Last night I attended the opening of Francine Spiegel’s solo show “Mud and Milk” at Deitch’s 76 Grand Street space. Francine’s illustrative canvases, collages of 70’s TV heroines and scenes from spaghetti westerns, splash across the gallery walls, as garish as pulp novel covers or B-movie posters. This is pop art for the TBS-rerun generation, except that it’s not quite TBS. There’s something disturbing about the comically exaggerated heroines that live in Francine’s shadowy paintings, something that makes you want to further objectify the simultaneously naïve and resourceful femme-sauver brought to life in slasher films. That same something seems to be reiterated Hollywood's latest batch of doe-eyed, nearly-virginal seen-on-screen vampire girlfriends.

In one piece, what appears to be a chemical fire or a space nebula drips off the canvas, breaking through the cool layer of (TV screen) blackness. There’s the suggestion of hasty vandalism in the red “spray-painted” halo that surrounds the centerpiece--Nellie Olsen, Walnut Grove’s favorite glowering mean-girl. Another painting depicts a blond woman with characteristically big-even-in-bed-hair, screaming in horror and clutching her sheets, although arguably, she is gasping in sexual ecstasy. This is the poignancy of Francine’s work,  its commingled familiarity and ambiguity. To the left of Big-Bed-Hair Woman, a girl drenched in something red and icky hikes up her prairie dress and wails. The depiction is exaggerated and absurd, but what strikes me is the woman's immobilization and objectification. She’s wailing, she’s filthy, she’s other (and by there way, here are her bare thighs), she’s there for you to gawk at.

Francine’s creation process is documented in blown-up photographs in the Deitch entryway, where friends-cum-models pose with crusty, brightly-colored goop oozing over clenched faces. I'm sure this is helpful for those who missed the opening and therefore the window-front performance, “The Curse of the Century-Old Egg," but ahem, you really should have caught the live act. For me, the performance inculcated the meaning behind the paintings.

Having paid scant attention to the display photos, I had little idea what to expect, and the build-up seemed excessive—people milled in front of the gallery for over an hour while Francine and crew emptied pepto-bismal in buckets, set out cartons of eggs and peeled the foil from bottles of acrylic paint. Finally Francine, in jeans and a flannel shirt, sat down with a few girls in ruffled polyester replicas of feminine frontier wear and shared a red-wine toast.

"Has it started?” one guy yelled haplessly at the window.

“Yeah, is it art yet?” someone else prodded. Having been the victim of much lackluster performance “art” myself, I also wondered.

But then, as the frontier-girls formed a circle around a pie-tin of mashed sweet potatoes, Francine disappeared, returning a moment later in a black vinyl dress, blue tights and sparkle-sandals with the price still attached. She planted candelabra in the middle of the prim tea party, and the women had more wine—this time  gold and bubbly—and then one of them tossed her glass carelessly over her shoulder and we knew. Now it was art.

Two of the women rose, holding the candelabra, and Francine and another woman began to pour something thick and white over the demurely bowed sunbonnets. The scene was  tender, domestic and radiant. They appeared as subjects from a Vermeer painting, excessively feminine, dewy-skinned and wholesome. Next they squeezed bottles of chocolate syrup over the white stuff, so that the two colors marbleized to form a gorgeous, almost solid drape over the bonnets and the dresses’ puffed shoulders. For the first few minutes everything seemed poetic and  stately, but the ritualism quickly dissolved to Dionysian chaos. The women formed an assembly line, each dumping buckets of red paint over the preceding head. Eggs slammed against the (audience) window, flour flew in elegant white arcs, as the women scurried frantically, unhindered by their layered clothes, crouching to absorb blows even as they inflicted blows on each other.

A red umbrella appeared, there were pies in faces, and eventually one woman cradled a dismembered plastic arm which she used to stroke her body before falling to the floor in a fetal position and rolling around, straddling the arm—all soundtracked to generic horror flick drone and tribal electronica. The flour settled over the scene like ashes and somewhere a smoke machine, which originally added to the literary illusion of misty dark nights, took on more vivid, hellish connotations. By the end the women were  ripping apart hay bales and pressing themselves against the—at this point almost entirely opaque—window in orgiastic smears. For the grand finale the music changed to a campy cartoon jig, and the women grabbed each other and danced accordingly—their now-sagging skirts and loose hair swaying heavily. It had an unsettling effect, not unlike witnessing a square dance in a slaughterhouse, as they skipped and frolicked through a good four inches of standing slime. With the final musical chords, they crumpled suddenly, falling over like wind-up dolls out of juice. I gaped out the window, mesmerized and somewhat shell-shocked. For a full hour, Francine and her cohort had managed to hold my rapt attention with what was, essentially, a food fight.

So…here’s what I make of it: Exces and gluttony, fetishism, voyeurism. A fairly obvious critique of women’s relegated roles in male-dominated media, particularly pornography, film and advertising. Exploitation and otherness—the action is “framed” as a presentation, made two dimensional by a window, and we, the audience, watch behind a protective plane of glass.

When shaving cream splatters across chests and faces, I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought “money-shot.” And when one woman was hit with bucket after bucket of paint, she lolled her head in exaggerated sensuality—Herbal Essence, anyone? The use of specific materials—fetish foods such as cherries, chocolate and whipped cream—and “fertility” foods, such as eggs and fruit—seems highly purposeful, as does the domestic act of stirring of the mixtures with big wooden spoons.

At one point I heard someone say, “It looks like period blood.” And it did. As the girls strung gummy pie-filling syrup between themselves, it formed a semi-solid chain, which seemed organic and bodily—menstrual fluid, afterbirth, maybe a traumatic mixture of mucus and blood. I also heard murmurs of “Carrie,” which is perfect, given that Milk and Mud is about female pop-archetypes, some of them easily recognizable, and others more generic and evocative. In her black dress with her long hair and short-cropped bangs, Francine reminded me of a fairy-tale crone, and when one of the women paused, spoon raised like a wand, puke-green paint dripping down her face, she resembled no one so much as Oz’s own Wicked Witch of the West.

It’s also interesting to note that “performance” is not a crucial element in Francine’s art. In fact, the food-fight scene often takes place privately, with its main objective being the photographs from which the paintings then emerge. And upon revisiting the paintings after the performance, the visual components seemed less abstract—those intestinal white squiggles are clearly based on shaving cream, those little rings down a dress are actually sodden fruit loops. In the press release, Deitch labels Francine’s characters paintings, “half-alive and half-dead, half confused and half horny.” Add half possessed and half possessing, and I’d say that covers it. You missed the performance, but you can still see the “fragmented females” at Deitch until October 31.