Mother Nature’s Son
dena yago interviews leigh ledare
Leigh Ledare steps in where normal parent-child boundaries dissolve. Nearly a decade ago Ledare, currently a School of the Arts student, came home from college to find his mother had become a stripper. For the last eight years, he has been compiling a visual and textual documentary of his mother, hoping to create the most complete portrait of such an enigmatic maternal figure. His book, Pretend You’re Actually Alive, will be published in early April by Andrew Roth. One of Leigh’s video works is currently on show at the Rivington Arms gallery in New York, and he has an upcoming solo show there in September.
How did you start asking her [your mother] to take pictures?
I came home for Christmas one year. I had stayed at my grandparents’ house and then in the morning she telephoned and we agreed to meet for coffee. She ended up answering the door of her apartment entirely naked. It was a way of her announcing to me what she was up to in her life at the time, working as a stripper in a club next door to my grandparents’ house. I quickly realized she had this young man naked in bed with her and so I began taking pictures of them, really not knowing how else to deal with it.
Who was the guy?
He was this guy who worked at the food court and was kind of a funny character. Just a somewhat lost kid.
Part of the project has to do with making a multifaceted portrait of my mother. She is a very complicated person. What’s being published in the book in April has to do with my relationship in making a portrait of her in this period of time when she is reinventing herself as a dancer—only this time as a stripper—and trying to find a benefactor. The activities in her life at that time centered around attempts to find an economic means to get by. She also has always had this sense of theatricizing her life ... All of her experience is a reality, although at times she arrives there through a fictitious means.
What did your mother do?
Before she had my brother, she had been dancing from the time she was 13 until about 21 with the Joffrey Ballet and the New York City Ballet. She ended up having my brother and stopped dancing for various reasons. I think she had some sort of breakdown, I’m not really sure. It’s one of those mysterious moments no one talks about. She ends up blaming my grandparents for a lack of financial support or something, but it’s hard to know what actually happened. After this she taught dance for a while, and later my parents did a series of odd jobs. We ran a bed and breakfast for years and didn’t have a business license. My grandmother had volunteered at the faculty housing department and would just send visiting faculty to us, which was great because we always had interesting people around.
It seems that the book is a lot about her gifts from men.
A lot of the gifts were a way of appearing to be sought after, elevating her status and her sexual currency. A lot of it has been her figuring out ways to commodify herself.
Does she see herself as purely maternal to you? Does she divide her sexuality and her maternity?
I think she had a very non-traditional upbringing in certain ways and so definitely our relationship reflected that. That’s another issue that the book takes up indirectly: how is our subjectivity constituted in our relationships in terms of being somebody’s child or being somebody’s parent, and when that breaks down what does that mean.
Is the book then an Oedipal monument to your mom? It doesn’t seem so much that it is trying to be this objective document.
I see two story lines. I see it both as a portrait of her during these years when she’s trying to cash in on her sexuality before her looks fade, and it’s also my own coming of age complicated by my mother’s projected sexuality. It’s where those two intersect that it’s interesting. There are other boundary issues that are there about authorship. In a way the book is a collaboration with her.
Are you going to continue this project with your mother basically until she dies?
I think that this is the end of it.
What made you decide that you were finished with this?
I suppose there came a point where it was resolved enough. I figured out what the issues were in the work and figured out how to bring a lot of the content out to the surface and deal with it. You work with material for such a long time and then the initial content of it begins to feel banal, no matter how provocative other people might think it is.
Did it resolve any issues between you and your mom?
I think that creating the book was a way of having a productive relationship with her. For instance when she answered the door naked, at that point it was almost saying you can take it or leave it, accept it or not. ... In my mind, having a relationship with her is about being tolerant of this side of things. I see her as a character that’s reacting to all these different forces that are very universal, whether it’s economic or this crisis that she is having with her age. I see her as just a more extreme version of the way other people respond to the world. In a broader sense it’s my record of negotiating a relationship with her, just as she’s finding ways to negotiate her relationships with the outside world and herself.