Meet the Clichettes — the feminist punk pioneers of Canadian performance art
Packed with props and costumes, the group's first retrospective is like visiting the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
In their first ever full-length performance, the Toronto-based artist trio of Johanna Householder, Louise Garfield and Janice Hladki, known as the Clichettes, played aliens from the planet More — or Morons, colloquially speaking.
On a mission to collect raw emotion, the aliens of Half Human, Half Heartache arrive on planet Earth disguised as girls. They practice telephone chatter, baton-twirling and worrying about cellulite to perfect their ultra-feminine cover. Noticing that clichés, like those in pop music, are the most prevalent mode of expression for Earthlings, the aliens form a '60s-style girl group, and in a fourth-wall-breaking, self-mythologizing wink and nudge, they call their band the Clichettes.
From the group's start in 1978 to their breakup in 1993, the Clichettes — the real ones — were themselves on a kind of mission, combining theatre, dance, comedy, drag and lip sync in a trailblazing evolution of performance art that took aim at the stereotypes of gender and sex.
They performed outside traditional art spaces, at rallies and benefits, and on stages from the Horseshoe Tavern to Roy Thomson Hall — once even opening for art rockers Rough Trade. In their day, the Clichettes were considered the darlings of Queen Street West, and at the height of their notoriety, they broke through to mainstream audiences, appearing on CBC, CityLine and the cover of Toronto Life magazine. What visual artist today could do the same?
Trained dancers who used comedy to do politics, the Clichettes emerged during a groundswell of performance-inclined interdisciplinaries who helped define the Toronto scene of the 1980s. Their contemporaries included General Idea, Vera Frenkel, the Hummer Sisters, Tanya Mars, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Elizabeth Chitty, David Buchan, Andrew James Paterson and Margaret Dragu. Theirs was a significant chapter in Canadian art that, in many ways, is still being written. Now, the trio of Householder, Garfield and Hladki are finally getting their curtain call.
At the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, the exhibition The Clichettes: Lips, Wigs and Politics is the first retrospective dedicated to the influential performance troupe. The show features video documentation from their four full-length plays and select other performances, dozens of costumes and props, as well as reams of ephemera (including a rejection letter from Late Night with David Letterman and a concert poster signed by feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who wrote, "Thanks for a new art form"). Lips, Wigs and Politics shows the Clichettes as the superstars they ought to be remembered as.
"It's overdue," says exhibition curator Ivana Dizdar. "They're so important for performance and so important for Canada."
And their work is still achingly relevant, she adds. Almost a decade before Gender Trouble, Judith Butler's landmark book on the subject, the Clichettes were exploring how gender is itself a kind of performance. "To take that and package it in this way that was entertaining, seductive, fun and drew audiences in was super radical and important — I would argue not only in Canadian art, but in a much broader sense too," the curator says.
"We were kind of hellions," Hladki tells CBC Arts in a telephone interview. "You're drawn in with laughter, but then you kind of gasp and go, 'Oh, there's some really serious stuff going on here.'"
Leaking from the exhibition doors, the first thing visitors will notice is the music. Whether it was The Four Seasons' Walk Like a Man or You Don't Own Me by Lesley Gore, popular song was the raw material the Clichettes mined and manipulated for meaning.
"I think what lip sync offered us was a way to be both inside and outside of the culture," Hladki says. "You have to inhabit the songs, so you can lean on them from the inside and emphasize the cultural messages."
In the gallery space, visitors will find many of the Clichettes' most memorable costumes installed on stage-like platforms with built-in video monitors showing excerpts from their major works. The garments were resurrected from the artists' own closets, basements and storage units, then carefully restored, Dizdar says, preserving the makeup stains and rough mends from quick changes between numbers. Beneath the gallery lights — and with the nearby video screens showing them in action — the costumes glow like the relics of pop idols from some lost wing of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Here, visitors will find a mannequin dressed in one of the Morons' mock Chanel skirt suits. At its feet sits a shopping bag containing the decapitated head of the character's boyfriend (a hand-me-down from a David Cronenberg film). On another plinth stands a ruffle-trimmed lounge lizard get-up from She-Devils of Niagara, in which the Clichettes disguised themselves as men to thwart a global regime set on eradicating the female sex.
At the centre of the room are three guitar-toting nude male muscle suits from the Clichettes' Go to Hell music video, where they performed to the Motörhead song of the same name. Skewering the "cock rock" genre, the video shows the Clichettes thrashing around stage in the beefcake costumes, interspersed with clips of explosions and war machines. In what Dizdar calls "arguably their most famous moment," the Clichettes pull the bobbling genitals off their costumes and kiss them in salute to the cheering crowd.
Dizdar was 19 or 20 years old when she first saw the Go to Hell video. At the time, she was a student at the University of Toronto, attending a performance art seminar led by Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak. "I didn't realize performance art or even art could be funny," she remembers.
Today, the curator is an art historian with a performance practice herself, and she considers the Clichettes among a small handful of influences that make up her fabric as an artist. While the group's recognition may be overdue, Dizdar also sees their influence in the work of other contemporary Canadian artists, such as Bridget Moser, Alvin Luong, Kiera Boult and Maya Ben David. (Ben David and dance artist Syreeta Hector have each been commissioned to make a new artwork in response to the Clichettes, which will screen as part of the exhibit's programming).
"Anyone who doesn't know [the Clichettes] is unlucky," Dizdar says. "But I also envy them because they get to encounter their work for the first time."
According to Hladki: "What's important about a retrospective is that it's not just about where you've come from and what you've done, but also, 'What are the kinds of questions that emerge now from the work?'"
She hopes audiences hear their feminist message and recognize what the Clichettes were exploring — socially, politically and culturally — about gender and sexuality is as relevant today as it was 30 years ago. Also, she says, "we were a hell of a lot of fun."
The Clichettes: Lips, Wigs, and Politics is on view at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton through November 22.
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