Lee Ann Norman: Ralph Lemon: Ceremonies Out of the Air

In his first major New York museum exhibition, Ralph Lemon makes an offering of more than sixty works spanning film and video, performance, drawing, installation, text, and sculpture that reveal the depth of a practice rooted in resisting convention. Even after disbanding his dance company thirty years ago, and then going on to create work that traverses and transcends geographies and genres, Lemon continues to poke and push at notions of what it means to make meaning through art. Across his oeuvre, people recur as do places, items, objects, gestures, and ideas. His vocabulary of words, movements, images, and gestures carries a familiarity that is imbued with dreamspaces, intimacy, celebration, the largeness of human emotion, and the quiet of the everyday. Ceremonies Out of the Air, then, serves as a gift—an invitation from artist to audience to explore or imagine a kind of otherwise, together.

Curated by PS1 director Connie Butler and Thomas Lax, MoMA curator in the department of performance and media, the exhibition underscores what informs Lemon’s approach: curiosity, research, collaboration, dichotomies, imagination, Blackness. Lemon is keenly aware of systems and structures, their purposes and use; much of his work centers on disrupting them or giving them new or alternate meanings or purpose. For many years now, periodically, he has declared that he is done with dance. When I met him in 2012 during his residency at the Park Avenue Armory, he said

I am known primarily as a dancer/choreographer, but I feel like that maybe was me more fixed [as a discipline-based artist] many, many years ago, and since, I kind of don’t consider myself anything. And I don’t really want to land anywhere, but I find all of these spaces really useful. I find the museum useful. I find the book useful … Somehow, I’ve managed to have them in my life in a way that is reasonable and supportive.1

The exhibition in some ways traces yet another story in Lemon’s journey to find room for each of his creative impulses and manifestations. The majority of works on view come from his personal archive of the last decade or so where he has continued to engage in ideas, actions, and thought experiments relating to the body as a container for emotion, history, and our shared stories.

More recently, he has been working through his ambivalence around dance in performances called Rant (2019–ongoing), which grew out of the last section of Come home Charley Patton (2004) from the Geography Trilogy. For nearly three minutes, Lemon dances at one corner of the stage while one of his collaborators sprays him with a water hose. He dances, limbs stretching and snapping like rubber, his body moving in smooth, soulful sweeps and shuffles, while struggling to remain steady against the water’s force against him. He slips and slides on the wet stage only to stand back up, resisting with an elegance that belies the reality of what was happening.

The centerpiece of Ceremonies out of the Air, Rant redux (2020–24), enacts something akin to what the artist described as a “Fury” from Charley Patton. It is a four-channel video and sound installation made with the artist Kevin Beasley in which Lemon’s longtime collaborators vocalize, writhe, and dance themselves to near exhaustion in a kind of marathon, freeform improvisation. At various points, the artist joins them in moving; at others, he recites texts from writers and thinkers including Kathy Acker, Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman, and himself, his voice rising over the din of Beasley’s electro-rhythmic score. (Rants is ongoing and have occurred five times since 2019; a sixth live performance, in March, is planned as part of this exhibition.)

Across the hall, there are numerous pieces from the archive of Lemon’s eight-year collaboration and friendship with the Carter family of Little Yazoo, Mississippi. Until a couple of years after the family patriarch Walter died, Lemon had kept most of the works the two created private, except for a video here or an image there as part of larger productions. He has noted that joining and separating the public and private sides of life is a necessary yet fraught tension. The public presentation of this archive at PS1 provides a new perspective, showing how Lemon continued the collaboration and relationship with the Carter family years later. Additional works, including videos and still images featuring other family members performing actions based on Lemon’s instruction pieces (Walter Carter Suite [2002–24]) and video of the Carters’ dogs wearing spacesuits, albeit reluctantly, in It Could Be a Forest (Chapter 3) [2013]), reveal the intimacy of the relationship. Lemon recites text from It Could Be a Forest as voiceover to describe the scene:

They dress the dogs in silver spacesuits; Lloyd Williams, Warren’s good friend, and his wife Emma, put them together. Patterned from pet-store-bought large-size camouflage dog jackets. The runt’s costume becomes a silver cape; he/she is engulfed.

Much like the quiet moments seen in the Walter Carter works, Lemon’s drawings are meditative, contemplative, observant. A series made over the last decade, “Untitled (The greatest [Black] art history story ever told. Unfinished)” (2015–present), consists of tiled vignettes filled with animals, figures, and texts implying quotidian stories from the historic and solemn to the funny and absurd. The juxtapositions are striking. In the corner of one drawing, a shapely figure appears to hula hoop over a crimson circle next to a man sitting in a lawn chair in front of a giraffe with his dog nearby eyeing what might be a water bowl, above a man striking a big drum while marching up a blue triangle like climbing a step, next to two men performing, perhaps on a street corner. One plays the flute wearing a sun-yellow shirt while the other in a red shirt and green trousers tosses a yellow paper airplane at an adult-sized angel holding a bear in the next frame. These vignettes transform into color-blocked and symbol-filled abstractions in the “Untitled (Rapture weft)” (2020–ongoing) series. Lemon uses modest, loosely constructed, colored grids, to invoke mandalas, celestial bodies, and the cosmos. The drawings also share space with works from “Consecration of Ancestor Figures” (2015–24), in which Lemon outfits the figures in looks inspired by Beyoncé and Jay-Z. The ancestor figures, paired with modern luxury styling, speak to Lemon’s interest in histories, legacies, and the stories we tell about what (or who) influences who we are.

As someone who liked “being in the body,” but wasn’t necessarily athletic as a young person, I imagine Lemon continues to gravitate toward embodied practices—mark making, everyday movements and actions, writing—because they satisfy a hunger for discovering the myriad ways meaning is held and released from our bodies, from the physical contents to our emotional registers. For Lemon and those who accept his invitation to be “in the body” with him, it seems that the possibilities keep on, making Ceremonies Out of the Air a welcome reason to reflect on our own capacity to hold and spill.

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1 Ralph Lemon, in conversation with the author, March 20, 2012.