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MoMA PS1 is a busy place. It manages five separate solo shows this summer, through August 25, and “The Gatherers” through October 6, but then the artists themselves suggest a certain hesitancy—and I work this into an earlier report on Rirkrit Tiravanija, also at MoMA PS1, and Mary Helena Clark in the galleries as a longer review and my latest upload.

Their art seems all but forced on them, and it is hard to say whether they mean that as critique. One can forgive Alanis Obomsawin, for this is cinema, sixty years of it, and who can begin to take it all in? Only slowly can it take shape as indigenous Canadian art. In the process, ordinary people need do no more than speak to children and speak for themselves. The work itself has a rather slow pace that will grow on anyone. As a film’s title has it, The Children Have to Hear Another Story.

Thanks to Bani Abidi in Pakistan, children are still waiting. They line the parade route for an unnamed entourage of motorcycles and limos that may never arrive and would demand unqualified obedience if it does. The museum’s two-story lower gallery seems just right for an oversized display of applause, and the winding parade already asserts it importance, with security forces in pristine white. What it means as political statement or art I hesitate to say. Not much happens in Reserved—and no doubt it has already taken place in many countries many times before. Political power works, Abidi might say, because it is predictable, anonymous, and halfway entertaining.

Julien Ceccaldi may have already given in. This is “everyday digital subjugation and hyperconsumerism,” the museum insists, with the accent on the everyday. It is “distorted” as well, which here might count as praise. It centers on a good-sized mural of a painting within a painting, as Adult Theater. The oversized woman is suggestively lying down and already licking her lips. Three figures sharing a raised steel platform next to it might be a museum worker, a curator, and a global explorer.

Or maybe not, but everything here is an imagined archetype of an alternative museum or a stereotype out of mass culture. I lost patience before I could decide. Upstairs, Whitney Claflin is up to almost anything short of soft-core porn. She seems unable to decide, and it makes for a puzzling but more intriguing show. Abstractions make a point of their spareness and white ground along with their brushwork and drips. A naked mannequin does a hand-stand like a circus performer in on the act.

Claflin makes it worth looking regardless for connections that may not actually exist. Put it down to the summer doldrums and real talent. Sandra Poulson has more focus, and it allows her truly to take flight. Based in Luanda, London, and Amsterdam, she is not out to map contemporary art, but she has a way of taking in the past and giving it a place in the present. A crowded room bears furniture that appears assembled the wrong way, but good news: a cabinet, a desk, and a preposterous wooden toilet sit at odd angles, and the outline of a face in wood appears carved into a t-shirt, for This Bedroom Looks Like a Republic!

After all that, “The Gatherers” could be that rarity—a group show that will try anything once but sticks well enough together. Tableware from Tolia Astakhishvili and Dylan Peirce, a junction box from Klara Liden, and motherboards in their ratty cases from Selma Selman might each belong to a single artist. Together, the artists are gathering what becomes the detritus of its own assembly. Ser Serpas speaks of a corpse, and others might well have kept the wrapping and thrown the work away. Texture may count most of all. Worst comes to worst, Poulson has supplied the furniture to put it all away.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Polonius: Will you walk out of the air, my lord?
The prince: Into my grave?
     —Hamlet 2:2

Twenty years ago, on entering his fifties, Ralph Lemon gave up quite a career in dance. He had left the Meredith Monk dance company in 1985 to found his own, but that, too, was no longer enough. Maybe he was sick of telling others what to do.

While he had continued to dance for Alvin Ailey and others, he had always loved choreography as an art of collaboration—and any musical theater as mixed media, mixed influences, and sheer mania. He could fulfill that only in what he liked to call No Dance, meaning performance. And now he takes that history to MoMA PS1 as “Ceremonies out of the Air,” through March 24.

Some reaching so monumental a decision would say they never look back. Lemon always looked back. He had made a point of injecting politics and history into his work, ever since co-founding the Mixed Blood Theater Company in 1976. He calls one work The Greatest (Black) History Ever Told, with his usual mix of ambition, irony, sincerity, and a gentle sense of humor directed first and foremost at himself. He looks back in a collage to a rural kitchen, where folks wear animal masks to tackle a half-eaten plate of pancakes and an untouched whole pineapple. He calls another piece, of half-length sculpture, his Consecration of Ancestor Figures.

If the collage is only a footnote to performance, performers elsewhere wear masks, too. It is his Rant (Redux), a raunchy and contemporary but still totemic song and dance. The title may refer to its recreation of a piece from 2000, but then what comes around goes around for Lemon, and he embellishes it further with Rant Residuum. They make a nice welcoming act to the exhibition, on four-channel video that gives a sense of performance in close-up, by Kevin Beasley and others, but also theater in the round, with the audience on camera, too. The singers are black and the song is black popular music, but the audience is both black and white—or maybe, as Lemon sometimes says, “blackified.” Recent paintings are a collage of mixed culture, but also a look back at his own past work.

They are a look back, too, to his first love in art, painting, which continues with sheer abstraction, of circles embedded in the cells of a suitably sloppy grid. This is the world of his ancestors, but also of art, and that breakfast takes place across from an actual table of aluminum and black steel, set with unappetizing sculpture and draped below with electric lights. Lemon tackles the remains of Minimalism and performance, too, in FBN—where BN is Bruce Nauman, and F is a four-letter word. The floor piece looks more like a gravestone than a celebration. At whom is the irony directed this time? You can judge for yourself.

Meanwhile, in still another video act, Lemon goes about his business of “harvesting” string. He may always be harvesting whatever he can toward whatever strikes his fancy. James Baldwin turns up in animation, barely blinking an eye. Yet the cast is rich, past and present, human and animal, and just one more thing as well. He finds his oldest collaborator on a final mission into space. Its videos take three rooms apart from the main display of his work, but he knows he has a long way to go.

This is his Walter Carter Suite, where Carter, born in 1907, was perhaps the last surviving sharecropper. The old man can collaborate on a spaceship regardless, although Lemon does the bulk of the work—and Carter, he seems to say, has better things to do than dwell on a painful history. If the human race is to endure, it, too, will have to transform that history into an improbable future. He is already listening, too, for extraterrestrials, with an antenna dish on top. In case you were worried, the ship also doubles as a doghouse. The completed ship on display in the gallery (or maybe another version of it) lacks both the dish and a dog, but it is only a work of art.

How silly is this? It becomes poignant all the same, as one of the two old men lies asleep or inert on rumpled sheets, with an old woman watching over him. (Lemon is now seventy-two.) He could be dead or dying, but in time he gets up, grabs the gun by his side, and leaves. He might have departed for this world or another. Unless, that is, one world is just the other redux.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.