Memory as Methodology: Ralph Lemon at MoMA PS1
Ralph Lemon and Kevin Beasley. Rant (redux). 2020–24. 4-channel HD video color, 8-channel sound, 14 min. Installation view of Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon, on view at MoMA PS1 from November 14, 2024 through March 24, 2025. Photo: Steven Paneccasio.
Choreographer and interdisciplinary practitioner Ralph Lemon has said, “I’d be a better artist if I didn’t document.” Though partially taught by the performance world’s preference for liveness, this fraught relationship to documentation keeps with the fugitivity that underwrites his works. For Lemon, the unreliability of memory and the trespasses of the body are methodologies, ones that allow biography to fragment productively into fabulation and everyday movement to become dance. Nothing is static. Past projects are anthropophagically swallowed by new works, translated by the act of rehearsal.
Not the artist’s first collaboration with MoMA (having danced in and curated performances in the museum’s midtown atrium), his PS1 retrospective Ceremonies Out of the Air delves deep into the body of visual work that has taken shape alongside his choreographic practice since 1995. Across the exhibition and accompanying performance program, Lemon’s practice further tangles the already entwined threads of memory and fiction.
Stepping through the glass double doors into the first gallery, the viewer is immediately swept up in an ecstatic blur of sound and movement that is the four-channel video installation Rant (redux) (2020–24). A collaboration with visual and sound artist Kevin Beasley, the work splices excerpts from Lemon’s performance Rant #3 (2020) to a frenzied velocity, condensing and reordering the chronological chain of the original into something layered and simultaneous. Evoking club more than proscenium stage, the dancers pulse to the music, at times synchronized, at others, wheeling off into private, rapturous movement. Roving cameras spectate and chart their own spiraling choreographies. The divide between viewer and performer is thinned as audience members within and outside the video move to Beasley’s irrepressible beat.
Beyond the documentary revision inherent to Rant (redux), the work considers memory through the faulty vessel of the physical frame. The body’s limits, exhaustions, and failures are made audible—contorted by the act of speaking or breaking words with wild gestures. On one screen, performer Okwui Okpokwasili bares her teeth in a smiling grimace, then opens her mouth and lets out a faltering scream. The sound is painful, wavering between operatic and involuntary. In another segment, we see Lemon bounce on the balls of his feet, his breath emerging in discordant gusts through the chambers of a harmonica.
Ralph Lemon. Untitled no. 1. 2016. From the series Untitled (The greatest [Black] art history story ever told. Unfinished). Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Martin Parsekian.
Two galleries deeper, thirteen drawings from the series Untitled (The greatest [Black] art history story ever told. Unfinished) (2016–) catalogue Lemon’s evolving visuo-visceral lexicon, colliding past work, pop culture, and art historical allusions. Visible in Untitled no. 1 (2016) are two Black figures, swimming through choppy waves; a watercolor rendition of Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), the prone traveler painted a shade of deepest black; a Halloween Snoopy comic, the central character robed in ghostly white; and an astronaut walking into a verdant landscape of grasses and vine-clad trees. Overwhelmingly dense, the drawings refuse to divulge their secrets, instead prompting the viewer’s subjective interpretation. Activating the works, Lemon has invited Daphne Brooks, Bob Hoffnar, Will Rawls, and Saidiya Hartman to conduct this dream analysis of his collated references.
The astronaut of Untitled no. 1 is drawn from the artist’s own repertoire; his collaboration with former sharecropper Walter Carter is on display in the galleries across the hall from Rant (redux). In videos such as 1856 Cessna Road [Chapter 1] (2008–9), Carter carries out surreal, task-oriented movements that cast a new type of dance onto the old man’s shuffling frame. The film starts with a silver space-suited Carter, walking through the forest on a misty Mississippi road. Recalling minimalist choreographies, he strides away from the camera in a straight line. [1] When his retreating figure is just a hazy cluster of pixels, he pivots and returns. In another scene, two men construct a bare-bones spaceship from a wheeled platform and a radio antenna—a version of which appears in a nearby gallery. Minutes later, Carter arrives on screen in his spacesuit, helmet now off. He boards the saucer and, lying on the floor, rolls back and forth repeatedly, a pantomime of distress. Among Carter’s strange and sublime gestures are strewn such hints of tragedy. Over a black screen, white sans serif text intercedes, asking whether the plum tree is still there, a reference to a lynching witnessed by Carter when he was young and Jim Crow still ruled Yazoo City. Carter travels time and space; the world of the film is different from the one he was born to. He is both himself and an emblem for the body miraculously persevering, but broken by all that it has seen.
Much as Lemon would forswear documentation, his works extend truth into trace, memorial into fiction. Elusive and between the lines, Lemon and his cast of performers/characters/surrogates abstract to a broader legibility. Rather than thinking of Ceremonies Out of Air as a portrait of a practice, we might consider the works on view as living objects at different stages of “falling apart” or “becoming something else.” [2]
Ralph Lemon. From left: Untitled. 2009. Archival pigment print. Garden [Chapter 2]. 2013. Video: color, sound 13 min., 15 sec. With (in order of appearance): Warren (Red) Carter, Lloyd Williams, Lorraine Carter, Emma Williams, Jayden Williams. Installation view of Ceremonies Out the the Air: Ralph Lemon, on view at MoMA PS1 from November 14 through March 24, 2024. Photo: Steven Paneccasio.
Ceremonies out of the Air is on view at MoMA PS1 until March 24, 2025.
[1] See Joan Jonas, Wind (1968).
[2] Ralph Lemon and Adam Pendleton, “Neither Here nor Now,” interview by Lizzie Feidelson, Triple Canopy and Studio Museum, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4906&v=X6goExpKwPM&feature=youtu.be.
