ART REVIEW : A Multiplicity of Moods

Ironic, elegiac, glib, confrontational and completely silly--not necessarily in that order, and certainly not all at once, but by turns--Zizi Raymond’s mediation of the politics of the feminine is marked by a profoundly nervous energy.

In one corner of the Dorothy Goldeen Gallery is a cheerleader with pompons overhead, cast in silver and mounted on a red cross--a tongue-in-cheek martyr to the stasis of suburban sex roles. In another corner is a photomural of a forest in autumn, a young girl’s white dress latticed into the photographic paper, winding in and out of the fallen leaves--a haunting metaphor for the girl-child’s vulnerability.

The rapid and repeated shifts in mood record the immense difficulties of negotiating an artistic identity, especially for a female artist. But Raymond’s jittery assemblages come a little too close to enacting the myth of the hysterical woman--not intentionally, in order to pull it apart from within, but by default.

This work is frustrating, and never more so than when Raymond gets it absolutely right. In “Pipe Dreams,” she restages a well-known painting by Magritte. Subtitled with the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”), a picture of a pipe is replaced with an actual pipe and, wafting up out of it, a woman’s white lace nightgown, as diaphanous as billowing puffs of smoke.

What Raymond seems to be interrogating is Freud’s notion that the artist creates in order to gain “honor, power and the love of women.” More broadly, the work elucidates the degree to which patriarchal language--the language of art included--is overlaid with and inextricable from a certain fantasy of woman.

Unlike the other work exhibited here, “Pipe Dreams” can neither be described in a single adjective nor reduced to a single mood. It solicits multiple readings. Despite this open-endedness, it feels deliberate rather than hurried. In this, it provides Raymond with a model for future work.

Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., Santa Monica, (310) 273-0603, through May 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.