Leigh Ledare: The Plot

The Art Institute of Chicago

Sept. 9th, 2017 — Jan. 1st, 2018
Leigh Ledare: The Plot

Leigh Ledare pushes social systems to lay bare their underlying structures.
His fundamentally collaborative projects depend on interpersonal negotiations
and examine the dynamics that bind artist, subject, and viewer. This exhibition
revolves around a film Ledare directed in Chicago earlier this year titled The
Task, which utilizes an experiential social-psychology method initially developed
by London’s Tavistock Institute. The film unfolds over the course of an immer-
sive three-day conference organized by Ledare in which a group of participants
and a team of psychologists construct and analyze a social “ecosystem” whose
task it is to study itself and its own unconscious dynamics. Through a series of
conversations focused on the group as a whole, participants explore aspects
of authority and identity by confronting differences and examining the impact
of issues such as race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomics. Ledare and a
camera crew are present as additional collaborators, modifying the method and
the results while serving to mirror the effects of the camera in contemporary life.
This intervention—a disruption of the selfcontained system—complicates the
structure of authority and boundaries within the assembled group, implicating the
viewer in turn.

An installation of assemblages of found mass-media images along with other

works act as footnotes to the film. The titles to these works—Plots, Data, and
Containment—suggest that the construction of meaning is always fragmentary
and necessitates an ongoing effort, an idea also conveyed by the title of The
Task. With Ledare at its center, the entire project presents highly structured
encounters between private and public, the individual and the group, and direct
experience and its representation. As a diverse representation of subjects take
on roles in relation to one another and to viewers, they foreground the notion
that how we see the world is not as it is but as we are.
ROOM 1

The Task (2017)

Single channel video and sound
118 min.

Ledare filmed The Task during a three-day Group Relations Conference—

a socialpsychology method developed by London’s Tavistock Institute—that
the artist organized in Chicago. In addition to directing the film crew, Ledare
assembled the 28 participants and secured the collaboration of 10 psychol-
ogists trained in the method. During a sequence of small and large group
meetings, the group studies its own self-made social structure—
an abstract “task” that allows participants to examine the identities, roles,
desires, and biases individuals import into the group, as well as conscious
and unconscious group dynamics. Ledare introduces one key modification,
however: the presence of a camera crew and the artist as observers and
collaborators. This intervention shifts the “here and now” orientation of the
conference by making the members of the group aware of the effect of exter-
nal social and technological forces. By complicating authority and boundaries
among all members—including the artist—Ledare calls attention, by analo-
gy, to power structures that govern our relations to one another in a society
where we are increasingly both observers and observed.

Presented in seven chapters, The Task focuses on four large group

meetings, each of which includes all the 28 participants, three psychologists
(or “consultants”), six camera operators, three observers—and Ledare
himself, whose role evolves over the course of the conference. Throughout
the film, the group’s members grapple with the emergence of complex
patterns of stereotyping and other projections of identity; authority is
questioned, assumed, and then taken away; and viewers are implicated as
the participants negotiate the subjective forces that exceed the structured
constraints of the self-made system.

click here to view:

https://vimeo.com/235537326
password: doublebind
ROOM 2

Plots I - VII (2017)

Glass, printed matter, paint, paper, adhesive, silicone, wood, steel, and stains:
jam, foie gras, excrement, paint, soap
66” x 46” x 1 1/4”
Data (2017)
Dirt, steel
66” x 20” x 20”
Containment (2017)
Glass, printed matter, laser print, paint, adhesive, silicone, wood
Three pieces: 22” x 30” each, plus text

The works in this room reference themes that emerge in The Task, the film
presented in the adjacent space. These include assemblages of magazine and
mass-media images collectively titled Plots, containers of dirt labeled Data,
and a series titled Containment.

The individual titles of the Plots correspond to The Task’s seven chapter
headings and explore cultural codes that emerge as central themes in the
film. The works that make up Containment explore intricacies of meaning
underlying both the film’s production and the exhibition’s structure. Data—
titled after a Tavistock term for information derived from subjective experience
and empirical observations of the system—creates an allegorical comparison
between information and dirt, both literal and metaphorical materials whose
value rests in how they are used.

Ledare’s installation invites viewers to examine each work as a grouping of

varied positions to be viewed from multiple vantage points and assigned multiple
meanings—enacting the processes of identification similar to those produced
by the mass-media.
PLOTS AND CONTAINMENT

Plot I: Pre-existing Conditions (2017)

Laminated Luxar UV architectural glass, laminated low iron safety glass, paint,
VHB adhesive tape, silicone, wood strainer, printed matter and stain (jam)
66” x 46” x 1 1/4”
Plot II: Evictions (2017)
Laminated Luxar UV architectural glass, laminated low iron safety glass, paint,
VHB adhesive tape, silicone, wood strainer, printed matter and stain (excrement)
66” x 46” x 1 1/4”
Plot III: Immune System (2017)
Laminated Luxar UV architectural glass, laminated low iron safety glass, paint,
VHB adhesive tape, silicone, wood strainer, printed matter and stain (soap)
66” x 46” x 1 1/4”
Plot IV: Amok in the Outhouse (2017)
Laminated Luxar UV architectural glass, laminated low iron safety glass, paint,
VHB adhesive tape, silicone, wood strainer, printed matter and stain (paint)
66” x 46” x 1 1/4”
Plot V: Inmates (2017)
Laminated Luxar UV architectural glass, laminated low iron safety glass, paint,
VHB adhesive tape, silicone, wood strainer, printed matter and stain (foie gras)
66” x 46” x 1 1/4”
Plot VI: Intimates (2017)
Laminated Luxar UV architectural glass, laminated low iron safety glass, paint,
VHB adhesive tape, silicone, wood strainer, printed matter
66” x 46” x 1 1/4”
Plot VII: Collision (2017)
Laminated Luxar UV architectural glass, laminated low iron safety glass, paint,
VHB adhesive tape, silicone, wood strainer, printed matter
66” x 46” x 1 1/4”
Containment (2017)
Glass, printed matter, laser print, paint, adhesive, silicone, wood
Three pieces: 22” x 30” each, plus text
 August 22, 2017

Patricia, I am including the entire conference staff here and attaching a copy of your August 16th email because it is not clear
to me whether the staff knows fully what has gone on since the conference was held and filmed at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago between May 12th - 14th. Please excuse this, but it is intended for the sake of transparency and so that, in what is
now the eleventh hour, all details relating to the release of the Staff Releases, and any issues around payment of honoraria, can
be finalized prior to the exhibition’s opening.

Before I begin, my intention in writing this email is to clarify the main principles operating within our agreement, to express my
expectations around the fulfillment of all aspects of this agreement, and to dispel any misunderstandings that might still persist
around my intended use of the film.

Following a long delay after sharing my work with you and the staff, I was happy to receive your notice on August 16th that
the entire staff has found no objections to the film’s edit, and that they have all agreed to return the signed releases. Given the
immense resources of time, labor, and money that I have put into realizing this project (including the effort to process these
events following the conference’s closing) I feel positive that collectively you have recognized the integrity with which I have
approached editing this material.

However, I was Patricia, troubled by your attempt to assert that the rights granted by the staff’s signed releases will be “limited
to the Large Group as you have currently edited it.” Your condition would cast doubt that, as the artist, this film both belongs to me
and I am its custodian. More troubling still is your assertion that (I will) “need to obtain releases for any other showing of the film,”
which suggests that I will need to revert to you for permission to show the film in any other context (i.e. art related). In less
intimidating language this restates a set of conditions I refused to agree to in the June 16th meeting with you and Frank: “May not
revise, edit, sell or otherwise display film without prior written consultant approval.” This threat would create impossible conditions
for exhibiting the film and further, would undermine my ongoing obligation to the participants.

If you are indeed trying to retroactively take over my rights to the film, these patterns do not reflect the group relations that I agreed
to and clearly run counter to my whole purpose in organizing the conference and recording it as an “art film” (i.e. to be released by
me in an art world context, including first, at the Art Institute of Chicago). Forgive me for reminding you of this, but it bears
repeating: It was a mandatory condition of participation in the conference that all members, staff included, would transfer all rights
in the film (including in their recorded likeness) over to me as the artist, when filmed within the conference. Patricia, not only
did we all discuss this on numerous occasions in April prior to the conference, these conditions are contained in the written release
agreement, a document to which you yourself provided final corrections on May 11th, and which was scrutinized point-by-point
(on video) and signed by the staff members on May 14th – which you have still not delivered to me.

Not only were great lengths taken prior to the conference to make clear that staff would be hired only under acceptance of this
condition, but I organized the production and filming of the conference (as was known to all staff members and you) on the basis
of this shared understanding. There would have been no point for me to have done otherwise. Our primary agreement was that
as “payment-in-kind” for the staff’s participation, AKRI would receive permission to use my documentation as training materials
and within educational contexts. In addition to this, I have always offered to provide staff a “reasonable” honorarium in line with
the project budget and with industry standards. I am of course willing to honor this, once the issue surrounding the releases has
been cleared-up. I will also happily send you a short statement regarding how the film will be described.

Please note that the cost of the film crew, associated charges and the many hours of in-kind work to produce both the footage
for my film, but also more than 60 hours of additional conference documentation for your use, are many times greater than
whatever value my film might have were it to be acquired by any museum video archive.

Once again to clarify: As I have defined from the project’s inception, my intentions have only ever entailed using the Large Group
recordings, the final edit of which the entire staff has now viewed and which you can see accurately reflects my description. As we
discussed many times and collectively agreed to, this film will be exhibited in its entirety within the context of museums, galleries,
and other institutional screenings, the first presentation taking place at The Art Institute of Chicago. Patricia, these details are also
listed on the conference website, whose content you and I generated together, and which prior to posting was made available for
staff to comment on and approve.

I wait to hear from you and look forward to receiving the signed releases without further delay.

Regards,

Leigh Ledare

Containment (detail)