Monster Chetwynd

Monster Chetwynd (1973) was given the name Alalia at birth, but often adopts a new one: Spartacus, Marvin Gaye and (since April 2018) Monster. Although she makes sculptures, paintings, films and installations, performances are at the heart of her artistic practice. In 2012, she became the first performance artist to be nominated for the Turner Prize.

Her exuberant, sometimes absurdist and partly improvised performances feature professional actors alongside friends and family. The characters they play – from Adam and Eve to Yves Klein, Conan the Barbarian and Jabba the Hutt – are dressed in costumes made by the artist. She crafts the sets and props from cardboard, textile, latex and papier-mâché. Once a piece is finished, she recycles the material in a new work. This deconstruction and reuse is intentional: it is sustainable, functions as a critique of consumer society and challenges the idea that a work of art is necessarily unique. Her method is considered bricolage, a term coined by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who described the bricoleur as someone who creates or builds using the materials and symbols available to them at that moment.

Displaying ingenious associative ability, Chetwynd draws from countless sources. Medieval mystery games, carnival shows and popular theatre feed the chaotic collective energy of her performances. Art history informs her visual world, with influences ranging from Giotto and Hieronymus Bosch to Tiepolo and the dadaists. She is equally at ease whether quoting Dante, Marx and Christine de Pizan or Star Wars, has a fondness for ugly or terrifying creatures and likes to associate herself with a bat (see Crazy Bat Lady 4).

Humour is the thing tying all of this together. For Chetwynd, humour is a method in its own right. While her carnivalesque style is entertaining, it is also a response to the elitism and pretensions she sees in the ‘serious’ art world.