For anyone still mired in post-election fatigue, there’s a quick picker-upper at MoMA PS1 in Ralph Lemon’s body-and-mind-blaster of a performance video called “Rant (redux).” In it, eight stellar dancers leap, dive, writhe and vogue to a high-decibel score by the artist Kevin Beasley, while Lemon himself, the work’s choreographer, shout-reads words by Angela Davis and other liberationist thinkers.
The four-channel video, filmed on the cusp of the Covid lockdown in 2020, doesn’t have a set narrative, political or otherwise, at least that I can discern. But it certainly has an emotional through-line, one composed of equal parts anger, grief and exultation, specifically as these are expressed through Black bodies. It’s a thematic mix that has recurred, at varying intensities, throughout Lemon’s influential but branding-resistant career.
He’s most widely known for his experimental choreography, and the exhibition’s curators are smart to start off with this rousing, engulfing example of it. But the surrounding galleries in this compact show take other directions, into painting, drawing and sculpture, before coming around to performance again.
Born in 1952 in Cincinnati, Lemon grew up in Minneapolis in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Detaching himself early from that exacting church, while retaining a touch of its exhortative spirit, he developed an interest in dance. In 1979 this took him to New York City. There he experienced, firsthand, the work of path breakers like Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Meredith Monk. And in 1985 he formed a company of his own.
Then, a decade later, he had another departure from faith, this time from a belief in the continuing viability, at least for himself, of dance in its traditional Western commercial form: as an evening-length “show,” contained in time, confined to a stage, and conceived primarily for a white audience, the last factor being of particular importance to a Black man who had grown up to the atmosphere of American racial violence and resistance in the 1960s.
Intent on taking dance out of the theater and into the world, and expanding the parameters of what it could be, Lemon shuttered his company in 1995 and started to travel, researching and experimenting as he went. He spent time in West Africa studying local dance forms and working with dancers there. He did the same in parts of East Asia and Southeast Asia — his partner in these years, Asako Takami (1960-2007), was a Japanese-born specialist in Indian dance — where he also immersed himself in a still-active Buddhist practice. And, maybe most important, he made extensive trips through the African American South.
You find a few direct references to global culture in the show, which is titled “Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon” and covers work from roughly the past two decades. Africa’s unmistakably there in a cluster of traditional wood-carved religious images from Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone, some of which Lemon has fitted with mini-versions of Beyoncé-at-the-Louvre couture, thus making them power figures in excelsis. But it’s his encounters with American culture that really seem to grip him, as is evident in a recent and continuing series of large ink-and-paint drawings.
Dated between 2016 and 2023 and collectively called “Untitled (The greatest [Black] art history story ever told. Unfinished),” all the drawings are identical in basic format. Each is a diarylike accumulation of small, separate but often overlapping figurative vignettes, lined up side by side, patchwork-style. Most of the figures depicted are Black or, to use Lemon’s term, “blackified,” though the work doesn’t tell a linear “racial” story.
Political history, art history, popular culture, and what may be taken as personal fantasy jumble together: civil rights heroes and combat helicopters; Manet paintings and criminal mug shots; images of police assaults on Black people and of demonstrators hoisting “Blacks for Trump” posters.
It’s as if Lemon were setting down whatever subjects were on his restless mind, or were circumstantially thrust into view, on any given day in the creative process. (Some of these paintings took a year to complete.) Stand in front of any one piece and you can get lost in it, in identifying content, sussing out connections or delighting in the fantastically fertile play of the artist’s mind and hand.
On display in a nearby gallery are recent paintings on paper in the same patchwork format. Under the title “Rapture Weft,” they were made in parallel with, and as an alternative to, the drawing series.
The big difference is that the newer pictures are abstract. In them, each “patch” is a stand-alone composition of gestural swipes, dots and swirls. Lemon has identified these abstract units as mandalas, which are, by definition, cosmic maps and guides to meditation. And he has described them as representing a way of seeing reality different from the vision embodied in the dizzyingly detailed, history-riddled figure drawings.
The mandala idea naturally brings his Buddhist interests to the fore here, but over the years most of his work, in various disciplines and mediums, has been about spiritual transport in one form or another, as is true of one of his largest performance projects.
You get a first hint of it in the gallery of “mandala” paintings, where a short video plays on a small monitor. It’s titled “Walter Harvesting String,” and in it we see an elderly Black man filmed outdoors in a rural setting and pulling handfuls of what looks like orange twine from vegetation around him, as if it were a local crop. Next we see him concentratedly wrapping the twine around a metal basketball hoop, creating what looks like a mandala of his own.
The man is Walter Carter, a retired Black sharecropper and citizen of Little Yazoo, a town in the Mississippi Delta. Lemon met him there on a Southern sojourn in 2006, the date of the video, when Carter was in his late 90s, and began a kind of theatrical collaboration with him and his family, recording it in series of videos.
Apparently, Carter had always had a yen for space travel, with the moon as a goal — he didn’t believe that American astronauts had ever really landed there — and Lemon helped him realize it. He drew designs for a spaceship that Carter’s son Warren, and a neighbor named Lloyd Williams, constructed from junk material. It’s in the show. After Carter had successfully achieved liftoff or, at any rate, had left Earth (that is to say, he died, in 2010 at 102), his family perpetuated the fantasy.
Costumed as woodland animals, they performed a memorial dance in his honor, then sat down together at a kitchen table for a memorial meal. The table, or a version of it, is in the show too. Adorned with high-intensity electric bulbs, it generates a blazing light that stings the eye, the way looking directly at the sun does.
The whole Walter Carter project — a multipart ”para-performance,” in Lemon’s phrase, captured in five videos — is an eerie, funky, funny, beautiful thing. Quiet in its joy, gentle in its mournfulness, it’s the aural and sonic reverse of “Rant (redux),” yet the idea of art as an agent of transcendent change is common to both.
The show’s organizers — MoMA PS1’s director, Connie Butler; Thomas Jean Lax of MoMA’s media and performance department; and the PS1 assistant curator Kari Rittenbach — have done well to present it in its full form. And they’ve done us a huge favor by assembling a program of live performances to accompany the show.
Among the highlights will be a fresh version of “Rant,” with many of the original performers, including Beasley, Dwayne Brown, Paul Hamilton, Darrell Jones, Lysis (Ley), Mariama Nougera-Devers, Okwui Okpokwasili, Angie Pittman, Samita Sinha and Lemon himself. It’s scheduled for March 22, and I’m guessing that, with a new president and new order by then in place, the work’s propellant score and ebullient motion will be received by at least some viewers as a combination of lament and exhortation, a call, as Lemon’s work has always been, for a different way to go.
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