Julie Goldenberg at Artplace

A Phallic Woman is always funny. Like the famous fish on a bicycle. the Phallic Woman is a fabulous grotesque, something you never expect to see. Limbless, peripatetic water breathers will never appear on our roads. Regrettably the Phallic Woman can and does happen, ever more frequently. She is not woman with phallus, dominatrix, nag or playboy bunny. The ancient image of the feminist extra, a spear carrier, bearing a carved wooden dick on a pole. contradictory sign of power, castration and unfocussed revenge for just about everything, is not the point.

We are talking of woman as phallus, a comic psycho-social phenomena, akin to the legendary condoman, a wobbly condom with legs that once patrolled the Hay Street Mall in support of Safe Sex. Nothing could beat the comic effect of the bumbling phallus confronting consumers on Saturday mornings.

Nearly all the humour in Julie Goldenberg’s new show at Artplace, Claremont relies on similar collisions between immanent, explicit, even agressive, desire and social circumstances. Her female figures, are mostly outlined in bright colours, over modulated dense yellow or orange background so that their empty phallic shape predominates. They are pushy too, in the ruthless oblique style with which women confront each other in New Year sales, peeled cucumbers with attitude.

Goldenberg is fascinated by the origins of the waspish mindset of the Phallic Woman , a bleak vacuum surrounded by crackling hair trigger anger, in the ballbreaking, mindnumbing pseudo - feminists manner so popular in recent art. Several of her smaller pieces reprise early feminist outrage and outrages with merciless contempt for their self indulgence.

In Dinner a naked woman bends over backwards so that a bowl of purple blue pasta can be served on her belly. Goldenberg’s acidic dancing line and sickly colour by passes the bundle of contradictions this provokes, so that we are left with a humourous predicament, a grotesque moment with neither victim nor perpetrator. The usual feminist nonsense analysis - the woman is offering herself as dinner, the pose is contrived to deprive her of all control, the image is a construct of the male gaze, a negotiable commodity - are not so much negated as transposed, relocated into a realm of practical desires and existential absurdity. Tzara once suggested that we might use Rembrandt as an ironing board, in the same spirit Goldenberg suggests we use a female stomach as a dining table -because, in this culture its fun.

Feminist problems arose with a similar image - Allen Jones sculpture of a kneeling woman in bondage gear, supporting a glass table top. Goldenberg has almost no interest in the overt fetishism, pictorial rhetoric of submission that fascinated Jones, but she shares much of his sense of humour, Jones, too, is interested in the absurdity of the erotic, its ability to corrode even our most buttressed delusions. If anything Goldenberg’s investigation of the Phallic Woman pushes this absurdity even further.

Another small work features two women having a conversation in which small whisper white condom like creatures whisper in their ears like devils. Are we to take it that the conversation is loaded with phallic innuendo or that the words and sentences themselves are a parade of full-on phalluses. After all the thing about a phallic identity is that you just have to know who has the biggest so why not phallic gossip.

The phallic woman and the colonisation of the male gaze.