilities can form.