The Clichettes go after the cliches

A trip to the McMaster Museum of Art

There was a time when western art decided that imitation was a form of undermining—whatever the bad thing was that needed undermining: patriarchy, gender roles, sexism, femininity, masculinity, traditional family, ways of seeing, habits of representation. Feminist critique especially delighted in this kind of appropriation and, to use the concept that became crucial much later, in the 1990s, performance.