A woman artist’s fairy tales

There is, and always has been, great professional difficulty for women artists. They aren’t taken as seriously as men. Their work is undervalued, undershown, underreviewed and underappreciated.

Women artists (artists who happen to be women) usually handle this problem in one of two ways, with very little space in between extremes. They may ignore it and paint “male” (i.e., traditional) subject matter, using traditional methods. Or they may choose to address the problem directly, by making their gender the subject matter of the art itself.

Such is the case of Ruby Osorio, whose work is on view at the Laguna Art Museum through Feb. 19. Osorio’s gouache paintings on paper (with some use of embroidery-like string) float along the walls of the museum’s second floor. The paper and string both evoke “feminine” pastimes: paper dolls and stitching pretty flowers. The figures themselves -- all girls, all with the same basic face and body type -- heavily evoke the illustrations of Antoine de Saint Exupéry in “The Little Prince,” a puzzling reference in this context.

The chief philosophy in Osorio’s work seems to be a combination of reappropriation and irony. To call Osorio’s work “girly” would be an understatement. Frail, small-breasted girls in floaty dresses pirouette in gravity-defying positions on the paper in various states of undress. It’s meant to be a kind of pink velvet glove with brass knuckles underneath.

There are allusions to male fantasies: group showers, women on toilets, women fondling each other, themselves and whatever happens to be at hand. There are plenty of Eve references (a group of girls dance winsomely around a mountain of apples), Pandora references, and ... well, you get the idea. There are nipple-pecking birds and various other beasts scattered around the walls, interacting with the oddly passive and self-involved girls.

All of this is done under the figure of a “fairy tale.” The exhibit, originally installed in the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, is entitled, “The Story of a Girl (Who Awakes Far, Far and Away).”

It is a reappropriation, of course. Many oppressed groups respond to negative terminology imposed on them by the dominant ideology (the use of the term “queer” by the gay community is a good example of this).

There’s nothing more “male” than a fairy tale, where women are either aloof virginal beauties or hideous frightening hags. Both stereotypes wield a kind of mysterious, repressed sexuality that stops at the happy ending. Fairy tales have been reappropriated before; the trick to successful reappropriation is a heavy dose of irony.

Perhaps, then, there’s more irony here than I can detect. I find Osorio’s work both attractive and repulsive. It is whimsical and airy. But there is the disturbing sense that these images are blind to their own traffic in stereotypes. The “voice” they speak in still seems infiltrated by the male fantasy they claim to be liberated from, as an expression, so the exhibit claims, of “a distinctly feminine psyche.”

If this requires explanation in the form of the accompanying set of essays (on display as you come through the door), perhaps these female figures, in their exaggerated femininity, aren’t free at all.

There’s the troubling sense that the exhibit has missed its own irony, like a self-incriminating remark made by an ignorant speaker. It is a naiveté that comes across as neither charming nor dangerous, but instead rather puzzling.

I find the fragmented and falling women the most disturbing. Scattered here and there are long-haired, pre-Raphaelite figures missing a leg, an arm, other parts. The lines and colors simply stop on the white page. Are they emerging from the paper, or are they unfinished? Unfinished seems to be the most likely intent. Here then, all along the walls, are fairy images of girls that aren’t quite complete.

The claim for universality also disturbs me, the idea of dreaming, sleeping and waking in this fantasy that seems more like a nightmare the longer you look. I say the exhibit has claims on a universal “girl” experience because of its title: These many girls are really one. But here are figures falling in space with painfully fragile little faces peeking out of flowers.

These are little elves, not women; it is the “blossoming” rose that we (and I say “we” because I am a woman, and I am being addressed as such by Osorio’s art) as we are supposed to be, not as we are.

Perhaps that is the point. Perhaps these girls are each attempting to address the problem of feminine expression each in their own way, and every figure on the paper represents a different moment in a maturing woman. The tale of escapism they exhibit is really a tale of entrapment, a story that comes across clearly in the runway-model indifference on each heart-shaped, perfect face.

If this sort of smoldering resentment is what Osorio sought to induce, then it is a job only partially well done. Like post-feminist identity itself, the confusion of selfhood should not be the point. The danger here is isolated, narcissistic, toothless, even cute. There are no real ambivalences, no real repercussions for these lost girls, beyond the fantasy itself.20060210hamo6rkf(LA)20060210isla8hnc(LA)Ruby Osorio’s “Pathless Travel.”