Pandora’s Box collage
This is how we get to the Leila’s version of the old Greek myth of the beautiful all-gifted Pandora, opening her jar/vase/box of evils. ‘All the evils flew forth and they have ever since continued to afflict the world’ or so the Pandora’s myth flows [BBM&L 1993]. Here we face Leila, who likewise Pandora, is opening her box - a box of Dart memorabilia, which she has hidden away from herself. Out she takes all the photographs, cards, dried flowers, and begins to assemble them into a collage.
As the fury to turn the love affair into its own monument takes me, as the fever rises, I seize hold of the scissors and paste and start snipping, pasting, even daubling over the bits and pieces of my life with Dart. Pandora’s Box, I call it, as the fury to collage my life overwhelms me. 252/XVI
While arranging snipped pieces of Dart, Leila is battling with herself over the same old dilemma of art and life, trying to find the answer of the question what does it mean to be an artist who takes all the pieces of her life - quite literally - as material? ‘Does it doom one to unhappiness, or is it after all the only bliss?’(p.253/XVI) Without any answer Leila Sand carries on, cherishing her belief of the blurring boundaries between life and art. The Pandora’s Box seems to grow alive and animated like the famous canvas of Dorian Gray in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. So does Dart, who seems to be winking at Leila, saying ‘Call me, Call me’ -255/XVI
However the Pandora’s Box is a source for another myth that will contribute for the perception of Leila’s style. Pandora’s box is able to invoke another mythological personae - that of the terrible mother goddess of Kali. The Indian goddess that stands for the creative principle and the destructive principle joined in one. While snipping, pasting and rearranging bits of her life, Leila feels not only like Pandora, but like Kali, as well. Leila is represented as a double of Kali. The madness is the same madness, as well as the fever in the blood and the pride of ‘creating a word out of nothingness’. We could be assured that whenever E. Jong deals with fever, fury and madness she brings about their positive connotations in reference to the creative woman. No wonder that when Leila looks at the snippets and pieces she has been playing with all day her ‘head throbs...’ with positive feelings. Kali’s view to creativity seems to hold the answer to the contemporary woman artist: ‘How else dare to create, if you do not dare to destroy?’- 256/XVI.
There is still another collage piece, that is born by the same creative force to destroy. It is based on all of Leila’s obsolete Filofax pages and Rolodex cards, reminding us irrevocably of her mythical obsession with the telephone. It is firstly called 'Sex in the Age of AIDS', with some pieces cut into sensual, even genital shapes, with dismembered Polaroids of Dart, and even with a pink-wrapped Excita condom pasted in the center. Leila is once again presented like a woman possessed with passion, energy and lust. Jong summons up all those positive emotions into the paper and the glue and arrives at the most appropriate and exuberant sexual simile, where the images ‘vibrate like an orgasm well and truly achieved’ - p.257/XVI. This collage could also be called 'Empty Bed Blues' and further dedicated to Bessie Smith, Leila’s heroine, as if to lead us to her new period:
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998