Marvin Gaye Chetwynd What Do Artists Do All Day?

The layers and the sense of fun and playfulness

when I'm referencing different things...

In my opinion, anyone would be able to get it, in a really intuitive way.

You don't have to have, in any way, been to art college or anything

like that, and I find that people do appreciate it on many levels.

I've been given lots of opportunities where you're completely free.

It's the opposite of being controlled.

Like, "Please, come and do what you want here", so I haven't even had

to think about where I place myself in relation to performance art.

It's slightly outrageous. I'm quite spoilt.

If you are obsessively trying to work on an idea

and you don't want to be bothered by eating, porridge is amazing.

It means that you don't have to eat for ages.

Totally unfascinating thing

is that I mix my porridge half water, half milk.

My name is like a trading name,

or like a nom de plume,

nom de guerre, whatever it is. A stage name.

All of the above makes sense.

When someone uses a name for when they work, if that makes sense.

It's very straightforward, very simple for me.

During some of the time when I was using that name, I thought

it would be really irritating and funny to change it again,

when the people who had been irritated by it

were just settling with it.

So I waited until what I thought was the right time,

and it felt like it was this summer.

So I went for it and it seems to have been really perfect

and quite fun, still.

I just can't describe it.

With anything like that, I definitely don't care.

It's like I'm choosing a name to cheer myself up,

but it's extremely complicated, all the reasons.

There's so many reasons that you could pick on to talk about,

or you could choose to explain.

And in a simple way, the name is a way to keep me cheered up.

It's not for any other person. It's like a private joke, in a weird way.

I received a phone call asking me

if I'd like to be part of the Turner Prize,

and I think of my work almost like a child

that I've had for seven, eight years.

It feels like I love it in the same way, weirdly.

So I don't have a dilemma between my work and my baby.

I love them like they're both kids.

And so to turn down the Turner Prize feels wrong,

because it feels like you're denying your child,

that's eight years old, the fun that it should have, or something.

So I said yes to it.

This little person was three months old

and I had to continue to be a good, professional artist.

Also, I had to contribute to my income as well.

So it's quite normal, in a weird way.

I'm sure it's normal for everyone these days to balance.

Impressive. Impressive brushing.

Shall I help?

There was stability in my family before I was born

until an age of roughly when I was three,

and then from the age of three,

there was a lot of travelling and transition.

My parents, through their work...

We lived in Hong Kong, and we lived in Malaysia, and in Australia,

and even in Pakistan for a little bit.

There were times when we lived on beaches in Australia,

and at the night-time, there were sunsets

and parrots came onto our balcony.

It was very colourful, wild, free and exotic, I guess, as well.

Both my parents have encouraged us to have unconventional,

alternative upbringings and lifestyles.

To be honest with you, I think I've even been almost, like,

an experiment by my parents, to have a different take on life.

I think they really wanted it, actually.

This whole room is one piece of art.

This is one element, the brain bug is one element,

the diorama is one element, the gobos are one element.

I've just started without planning it.

It's like when you write a sign

and you haven't planned out where to put the letters,

so you ended up squeezing all the letters at the end.

You know, the last three letters haven't got the perfect spacing.

At worst, it's called abysmal, and at best, it's called punk.

I've got the means to hold together a group of people

to have a particular time,

like a buoyant sense of freedom, a sense of autonomy,

as if they're sort of feeling like they're empowered.

So, I'm asking, very simply, whether our morality is up-to-date

with the amount of medical and technical advance

that we have in our society. It's very simple.

It's like our outdated morality is probably more linked

to Victorian times or medieval times or something like this.

Financial gurus such as Alvin Hall

encourage people to rein in their spending...

..to control their fiscal urges and desires,

and, in this way, gain freedom.

Can we adapt and cope, and change, and have good quality of life,

and feel confident and full of morale?

And the performances definitely ask those questions.

I'm not trying to hide it.

If they're seen to be just entertaining,

that would be kind of wrong, to be honest with you.

This is the brain bug from Starship Troopers.

We're inside the brain bug and it's like a metal,

aluminium frame with two layers of skin.

One is foam and one's cloth.

People say that I'm intentionally bad,

as if I was intentionally amateurish with my aesthetic, when, actually,

if you were to watch me, I'm just excited and impatient to make things.

And I'm making them myself, that's why they look bad.

It's me making them.

It's not because I'm employing a professional or that I've

spent five years learning how to use the material,

it's because I'm trying to botch it together quickly to tell a story.

I want to make it really expressive and dirty, and sort of crazy,

and I don't have any other people other than myself,

so I might have to just go crazy on my own.

I'm totally interested and always full of respect

when I research and learn about any of the artists

who have gone through the '60s and '70s,

all these famous periods of happenings

and art events, performance...

I just think it's nothing but deeply impressive.

I was invited by some friends

who were from the same art college as me

to put on a live element in a show they were doing.

Then I started researching, kind of thinking that it would be funny,

not laughing, but I was being very flippant... I was thinking,

"Oh, I'll just have a go at re-enacting the Anthropometries."

There was this really famous moment where the women were painted

and they impressed their bodies with the blue paint

and made these brilliant, famous impressions.

Some of them were just slid across the floor, and it was all

kind of as if they were brushes, rather than using brushes.

He really questioned things. He threw away the paint brush.

And he wanted to have naked women in the studio to be more invigorated,

so it's just wonderful.

I think he's brilliant.

But in all honesty, in total, natural, knee jerk reaction reality,

the people who I reference are more like the Marx Brothers,

Mae West,

anyone from Kenny Everett to Harry Hill.

There's a level where I'm genuinely connected to something

more like carnival and comedy...

..rather than endurance performance arts.

I've been given lots of opportunities where you're completely free.

I am being given total rein,

and that's happened to me for a long time now, from college.

It's as if I'm been given... It's the opposite of being controlled.

Like, "Please, come and do what you want here",

so I haven't even had to think about where I place myself,

really, in relation to performance art and things.

It's slightly outrageous, like I'm quite spoilt.

We've come to these caves called Peel Street Caves,

and we're going to do a section of the film where people are going

to be doing debt counselling and it's going to be a small section

filmed that will be part of Nottingham Contemporary's exhibition.

We're in the Peel Street Caves,

which are under the city of Nottingham.

This is also known as Rouse's Sand Mine,

and it's one of the 550 caves that we know about under the city.

They're all sandstone, they're all man made,

and this is the biggest, we think, anyway.

We're all happy? Are you happy? Is that it?

'The space is beautiful to me

'because I want to present a kind of help group,

'like an anger management,

or maybe a Weight Watchers group,

but this one, in this case, is debt counselling.

'I wanted it to look a little bit like medieval pictures of purgatory.

'In reality, their real debt problems

and the proportions of the rocks

'are to be in relation to the actual debt that the person has.

'We're going to put the rocks on our backs and walk around,

'and then the character who's playing the debt counsellor,

'who's the star of my story, she's going to be very calmly,

'and in a concerned way,

discussing the individual debt problems which each of the people in the group.

Anyone who's ready, can you jump in the middle?

I want to do Joanne's hair.

'Hopefully, it'll come across as visually interesting,

'and maybe, I don't know, MAYBE humorous, but we'll see.

'It might just come across as earnest and odd.

But I'm going to have a go at doing it.

'In the medieval times, there was this idea

'that you could buy your way into heaven,

'and then, in Victorian times, there was debtors' prisons,

'and now we have credit card culture,

'so I was just interested in the differences.

'And I was wanting to really have a debt counselling club

'were people really did have papier-mache boulders

'that corresponded to their bank balances.

'And in the film or video we're doing now, they're just meant to be

'that that whole idea, as a package, gets represented in the film.'

Does it look worthwhile doing?

Can you touch your chin again like you do?

I do feel like I've done all I can for you now.

CHETWYND LAUGHS

I've never given up on someone before though.

GIGGLING: You guys have got it wrong, he needs to be congratulated.

Thank you.

'I don't seem to work in any way in a professional,

'conventional film-making way.

'I have a slight reaction to the professional film industry.

I respect it but, for some reason, I want to work in a much more

low economy and hand-to-mouth way,

'and very much allowing spontaneity.'

Is there any light as she comes up here?

Does she get caught by the light?

'My mum's a professional set designer, a production designer,

and she's won an Oscar for Howards End, with Merchant Ivory.

'Some of my earliest memories of being on a film set playing

'with my brother, and we're having a lot of fun,

'and everyone on the set was really great with us.

'They were welcoming.'

You're doing really well.

'I remember we used remember we used to smash up doors with chains

'so that the doors had chips, so that it looked as though

'it had been lived in and other sort of film tricks.'

If you want to, we can offer you...

What seems to really work is eating really, really harsh horseradishes.

Amazingly, Jacob was nearly in tears. Would you like to do that?

Lucy's game, Martin's smiling.

Eat it quickly then move your hand away. Well done.

'The group I work with, I problem solve with them

'and I test the ideas to the group

'I'm going to out the performance on with.

'They understand the ideas, they like them.

'The group's made up of quite a random group of people anyway,

'from different backgrounds, so that's the lock, at that moment,

'when you realise that the group enjoy all of the humour

'and all of the references.

'Normally, that will be a successful communication to an audience.

'I've found it very straightforwardly.'

Do you know sewing machine pinning? I don't know.

If you do it like this, the sewing machine can go over it,

but I don't mind.

So, this is like a... How do I put it?

This is like a spare three hours,

where we can make the costumes ready for the performances

that are coming up.

It's like a moment, a day before the opening, where you could go

and relax, but in fact it's really useful

to just get ahead of some of the workload,

get some of the things mended,

and make sure that the guys who are performing

feel like they're slightly loved or slightly looked after.

This one...

You know in Star Wars there's this creature called a Wookiee

that Chewbacca is well known for being?

These are Wookiee children, this is a Wookiee child.

I think they're going through a sort of teenage crisis

and they've dyed their hair pink or something.

I don't know what it is.

-Oh, my God, you're making pink fur go everywhere.

-It's tiny.

-That's good!

-I made it for a small person.

-I'm not a small person.

You see... Can you see the layers I was talking about?

This is done, this is finished.

Turn around, honey.

Look, these are the layers I was talking about.

They're missing, but guess what?

We can't find, in Nottingham,

any of this brilliant fuzzy cheap fur that's only £1.99 a packet,

so I have this extremely thin pink fur to compensate with,

so I'm just going to have to get on with it and do that.

You can't fixate thinking,

"Oh, my God! We haven't done this bit!"

When someone is looking at the costume in all,

it has an effect, and also, when the person, who's an audience,

is looking at all the different costumes and things going on,

the many layers, it all adds up.

I'm quite aware that I'm not fixating on things.

Which sounds like I don't have any quality control again,

but I'm just bashing things out,

and I know that the end result has a much better energy than

if you were trying to do everything meticulously

and didn't manage to get an overall,

I don't know, sense of it.

I think Marvin Gaye Chetwynd's work is seriously funny,

and I mean that in every sense.

It's all about pleasure, joy, exuberance, laughter,

but I think it's quite a radical laughter.

It's almost child-like joy

resituated in an adult field of references

and in an adult context,

which is something that everyone can engage with.

The way of exhibiting in the art world on a high profile level

is in museums where there's a lot of people coming in who are expecting

to be given the same experience each hour of the day the museum's open.

But instead, oddly, I've been really stretched

and strained to produce a performative thing,

a performative atmosphere,

a performance to happen, like, the whole time the museum's open...

..which is incredibly strenuous.

It's like making people into dancing monkeys or something.

It's impossible.

You can do it for a time that makes sense to you,

and then you have to be relaxed or normal.

The phrase that I've been given by the Turner Prize experience

was that I have to make my work more robust

to handle the amount of public that would be happy to see it,

so I'm meant to meet the demand rather than it being able to be

that I can say, "No, that's impossible.

"I really need to only do once a week for one hour."

The answer I found is through film,

because of people like the Marx Brothers

making their brilliant films,

that you can manage to make a film that's really chaotic

and full of mayhem and that an audience would experience

that as if they were experiencing a live performance.

I actually seem to be slipping into making films

just to solve that problem.

MUSIC: "Jump In The Line" By Harry Belafonte

It's fantastic. It's really, really... It's great.

The thing that's important about the contribution of the people

I work with is simply that - that they contribute.

If you're working with a group of people you don't know,

they're too shy to actually jump in and contribute

and understand what you're trying to do.

I can set up a certain framework, but I need the energy

and contribution and ideas

of everyone to spill in and to mix together.

CHATTER

Everyone locks their minds in in the same kind of level of...

free will and concentration,

so it's quite exciting.

It gets very exciting...

That's really important.

We can't ever get away with statements, it seems.

It's as if we're not allowed to be that confident or

something like that. Everyone criticises you too quickly.

So rather than have a clean, clear statement,

I am posing questions, which is almost...

the manipulative way to get away with being political.

ROCK MUSIC PLAYS

It's good. It's been very good,

but there are different waves of energy within it.

It's like we're meant to somehow be intensely partying for four hours.

But at the moment there have been really good waves of moments

that have felt really, like, perfect.

And then there's other moments where you can tell everyone really

wants to go to the real backstage, like relax a bit.

So it's an odd thing where you have to,

like, timetable the times to relax and times to be...

..for ever in some way performing.

There's three different elements that seem to be working.

The puppets and the dancers seem to work.

And the Star Wars film really works when the song,

when the numbers, happen.

And also, there's enough for people to see, like, even if

they're coming in and things aren't really necessarily at a peak.

I do think there's a lot to appreciate.

SHE LAUGHS

# It's over, it's over... #

It's, like, something that could be considered very dangerous,

like a cult, or overly controlled,

but it's all volunteered and held together for a short period of time,

and then it is over.

I let go. I'm not trying to build something.

I find that people do appreciate it on many levels,

so I don't feel that I'm in trouble with this.

I feel like it's really natural, and I'm quite confident that the

referencing I do somehow communicates.

And that's weirdly why people keep asking me to do projects.

It is that is communicates.

# It's over

# It's over

# It's over

# It's over

# Goodbye, 1,000 times goodbye

# The thought may have crossed my mind

# That list would be my last goodbye... #