Thom period
Even though we begin with Thom, irrevocably the emphasis will be drawn to the anticipated Dart period despite the humble pair of brackets:
(Even then I was interested in film stills - which later figured so prominently in my relationship with Dart) - p.55/III
The Film Stills of Dart will be soon given proper attention but what sums up Thom’s period is the label of an eclectic style. In strict theoretical terms eclectic is not positive enough as a label. It is usually associated with a style drawn from various sources without following any particular system. But despite its self-critical meaning we will face a very avant-garde, up-to-date style that is powered by a new interactive media. These are number of happenings and dubious performances at which the ‘bourgeois participants’ were forced to strip naked and ‘crawl’ through canvas tubes to be photographed ‘mooning at old-fashioned cameras’ - p.55/III. This is the only brief account on her works at that time which is in considerable contrast with the elaborate and extensive reviews concerning later periods and works of Leila Sand. We could even suggest that there is an implicit argument here with the perception of a Feminist style of the seventies.
The feminist beliefs of the early seventies highlighted the female body as the major art subject/object and put it forth and naked on a stage [Frueh 1994]. Leila Sand’s body art performances reverse these roles slightly. Her audience of ‘bourgeois participants’ are made by force to trade their places with the woman artist. The narcissism of the audience is further stimulated by the old fashioned cameras clicking and memorializes their self-content gaze. The social satire that springs even from verbs like moon and crawl depicts the participants who are gazing dreamily and sentimentally at the cameras after lengths of a humiliating power play of crawling. The audience of consumers are treated as a merely redundant item in the clash between the artist and society.
Elmore period
As the novel enters Leila’s period with Elmore women’s art practices of the seventies are still in view. There is a radical awareness of Jong for this special moment in art history. On the crest of the interest in women’s art generated by the women’s movement Leila’s paintings are viewed as ‘erotic canvases of ordinary objects’ - shells, flowers, stones, bones, made into monumental icons in a manner reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe’s. Leila’s paintings began ‘to generate a great amount of interest’, at a time when Elmore’s Hans Hofmann-like abstractions were beginning to ‘seem passe’ - p.60/III. Yet what prevails in this reception again is the subtle subversive attitude of Erica Jong to the feminist preoccupations of the days. In the deliberate repetition of the phrase ‘generating an interest’ we could detect an evident disregard of the fashionable waves, mythologized by society in art and a sincere regard of Leila for the waves of her love-driven heart. The semi-dramatic irony towards the most fashionable art trends is dominant in the following paragraph:
Photographed like a double madonna (i.e. mother of the twins) in my studio before a fuchsia lily’s painted lips, I represented the perfect image of the artist for the vaginal age. p.61/III
What should not be neglected here are the social concerns about the place of women and men in the contemporary art values of the 1970s. Women are intrinsically not keen on superiority/inferiority rates in life and art but there are myriads of instances of how society tolerates the hierarchical order in the art world. The two artists’ careers are positioned at a moment of intense competition. When the babies were two, Leila had her most successful show ever but this happens in the same year that Elmore fights with his dealer and left his gallery. So Leila blossomed and Elmore sulked - p.64/III. In the juxtaposition of the key verbs blossom and sulk we are given the story of this social clash in a nutshell, where blossom primarily belongs to the natural world of blooming trees, flourishing flowers as the features of success, while sulk drives us to the poor human world of grief, fret, ponder and pout as emotions of discontent. This could be conceived as a mythological binary clash of male/female; nature/man; good/bad; interest/indifference; success/failure:
Suddenly I was the token woman artist of the moment, the exception that proved the rule, the flavor of the month. Vaginal art was in, and my forms - shells or bones, flowers or stones - seemed to be what everyone required. p.62/III
This is what delivers the ‘coup de grace of their marriage’ as well as the awareness of the coup de grace of the concept of male firstratedness and superiority in art and life.
Elmore period with Leila becomes an instance of the social act of showing society’s discontent with the popular mistreatment of women into arts. There is a whole paragraph of pouring pressing questions that bear the constructive rage of the woman artist. E. Jong makes the power play transparent and unbearable by the end of the paragraph. Leila Sand can hardly provide a universal answer no more than she can break loose from society’s rules dictating that the man must be central, or he will sulk. She herself can no longer maintain the social illusion; she can no longer pretend, for his male ego’s sake, that her work is not in the ascendancy. Hence Leila Sand is able to set up informally the rules of her self-empowering ego. Few of her questions will still linger in the air laying the foundations of the emerging myth of the triumphant woman artist.
But when one artist is a woman and the other is a man, whose work shall come first?... And what if she is the one who puts the food on the table as well as her tits into the babies mouths? p.63/III
Dart period
Like Elmore, Dart is also identified with the image of the failed artist. He constantly claims that ‘Leila’s success blocked him’ (p. 27/II), which is just another manifestation of the broken myth of the male artists dominance in the ‘toplists’ of art history. Whenever Dart has to cope with Leila’s success he will adhere to the guilt syndrome as a manipulative enough way to sabotage Leila’s work. Isn’t it a clue that when a human being is turned into a myth it is always hard to live up to his/her unfathomable demands and high profile? Are these hundreds of role models available for us only to aspire to them but never to reach and transcend them? Could this be an answer for the ceaseless myth-reinterpreting and mythmaking in human arts and culture? Whatever aanswer Yes or No we arrive back at our immediate concern - Dart and how he has never risen to his own aspirations to create art himself. Though he once told Leila he ‘had fashioned western sculptures a la Remington (when he wasn’t fashioning female bodies with his extra rib’ - p.15/I). This, of course, is told at the outset of their love affair yet the bracketed afterthought is only too suggestive of Dart’s major style. The metaphoric use of the verb ‘fashion’ and the jocular implications of a biblical replica of the ‘extra rib’ could prompt on Dart’s quite promising skills in his art of being the model, the live-in muse, rather than the artist.
Later Leila is to realize with a shock that she never ‘actually saw him paint or sculpt’; that somehow he never got together his projected one-man show, though he was always promising to; that he never even began the work for his show; nor would he run the Grand Teton Gallery - called in honour of their liaison - p.26/7/II. What he did consistently was always to follow his ‘rotten luck’ in all of his activities.
Perhaps later on we could ascertain the reversal of the good old romantic myth of the old master and his lady muse, that will culminate in the specific re-reading of Erica Jong of the Pygmalion story a bit. In his own sense of inadequacy, Dart is always the model, never the artist.
I think of Dart: he is his own finest creation. If he cannot paint or sculpt, it is because all his artistic ability has gone into the creation of his own persona, a not inconsiderable feat. He is always inventing himself. How can he invent mere paintings? An artist must be a funnel from the muse to the matter. Dart is both muse himself and self-creation. p. 79/IV
It is worth now to take a glimpse ahead in time when Dart will no longer be the muse powering Leila’s art. Being dethroned as a muse Dart gets into excesses and destroys Leila’s new work of a still life that has been inspired by no muse, by no model, by no Dart. Leila is seized with panic - somehow that if he sees the crystalline still-life, created in his absence, he will destroy it. So clear will it be to him that he has been replaced as a muse - p.113/VI. Rather than destroying the new piece that bears no trace of his omnipresence Dart stings Leila with guilt when feeling entirely powerless at the chaos of their broken connections, at his own image of a failed lover and a failed artist:
[Dart:] I think you are the greatest painter since Michaelangelo, but I still remember the time when you slept all night in my arms and nothing could tear you away. p.113/VI
But the still-life could and did tear her away as if to reiterate that the relationship artist/muse is apparently very significant for the professional identity of Leila Sand. Erica Jong is always aware of telling Leila’s story from her point of the woman artist. Leila is the one who says: ’I had given him every young artist’s dream - a barn to work in, unlimited time, all his expenses paid (p. 22/I). Would it make a difference if it were told from someone else’s point of view? How would it affect Leila’s profile? Here are some speculations on the outcome if Dart were to write his part of the story. What would he say? Leila would be no longer the good girl but the one who ‘emasculated’ him and made him feel weak. That big bad Leila who took all his marbles away.
This is how Leila’s mythical strength and huge fame proves hazardous like casting loads of bad spell and bad magic on her muse. ‘That big, bad Leila’ is notoriously difficult to comprehend. ‘That big, bad Leila’ is how a woman artist would be called when she is rebelling against the set taboos of her time. No wonder ‘that big, bad Leila’ felt the same when once in school had been the model for a friend of hers - a figurative painter named Mihailovich, ‘who painted me for a month (out of love, I believe) but who made me look a way that was not at all to my liking.’ She remembers too the feeling of being out of control. This is where one can draw a parallel between Leila and Dart. It strikes her that Dart is trying to control her in his own ways: by bringing the ‘bimbo’ to Leila’s New York loft, by darting, by fucking her in my bed - p.153/IX. The reason is to be found in the powerful word ‘control’. Dart feels being out of control and out of the traditional context of male superiority all the time. Perhaps he feels more like Galatea in Erica Jong’s story.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998