Leila Sand as an extraordinary woman - Women artists as lonely outcasts
The woman artist in E. Jong’s narrative mind will keep being alienated as an outcast. Her creative woman will perhaps never be perfectly clear how close yet alienated we all are. Thus unsurprisingly the word alone could be perceived as another key through which to approach the social identity of Leila Sand. Leila is steadily convinced that we are all alone in our houses painting or writing or composing and phoning each other all over the world.
Each of us living alone and calling out through the cosmos to a network of living friends we seldom see; social life is conducted digitally; lovers we touch and smell, but friends we increasingly ‘visit with’ only electronically - even when we live few blocks away. The human race is preparing itself for space? 187,8/XI
The rhetorical question makes us reflect on the up and coming digital myths of communication, on the idea that hi-tech art that will inadvertedly take its place in the hierarchy of contemporary art values. Leila proves very much concerned about the way art and life will flourish now that they are turned over to the 'techies' and translated into computer language. Leila’s concern is quite critical when it comes to the shift in values which such changes might bring. E. Jong’s criticism is very sophisticatedly disguised in a series of amusing ‘instead of’ clauses:
Bytes instead of bites, input instead of intercourse, file instead of fuck. We’d all change directories and become blips on a flickering screen. Which we were anyway. In God’s computer of starry blue. Instead of mothers, we’d have ‘surrogates’; instead of fathers, we’d have ‘donors’; instead of children, we’d have -what?
Glory and abysmal pity seem at the crux of our evolutionary dilemma. Perhaps we could blame the computers for our isolation while at the same time realize why the artists tend to stick to forms of art which are not aided by computers. Leila Sand seems very likely to ban all computers from her art as she is really fighting and ironizing all sorts of isolation. Her artist’s credo seems focused on connection and abundance, rather than on scarcity and isolation.
The growing tendency for further isolation will result in the hilarious image of the artists as zoo animals. Perhaps this is the humourous view by which Erica Jong can beat away the social discontent. At Andre’s parties, the artists appear like ‘zoo animals on their best behaviour’, always with the sense that their endeavours are ‘vaguely peripheral’ to the main event: the buying and selling of artworks. Leila is unromantic and realistic enough to understand the rules of the social game at the parties of the McCraes’ - an artist’s time and artist’s work is of no worth - unless it is bartered by Andre - 170/X. The woman artist as a peripheral guest could rebel against this show both through her sarcastic words and her awkward presence. She is one of those zoo animals at Andre’s parties who often get quickly drunk or stoned, pass out in the guest room or ‘discretely throw up’ in the powder room, perhaps ‘nauseated by so much proximity to the beau monde to which their success has entitled them’. The sarcasm is evident in the opposition of the two worlds set apart, yet brought so dangerously close at Andre’s show. The artists will never be the hard-core of the social show, but will certainly always be a part of its sideshow.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998