There may be a proliferation of performance across the art world but the bawdy, tumultuous and often hilariously free-form extravaganzas of Marvin Gaye Chetwynd are in a league of their own. These carnivalesque events can involve gangs of participants, elaborate wonky home-made costumes and props, and an eclectic range of sources from Hieronymus Bosch and Rabelais to Meatloaf and Conan the Barbarian. They resulted in Chetwynd (known back then as Spartacus rather than Marvin Gaye) being the first performance artist to make the Turner Prize shortlist in 2012. Her film, Hermitos Children, the pilot episode (2008), is in the opening displays of Tate Modern’s new, live art-oriented Switch House building. London-born and Glasgow-based, Chetwynd is currently showing at the Bonner Kunstverein, while recruiting schoolchildren to participate in a live work that is due to receive its premiere at the Liverpool Biennial on 9 July.
The Art Newspaper: What is the thinking behind Dogsy Ma Bone, your performance for the Liverpool Biennial, which involves working with local children on a fusion of Betty Boop’s A Song a Day and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera?
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd: I love Betty Boop and out of all her films I especially love this one. It’s set in an animal hospital where all the animals are appropriately poorly—the herring is pickled, the giraffe has a sore neck—and they start screaming and shouting, so Betty gets Grampy in [her eccentric inventor grandfather], and he makes all the furniture in the room turn into musical instruments. It suddenly becomes a scratch band and then all the animals jump up and start tap dancing and feel better—it’s quite random and fun. Then I thought Liverpool is so razzy and it’s a place where I’ve always had a lot of adventures, so maybe I could do it here? But when I met the biennial curators something different happened: we looked at all these amazing abandoned buildings around Liverpool and they wanted me to work with children, so we started talking about doing a production of Bugsy Malone which would really fit with the gritty feel of the location. But there was an insane amount of copyright control with Bugsy, so I came up with idea of doing Brecht’s Threepenny Opera because it seemed to be a good juxtaposition and the grittiness of what I liked about Liverpool locations still fits. There are still copyright issues, so we’ve got to make a massive effort to change the music and the lyrics, but I think it still works because I’d want a cheeky Scouser interpretation anyway.
The sources for your performances are eclectic and come as much from film, literature, history and popular culture as from art.
I’m a very curious person—I’m really attracted to information that needs to be rehabilitated or celebrated. I didn’t go to school until I was nine, and before then there was a lot of travelling with my parents and just having to hang out. Going to school in snippets made me hungry to learn, and it’s also part of being dyslexic: although I do read and am perfectly capable of writing, there’s a level where I’m much quicker at gleaning information through conversations and the spoken word. I’m a documentary junkie. I could watch four hours of BBC Four in a row without any problem.
How do your performances begin and develop?
I just have some weird visionary blind flash—I don’t understand where it comes from, but I know to trust it. So I get the flash and I always check it out by soundboarding with my best pals, often of [many] years, who are very moral and good people. If they revel in the ideas, then it reassures me to take it seriously and move forward. Then I’ll start researching and pulling in different people and seeing who’s free. And then I’ll have a meeting and a ridiculous rehearsal where we all meet up and everyone is bombarded with an avalanche of information and references, and we all talk through the ideas. I am not only relaying all the ideas but I’m also making it into physical action like a mime. After the rehearsal the only time we all meet again is for the run-through, but sometimes that can be the performance itself. Everything is through people’s contribution and enthusiasm.
Your mother is the film production designer Luciana Arrighi. She won an Oscar for Merchant Ivory’s Howard’s End. Has her work been an influence?
If you are brought up by someone who is loving their job and is fluent within it and is not complicated about training their children up to be within it, then this feeling is contagious. I learned to feel that you can do whatever you want to, that you should love your work and that that is natural. I really believe in the right to work: it brings dignity and confidence and I think I get that entirely from my mum. But there is also a level where I definitely have different politics to my parents: they are meritocrats and they genuinely believe that if someone doesn’t have the ability to rise up then they are not worthwhile, whereas I feel like you can just be yourself, you can do things on a local level, you can just enjoy the relationships with people around you and don’t have to be on some pinnacle.
You did a degree in social anthropology before studying sculpture. What attracted you to anthropology and why did you forsake it for art?
My unconventional childhood where we travelled all the time and were left with lots of different people—from a Zoroastrian Pakistani family to a single-mum Malaysian hairdresser—has given me a template where I am really positive about people and I entirely trust the world. That gave me a mindset which was receptive to social anthropology and the study of human behaviour. But it was a new and in many ways very self-conscious subject, and I found the way in which you were meant to abandon your world view and present information in an objective way a complete paradox and very frustrating. For example, you were not allowed to find anything funny because that was a judgment and a world-view bias. So then I went to the extreme opposite and worked out that you could be celebrated for being entirely subjective in art.
You’ve described your name change to Spartacus as an incantation and to Marvin Gaye as a talisman—can you elaborate?
They came out of wanting a trading name or nom de plume as a front for my work. The Spartacus name was an experiment because of the strange amount of attention I was getting at the time. The idea of taking on a name that I would never manage to fill the boots of was slightly like a private joke, and I liked the idea of anonymous solidarity—there’s a lot of left-wing politics that come across. Then the reason why I changed it again was as a reminder to look after my small family, my son and my husband, and to be really wary of the different kinds of pulls or demands on your life—whether from your parents, the rest of your family or your work. Marvin Gaye was this total free spirit who was brought up by this insane father and spent all of his life trying to prove himself to his parents, so this new label is very useful in allowing me to have some normality and breathing space and to make sure I nurture my own stability and happiness.