As Flight or Escape: Ralph Lemon at MoMA PS1

Ralph Lemon has described choreography as “a daily event appropriate to uncontrolled circumstances.” If the traditional role of the choreographer is to determine the conditions in which the performer enters and interacts within the environment, Lemon turns this role on its head; his interest doesn’t lie in determining this action but in seeing what unfolds within the wayward space of narrative indeterminacy.

His survey exhibition Ceremonies Out of the Air, presented at MoMA PS1 and cocurated by Connie Butler and Thomas (T.) Jean Lax opens with Rant (redux) (2020–24), a four-channel video installation of an ongoing series of durational performances combining dance, vocals, text, and sound. Four curved benches form a parenthetical space in the middle of a darkened gallery. The video begins with a pulsing beat, layered under synth tones, building into increasingly complex, syncopated rhythms mixed by artist Kevin Beasley. Lemon and his circle of recurring collaborators are shown entering the space—Dwayne Brown, Paul Hamilton, Lysis (Ley), Mariama Noguera-Devers, Okwui Okpokwasili, Angie Pittman, Samita Sinha, and Darrell Jones. Lemon, geared with a harmonica, begins shouting quotes by Kathy Acker, Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and himself into a microphone, as Okpokwasili and Sinha start to wail and the other dancers move in frenetic, formless, trancelike motions, occasionally syncing up before diverging again. They do so with increasing intensity until their energy is seemingly depleted, but then they start again. Lemon calls this practice “aestheticized excess,” an experiment into what the human body can do when there’s nothing left, where deconstructed, excited movement is pushed to the brink of collapse.

Modes of deconstruction, of spaces, bodies, symbols, and rhythms, appear throughout Lemon’s oeuvre. Some of his most iterative works form the basis of Ceremonies Out of the Air, which features more than sixty pieces made over the past decade. Along with his collaborators, Lemon returns to certain motifs throughout his practice, some of which are deftly embedded within the exhibition. In the gallery next to the Rant Residuum (2020–24)—a room-size installation of props used in different stagings of the performance, Rant (2019–ongoing)—are his series of drawings Untitled (The greatest [Black] art history story ever told. Unfinished) (2015–ongoing). They produce the most consolidated yet visually complex evocation of these motifs. Each drawing comprises colorful vignettes of mostly Black figures and historical events: from Richard Pryor performing live on the Sunset Strip to a picket sign that reads, “Boycott non-union lettuce,” a reference to the 1970 Salad Bowl strike, the largest farmworkers’ strike in US history. Others are more self-referential, like a depiction of Lemon’s torso emblazoned with the words “A FREE SHOW,” mirroring his appearance in Rant (redux) as well as an untitled 2022 photograph that appears elsewhere in the exhibition. Other figures are “blackified,” to borrow Lemon’s term, representing subjects either relevant to or resonating with Black pop culture, from Amy Winehouse and Ziggy Stardust–era David Bowie to a Black version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Within these densely layered drawings, Lemon interlaces personal, familial, and collective narratives on Black life, movement, and migration in order to mediate on the spaces between memories, where recollections fracture.

This blackifying of the canon plays out in other works, including the video James Baldwin Dharma Talk (2004), a projected animation of Baldwin with an intermittent voiceover quoting from his various interviews, juxtaposed with the tongue-in-cheek Fuck Bruce Nauman (2009–19), in which Lemon grapples with his complicated relationship to Nauman’s work within a particular white-male art-historical discourse.

In another gallery, a group of acrylic paintings on paper, Untitled (Rapture weft) (2020–24), visually echo The greatest [Black] art history drawings, but absent discernible figuration. The paintings oscillate between geometric abstractions and illusions of cosmic bodies, weaving together what Lemon refers to as mandalas (spiritual, meditative symbols). This gesture continues across the room in a video that depicts a man weaving a mandala in a tree. The work, Walter Harvesting String (2006), introduces another one of Lemon’s friends and collaborators, Walter Carter. Lemon and Carter met in 2002, when the artist and his daughter were on a research trip in Mississippi that eventually took them to Yazoo City, a small town located just off the Delta. Carter, then a 95-year-old sharecropper, was the oldest living person in the area, and soon after became the central subject of Lemon’s long-running and perhaps most intricate series, Walter Carter Suite (2002–24).

Throughout the 1990s, Lemon embarked on a series of trips to the Deep South, where the artist, like many Black Midwesterners, has roots. His conversations with Carter revealed the complexities of Black southern experiences, as well as a generational rootedness that often keeps Black individuals within this particular economic, sociopolitical, and psychological space. But this condition breeds fugitivity—or, in the words of Fred Moten, “That desire to be free, manifest as flight or escape.” Reckoning with this desire, Carter and Lemon formed a cross-generational, cross-temporal speculative narrative, centered on a Black astronaut and the aftermath of his encounter with a distant time and place.

Ceremonies Out of the Air brings together five video-based chapters from the Walter Carter Suite, installed as projections across three galleries alongside related videos, photographs, drawings, and sculptures. In the first gallery, chapter one, 1856 Cessna Road (2008–9), opens on the astronaut (Carter) dressed in a Mylar spacesuit and white helmet, preparing for his journey. He inspects the terrain and his spaceship, which was crafted from scrap parts found in Carter’s backyard and largely built by Carter’s close friend, Lloyd Williams, who appears in the video. Carter exchanges a long, silent sequence of goodbyes with his wife and son—played by his actual wife, Edna, and son, Warren (also known as Red). We witness him board his ship and take off into a starry cosmos. He lands in a barren cotton field on an unknown planet, at an unknown time.

Later, four Black inhabitants who tend to the land of this place—Sam and Dave (who wear blue T-shirts printed with their names) and their wives Emma and Lorraine—plant a garden in the remnants of the spaceship. They wrap the wreckage around a tree, as seen in chapter two, Garden (2013). We know from Lemon’s documentary-like narration of chapter three, It could be a forest (2013), in the adjacent gallery, that the astronaut is never seen again, coinciding with Carter’s actual passing in 2010. While Garden depicts the burial of the spaceship, It could be a forest shows the effects of a violent storm in the Delta, which uprooted the tree that anchored the spaceship in the soil.

The final chapter, I am the light (Sam and Dave) (2018), references gospel singer Reverend Gary Davis’s song “I Am the Light of This World.” which Lemon has incorporated into his performances before. This chapter sees the return of one of the gardeners (played by Williams)—whom Lemon refers to as the “ghosts of the R&B singing duet” in his voiceover from chapter three—as he constructs his own terrestrial ship using an old swivel chair, various lighting fixtures, and spare parts from his garage. Across the gallery, a prototype of the spaceship that Lloyd made with Walter’s son, Red, hangs from the ceiling, with a floor video projection entitled (Solaris water) (2024), after the fictional planet depicted in the eponymous 1961 sci-fi novel. The coda, Saturnalia (Forest Dance) (2018), follows a group of five people dressed in wigs and animal costumes (portrayed by Carter’s family and friends) through a mournful, slow-motion processional in the forest

These five chapters speak to the nuances of performance. There is, for instance, “performing” for the camera in a (pre)scripted scene. Then there are the slow, methodical, everyday gestures and forms of labor and care that enact performative modes of encounter. The astronaut’s fate is left somewhat open ended—the world he finds is not too dissimilar from the one he left behind, but in his flight, he achieves an “escape from the escape,” as Lax noted on the exhibition’s opening night: boundless freedom. This cyclicality reveals that the contradiction inherent in the notion of departure is its inextricability from the act of return. As expansive as Walter Carter Suite is, it is clear that we, the audience, are seeing only fragments of a longer narrative, which in itself constitutes an eight-year encounter in which the lives of two individuals, their families, their communities, and the generations before and after them overlapped at particular point in time—a parenthetical space—to offer us this speculative story rooted in a broader timescale of Black diasporic existence. The spaceship remains uprooted in the forest, deteriorating into the undergrowth as a residual offering. As Carter’s loved ones grapple with his loss, they continue his story, creating new roots as they tend to a boundless existence beyond the one he left behind.

Even when he removes his own body, many of Lemon’s performances seamlessly shift between exaggerated, full-body gesticulations to small, quick, specific ones, sampling real-life actions. These movements, mediated through Lemon’s prompts and scores, sometimes draw our attention to the racialized, gendered forms of ordinary movement, especially when cast in an institutional space. But his practice is not limited by racialized interpretations. The expectations of Blackness as witnessed in or arbitrated through the museum is merely a bracket of the experience itself, and Lemon enacts a refusal and disarticulation of these projected expectations. His symbols and characters fracture and replicate over time, across the gallery, always “incomplete”—a state that troubles the relationship between the work, the viewer, and the institution. More broadly, his movement-based explorations home in on the individual body (in ways that seem almost trenchant) and its relation to time and space, to audience and atmosphere, within the imprecise condition of otherized being.

In the closing week of the exhibition, Lemon stages the sixth iteration of Rant, billed as “the latest (and perhaps final).” It seems fitting for the exhibition to close how it began, with a “rant” as a score, a study of excess and duration, but also a testament to a body’s endurance. As with other iterations of Rant, there will inevitably be simultaneous happenings offstage, off script, and other ways in which the performance is informed and continuously developed beyond our witnessing, which distinguishes the work itself from the practice. The latter doesn’t require an audience, as it’s always in motion, but Lemon’s work succeeds in merging the two, complicating the staging of a performance by insisting on a perpetual status of being in process. In this way, there are myriad configurations and permutations of what it is/would/could/should be. In my multiple viewings of Ceremonies Out of the Air, often preceded by one of Lemon’s newly staged performances that accompany the exhibition, I found myself moving slower and slower with each encounter. Lemon’s permutations cannot be held within a singular body, performance, or exhibition. Our encounters are, instead, as iterative as their making.