Beyond the topos of the attic
However there is an obvious disregard for the pseudo/Romantic notion of the attic as the only appropriate artist’s space in E. Jong’s interpretation of a new myth of women artists. Throughout the book Jong’s emphasis on the particular working environment a woman artist needs is far from the topos of the attic as the recurrent mythologized place for the artists of the nineteenth century to live and work in. The attic is associated with the poor standard of living, illness, famine, poverty and no proper house. Even more so in mid-nineteenth century when there was a shift from the huge importance of the artist to the artists’ practice and activities and his new relation to society. By then the positive Romantic approach to the artist as a creator was solidified in cliches, i.e. the myth flourished and boomed in the new trendy magazines and papers. Pseudo-romantic notions preferred the artist to be young; a genius, committed to art; with a pale forehead and burning eyes; with a dislike for worldly vanity and a disregard for his everyday needs; being attic-bound he suffers and dies in a beautiful manner, mourned by pretty young girls [Kovalev 1985].
There is still another extremely important point which is characteristic for Leila Sand’s professional self. It is important for Leila to make love in her studio, on her own easel. She used to do it in order to ‘keep the creative vibes energized’ - 240/XV. We have realized how vital and crucial it is for contemporary woman artist to have both love and art in reference to Leila’s sexual identity. In the modern age artists seem to be quite perplexed. So does Leila. Being a creature desperately in need of her own priorities, i.e. love and art, she is definitely unhappy to realize how her priorities have ‘grown too murky’; that her love is ‘too mutable a thing to live for’; that her art is ‘too lonely’ - p.63/III. At this point love and art are perfectly sufficient to make her happy and to cast away the negative, gloomy, unsteady and uncomfortable feelings brought on by the qualitative epithets.
Beyond the cliche of the art periods in women artist’s career
Perhaps it is due to art historians that art periods within an artist’s career usually bear stylistic labels such as abstract, modern, post-modern, blue, pink, etc., but in Erica Jong’s book such periods are hardly applicable. Leila is deliberately ironic when she puts in brackets her artistic life cut to ‘so called’ pieces presumably by the art critics:
I once painted a picture of lust. (That was in my so-called abstract period, which followed my so-called figurative period and preceded my so-called postmodernist film-still period.) p.13/I
Next to the handy but ridiculed labels of art history and criticism we have Leila’s personal markers - the men in her life. Leila’s need to structure her achievements into the nutshells of love/art periods could possibly reflect our need from the rites of passages, once attributed only to the archaic societies. Even in our modern times we desperately need the experience of going through different periods, different trials, failures, exploits, exams. Thus we will literally follow the adventures of Leila Sand, the heroine, as if set up in a framework of a contemporary myth [Campbell, 1995]
Although it will be in very crude terms we could try to put the periods distinct in Leila’s professional identity in its different phases. Hopefully this discussion in relation to the men in her life will make much more comprehensible her split self and the various ups and downs, ins and outs she goes through.
We won’t fail to notice that Dart keeps returning the pivotal point both in Leila’s art and life. Evenmore the periods before and after Dart are always referring back and forth to him. It seems that his physical absence is also a form of mythical omniscience. Although Dart is an implicit part of the myth of stardom, newly coined by Leila Sand, the artist, there are a number of recycled myths of Pygmalion, Don Juan, etc. I try to pursue these in relation to Leila’s professional identity to establish whether there is a woman artist’s style inherent to her works and periods or is there only the essence of femaleness in art works.
If we are to explore Leila’s career chronologically we should start with Thom.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998