The Pygmalion myth recycled
In questioning the stereotypes of creativity Erica Jong tends to decontextualize and reverse the patterns. The mythological Greek couple of Pygmalion and Galatea enjoys a shift of their roles in the story of Leila/Dart. Alongside with this major reversal Erica Jong questions and alters the places even of the archaic couple Moon/Sun. In her cover version we have Dart as a moon and Leila as a sun for Dart, ‘who required a sun in order to gleam’(p.26).
The Pygmalion myth has been told and retold many times-but never with the woman as artist and the man as Galatea! A quick cross-reference from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (1598), Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, W.S. Gilbert’s comedy Pygmalion and Galatea (1871) up to G.B. Shaw Pygmalion (1912) [BBM&L 1993] will prove that Galatea is always an Aphrodite’s sister. But what happens to Pygmalion myth when our creator is a woman and her creation is a man? Simple: the creation betrays the creator with as many ‘nubile young groupies as possible’-p.67/III. Dart/Galatea couldn’t possibly help betraying his Leila/Pygmalion. Having become a star through Leila’s loving re-creations of him, he was now ‘besieged by young cuties.’ Leila was left no other chance but to blame her cowboy canvases of Dart that went to live on their own life, regardless of her artist’s will: to keep her creation as near as possible.
The sexuality I found in him exuded from the C prints, from those cowboy canvases, and every spectator could feel it. Dart had become the property of the world, and everyone wanted to fuck him. p.67/8
Instead of marrying her creation as a proper Pygmalion does Leila is caught in her own trap of being a fierce artist, rather than a fierce lover. It is quite amusing in the same reversed mode that this is Dart who insists on marrying Leila while she is not at all that eager. The odd episode of his proposal when he produces a diamond ring for her results in her getting ‘engaged to herself’ - ‘Leila is engaged to Louise Zandberg’. This is just a tiny example of the powerful identity of Leila as of an artist who gradually turns towards self-love and self-respect, rather than sticking to the mythical woman’s lot of a victim.
Dart in the cowboy canvases and the film stills
What remains undeniable is that Dart Donegal had given her a lot - the gift of life, and so Leila returned the favor by immortalizing her lover in her art. There are two very exciting ‘memorabilia’ of Dart that could cover Dart period in Leila’s career. These are the cowboy canvases and the series, called simply ‘The Film Stills of Dart/Trick Donegal’ that was even more successful than the cowboy canvases and made Dart, by Leila’s own hand, a star and a myth. Both of them are given prominence in terms of their creative process and appreciation.
We could argue that the artist’s choice to reside in the figurative style, portraying her darting lover is a symptomatic enough for her addiction to both love and art. It is her only period so explicitly organized around this obsessive topic of Dart. From that point on we will have works and periods mirroring Leila’s mind but none of them will dwell on creating portraits of Dart/love.
The creative period of the cowboy canvases could be very useful with a hint on what is not like Leila’s style. A rather ‘sappy’ rendition of Dart and Leila’s first meeting in the Tetons: ‘cowboy and a cowgirl riding beneath the sunset through fields of flowers - an image more suitable to one of those pseudo-hippie greeting cards than for a show of the new works of Leila Sand.’ Leila had painted it to Dart’s design (‘he had scribbled a rough sketch on a napkin; I, of course, had painted it as if bewitched) and there is no denying that it’s an abortion’ (p.26/I). The succulent and energetic connotation of ‘sappiness’ is coupled with the pseudo-romantic message to consolidate our vision of anti-Leila. What will keep concerning us though will be what is Leila-like style, what a woman artist’s style is like? Are there are any particular patterns that are valid in any woman’s art/blues? How about the particularities of a male style? These are the traps for any art historian, no matter how for or against gender studies they are.
What is assuredly valid for Leila Sand’s art is the tricky elusive line between art and love. Both the film stills and the cowboy canvases were ‘born of my love for Dart’. From the moment Leila met Dart, she ‘ was sketching him’. From the sketches of him, she evolved the cowboy series -‘enormous mixed-media close-ups of Dart as the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gary Cooper in High Noon’. Leila is aware that she is rearranging myths and mythical figures, which proves very dear and appealing to the bying audience. This very bying audience proves not only that the paintings are ‘alive’ but that the myths of the fifties are still tantalizing to the world in the eighties. Myths are persistently alive and what sustains them is the power of art.
I took this cultural icons of my childhood and superimposed this beautiful young man upon them. I hybridized this man born in the fifties with these images from my fifties childhood, and the passion with which I did this lost on no one. p.66/III
The passionate film stills of Dart are portraits of Dart that depict his ‘infinitely inspiring, infinitely bewitching, infinitely alluring’ multiple ego. No wonder that this overstressed infiniteness ends up in the photographs, that are ‘blown up to the overlifesize C prints, like movie posters.’ As if these efforts are not mythologizing enough Leila invokes in them the metaphors for his multiple personalities. Providing herself with an old-fashioned camera Leila begins photographing Dart in various costumes: ‘Arlecchino in motley, the Lone Ranger (again), rock star as heartthrob (with Elvis Presley thrust at the camera), fifties truckdriver in T-shirt with beer can in hand, young WASP in black tie, St. Sebastian pierced with arrows, Hell’s Angel in black leather, Jesus in a loincloth on the cross’ -p.67/III.
This is whereabout Erica Jong takes her chance to dismantle another ‘minor’ misconception - that of photography as a lesser art. By applying one and the same verb when referring to Dart and photography ‘I had always been fascinated by...’ Jong ranks photography equal among the most traditional, somewhat patriarchal modes of expression and types of media as a manipulation of light upon the retina, containing every bit as much of its own integrity as oil painting or the carving of marble - p.67/III.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998