REVIEW// Lyra Hill’s “Moon Moods” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Known in the zine and comics community for her “Brain Frame” series that in recent months completed its performance-touring life-cycle, here Lyra Hill competently and ardently shifts to museum audience. Competently, and with a notable (and, hopefully, sustainable) depth of heart, Hill was confident and competent in screaming, seemingly in a rage at points throughout the performance, berating the audience for having felt special for holding onto any specific trauma: “Did you get your heart broken?” she cries at one point, not knowing I’m the only one who has raised my hand since I’m sitting in the front row. “There’s one brave man!” she shouts, points at me and moves on without a beat to the next on her list of sufferers: “Who’s had a heart attack?” and on and on in a list of the pains of day-to-day struggles for survival. Hill, in this way, presented a despotic persona likely intended to embody the basic, human struggles of her audience member’s life struggles, though it was shocking and unsettling to embrace in its embodiment the essential problem of human misery Hill was attempting to free her persona to contextualize: heartlessness. She began the ceremony, intended to stage a ceremonial cleansing ahead of the Winter season, by carrying what she described as a “wishing well” (a broad aluminum bowl) which audience members, without context, had been invited to write private wishes onto, and then lay their written expressions into the water. After transporting the bowl to the stage, she washed her feet, head and neck from, and gave her opening statement still standing in it.
Her face, painted with a green moon-circle, made the whites of her eyes pop, bared as she raged into her microphone, intense feelings of someone openly and, at moments, with savage, bare ferocity demanding the audience recognize the sad, incomplete desire for the primacy of intimate emotion over everything else. Empathy and its lack, of course, was the implied context of this communal Winter-welcoming ritual, defined by whether or not audience-members chose to recognize and identify with the pain that defines the survival of all bodies, celestial and otherwise.
The metaphor lent itself at times almost too-readily to the somewhat ever-present scarred lunar surface, writ large in projection behind Hill’s voice-modding moments, and throughout, wavering from and toward an expectation of some resolve of feeling, it came to seem, was the central motif of the performance. Let’s pray, as this “seasonal ritual” asks us as its audience, to tolerate how kindness may, in necessary rare instances, prevail against the background in cruelty the human species has shown itself with so much growing global intensity in these previous months of war, civil unrest, and personal hardships.
If anything, the moon could, this performance suggests, stand as a symbol of respect for the wish to somehow escape from the cruelties of these cruelest days of the year, mostly lightless, cold, isolating, filled with failed wishes, despair, and unceasing loneliness.
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Lyra Hill, “Moon Moods” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Dec. 1, 2015. 220 E. Chicago Ave., Chicago IL, 60611.
