Madison Snorts at Consumerism
BY JANET SMITH

I

f you saw a chic pig-woman
with a turned-up snout, wellcoiffed bob, and armloads of
s h o p p i n g bags o n R o b s o n
Street last year, you've had a firsthand look at the bitingly comic performance art of Marlene Madison.
Madison's character piece, called
Chiclette, the Posh, Urban Piglet, is

tteGentury
w h a t s h e calls a p e r f o r m a n c e
"intervention". Snorting through
the city's toniest boutiques last
Buy Nothing Day (November 27),
Madison n o t o n l y grabbed t h e
shocked a t t e n t i o n of passersby,
she thumbed her prosthetic nose
at today's hoglike consumerism.
W a t c h i n g s n i p p e t s from t h e
video she had shot of Chiclette's
day out, Madison laughs at people's reactions. Still, responses were
not nearly as uptight in Vancouver
as they were in Toronto earlier in
the year, when her pig lady hit the
upscale Holt Renfrew on Bloor
Street: "I think because, I guess,
they were really seeing themselves,
they pretended I wasn't there.
They're hard-core shoppers."
Settling back into an a n t i q u e
chair in her West End apartment,
Madison continues animatedly at
her off-the-odometer rate of speech:
"One thing about my performance
art is, I want to get across a message
that's the opposite of what I do.
Chiclette is a shopper, but the message is about overconsumption. This
character is steeped in this stuff,
she's caught in this brand-name
loop, and I don't think there is a

VANCOUVER
MILLENNIUM

Marlene Madison makes her performance accessible yet subversive.

way out, myself. What fascinates me
as well is I'm as seduced as the next
person by it. We're just so bombarded by all that—the billboards, TVs,
and now even the buses are being
painted with advertisements."
Madison will further explore the
cult of consumerism in her new
show, Little Miss Mira, which she'll
unveil at t h e Western Front on
October 15 as part of the Live at the
End of the Century festival. Her latest character is a fashion-obsessed
woman she says is searching for her
identity through brand names. She
turns to an astrologer and a psychiatrist for help—both of them portrayed in big-screen video segments
t h a t are integrated into the live
show. Throughout, standup comedian Jamie Hutchinson (who collaborated with Madison on a film-noir
spoof last year) performs his own
monologues commenting on the
t h e m e of o v e r c o n s u m p t i o n and
Madison's character.
Madison has been integrating
humour and pop culture into her
work since she began making per-

SYMPHONY
S E A S O N

FUTURE SHOP

MASTERWORKS GOLD

OCTOBER 2 & 4
SATURDAY & MONDAY

8PM

THE ROGERS G R O U P FINANCIAL ADVISORS

SYMPHONY SUNDAYS

OCTOBER 3
SUNDAY

2PM

ORPHEUM THEATRE

GEi££rt$<3*h ^ T R M ^ t t i

^BVT 3o-OcT 7

ft<tf

formance art as a student at the
Emily Carr Institute of Art and
Design in 1995. Her first video
piece, which she says she made
when she realized she was a "very
m e d i o c r e p a i n t e r " , was called
"Five Visits to the Doctor". It was
accepted into that year's Vancouver I n t e r n a t i o n a l Film Festival.
The monologue, based around a
w o m a n w h o becomes obsessed
w i t h g e t t i n g a bit of s o m e o n e
else's spit in her mouth, played on
the kind of neuroses that have fed
the explosion in antibacterial dish
soaps and cleaning sprays.
From germ p h o b i a s to b r a n d
names, Madison's subjects manage
to be accessible and subversive at
the same time.
"People that aren't involved in
the arts or haven't been exposed to
performance art tend to think it's
people running around naked onstage, b u r n i n g a flag, or d o i n g
something really out of reach intellectually," she says. "When I tell
people I do performance art, a lot
of them don't know what to say.
They don't know what I do."
In a long-accepted performanceart tradition, Madison stays true to
her visual-arts roots—not just by
creating her own wildly imaginative
sets, but in her approach. "My work
is based in sociopolitical commentary, and that's what I think good
art should do," she explains. "I didn ' t t h i n k I should go to theatre
school; I d i d n ' t like t h e idea of
repeating somebody else's words."
After debuting Little Miss Mira at
Live at the End of the Century,
Madison does intend to trot out
her shopaholic Miss Piggy again—
first on video, and then: "I want
to take her to New York with two
little C h i c l e t t e pigs. And Chiclette's going to be coming out
with her own line of perfume." •

The Comedy Tnoope that br
Wiliano Shakespeare [Abridge

A Hilarious Original Tale Of A Man On 1

October 6th
Tickets $10/$

Starring: Toby Bernen C
Nicholas Harrison, Dav

Directed \

Havana C
1 2 1 2 Cor
Reservations Recommended 73C

VECC
V A N C O U V E R
C U L T U R A L

EAST
C E N T R E

Thursday, sept 30 8pm S14/10
Standing wave in Concert
Friday, Oct 1 8pm S18/15
Martin Hayes and Dennis
Saturday, Oct 2 8pm s l6/l2
Duke Ellington's Black, Br.