Monster Chetwynd: ‘I enjoy the mischief’

Monster Chetwynd is in her kitchen in Zurich, talking about the costume she wore for Tears, her 2021 performance work at Art Basel, in which she and a company of professional ballerinas took over the city’s Messeplatz and rolled around inside enormous inflatable globes.

“You can’t be nude [in public], but you can wear costumes with trompe l’oeil body parts,” she says. “Absurd! Here, I’ll show you.” She grabs a rucksack and retrieving what looks like a lion’s mane and a stocking. The former turns out to be a wig; the latter a pinkish catsuit encrusted with crimson rhinestones, with a photograph of an enormous cleavage printed on the chest.

Chetwynd, 49 — her real first name is Alalia — is best known as a carnivalesque British performance artist, though she also paints and makes sculptural installations. She is energetic, enthusiastic, a rapid-fire talker who describes herself as “a natural anarchist”.

Chetwynd makes most of her costumes by hand. But the catsuit is an exception, bought from “a wonderful sex-workers’ shop” called Aelita Fantasy Fashions, in Zurich, from which she also kitted out the Basel ballerinas in garments printed with more optical illusions: exaggerated abs and “gender-fluid sexual body parts”.

“I enjoy the mischief, the puzzles and the game-playing of costume,” she says. “And this matches instinctively how I would like to dress.

“Obviously I don’t in everyday life, I tone it down so that everyone can cope. But I love them.”

Chetwynd’s specialities are turning big ideas into spectacles, and dismantling the boundaries between artist and audience with a porous mise-en-scène. “When people enter my performances, they feel as if they are entering a composed painting,” she says.

In everyday life I tone it down, so that everyone can cope

As Spartacus Chetwynd, her previous moniker, she was nominated for the Turner Prize, in 2012, for Odd Man Out, a five-hour group performance at the Sadie Coles gallery, in London, about democracy and the body politic. The show featured a giant monster, an inflatable slide and performers re-enacting Bible scenes. She draped enormous, illuminated slugs on the steps of Tate Britain, in 2018 (“I wanted to use real bioluminescence, but the tech wasn’t ready”).

And in May, she will bring Pond Life: Albertopolis and the Lily, an “ambitious, multi-faceted” installation, to Gloucester Road Tube station in London, a commission for the Art on the Underground series. Giant, three-dimensional creatures — frogs, salamanders, tortoises and tadpoles — will occupy 80 metres of abandoned platform, a work that evolved after many iterations and discarded ideas.

In June, she will exhibit another original series, of chrysalis and moth installations, at Mount Stuart House, on the Isle of Bute, in Scotland.

It is a demanding schedule. “I make something and it feels like it’s always existed. But actually these things are a long process,” she says.

I am used to seeing Chetwynd in scanty costumes and exaggerated masks, wigs and make-up — sometimes glamorous, sometimes deliberately nightmarish. Meeting her in everyday dress takes adjustment.

She is a mixture of poise and low-key punkiness in an outsized mohair jumper, with hair loosely top-knotted and eyes elongated with great wings of black eyeshadow.

Her main studio is in the Swiss countryside, though her Zurich home is stuffed with handmade props and half-finished projects, which pop up at every turn: a startling latex pig mask on a wall; a funny-grotesque maquette of a bat on a shelf, which I recognise as a version of her installation at the recent Horror Show exhibition at Somerset House; devilish faces on doors; and, intriguingly, a life-size cardboard cut-out of Chetwynd in a ballgown.

The latter is a souvenir from a modelling assignment about 20 years ago, and it transpires that Chetwynd comes from “an interesting line of fashion models”.

Luciana Arrighi, Chetwynd’s Brazilian-born Australian-Italian mother, is a costume and production designer who won an Oscar for her work on Howards End, in 1993, and previously worked as a model for Yves Saint Laurent. Chetwynd’s grandmother, Arrighi’s mother, modelled for Schiaparelli, and her aunt for Balenciaga.

This high-fashion heritage is at odds with Chetwynd’s handmade aesthetic, but it does explain her instinct for visual impact and presentation — “this family history, in which it was taken for granted that fashion was integral and respected”, as she describes it.

Despite the embellished unitards and grotesque masks, Chetwynd reveres high fashion, particularly Dior and Chanel: “inspiring, radical”. In 2018, she even based a performance at France’s Centre National des Arts Plastiques on the life of Madeleine Vionnet, the Parisian haute couturier venerated for bias-cut gowns in the 1920s and ’30s. Vionnet and Ethical Capitalism involved Chetwynd and performers re-enacting the story of Vionnet’s pioneering employee welfare programmes.

She recalls performing a mime about 1930s dental care wearing a bias-cut dress: “Ridiculous, obviously. But I was wearing wonderful things.”

Chetwynd was born into a British aristocratic family. Her father, Rupert, who died in 2021, was a captain in the Grenadier Guards, who later ran a medical mission as an aid worker in Afghanistan. She describes an unusual childhood in which she was given an extraordinary amount of freedom — bordering on neglect — spent partly in Hong Kong and partly in Australia, where she loved “the irreverence and humour and the jokes — so much more direct and progressive than the UK”.

After a degree in anthropology at UCL — a discipline that still underpins her artistic research and practice — she studied painting at the Slade School, then an MA at the Royal College of Art. For many years, she made her home in Glasgow’s artistic community, a city she loves.

But she describes a sense of growing demoralisation. “I didn’t feel artists were treated brilliantly in Britain. People felt artists were tricksters, they weren’t treated as professionals.”

Alongside her artistic practice, Chetwynd has long taught in higher education. But she became worried by precarious employment conditions for many staff in UK institutions. Three years ago, she looked for a job in continental Europe to fit around her practice and landed a part-time teaching role at Zurich University of the Arts, where “I’m well treated, well paid, respected”, she says.

Her Swiss students, who are used to generous state funding for the arts, often don’t know what to make of her constant reminders to take a DIY approach. “It’s important for artists to generate worthwhile art, not just wait for access,” she says. “I tell them, you don’t need a commercial show, you don’t need to be represented by a gallery.”

Chetwynd takes this seriously. Although she is represented by several commercial galleries, her next side-project is her own exhibition space — in the single car-park space that came with her Zurich home.

Because she does not own a car, it was lying unused. But soon, she and others will stage performances and exhibit work in the suburban lot, a “funny-stupid idea” that is “exciting because there are no walls”.

Her intention is to take a stand against “artwork about green politics in institutions”.

“The urgency of the subject matter does not match the product. It’s going to fail. So a car-park space that’s not a car-park space is already on track. It contains its own antidote.”

Chetwynd’s enthusiasm about this theme is sincere, and she is in the enviable position of being both a serious artist and a childlike subversive (she loves comedians with an absurdist edge, and rattles off a list of her favourites: Kenny Everett, Paul Hogan, the Marx Brothers).

I realised I could achieve a lot through simply changing my name

But she has, since her early thirties, adopted pseudonyms. After Spartacus (chosen to reflect the idea of solidarity among people from different backgrounds), she was known for a while as Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (because she felt an affinity with the soul singer). More recently, she has adopted Monster.

Why doesn’t she simply call herself Alalia? “I realised I could achieve a lot through simply changing my name,” she says. “It does not cost anything and it appeared to give me volumes of space, new territory without travel or strain.”

Monster, she says, seems to fit now because it is “genderless, undefined and enables me to feel autonomous and unselfconscious”.

Chetwynd talks of a dizzying array of projects, plans and installations over a near 30-year career. Perhaps her greatest strength is her instinct for the absurd. While she is serious in her intentions, she does not take herself seriously.

Flicking through her monographs, full of photographs of her and performers, gleeful in her handmade costumes, it is hard not to marvel at her imagination: here, she is in a jewelled bikini caressing an enormous model of Jabba the Hutt; there, she is wearing nothing but parcel tape and a gold cape — and always with the black winged eye make-up.

At one point in our interview, Chetwynd says that, ultimately, she seeks to occupy herself just enough “so that life isn’t too deadly”.

“You just need whatever it is to make life interesting enough to get through it.”

It strikes me as a sensible aspiration.

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