SELECTED WORKS BY Spartacus Chetwynd
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Spartacus Chetwynd
The Fairy Feller
2003
Paper, paint, paper-mache, glue and dutch metal
200 x 150 x 20 cm |
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Spartacus Chetwynd
The Lizard
2004
Fabric, latex, cardboard, paint, plastic and hesian
170 x 100 x 60 cm |
 
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Spartacus Chetwynd
The Mole
2005
Fake fur, latex, paper-mache, paint and plastic
170 x 60 x 60 cm |
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Spartacus Chetwynd
The Stick Insect
2004
Fabric, latex, cardboard, paint and plastic
220 x 60 x 60 cm |
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ARTIST INFORMATION
ARTICLES
Spartacus Chetwynd
The epic and the everyday; theatre, bats, puppets and paintings
Last year, on her 33rd birthday, the British artist Lali Chetwynd changed her first name to Spartacus, after the gladiator and leader of an audacious, ultimately unsuccessful slave uprising against Rome in 73-70 bc. Not quite a stage name like Meat Loaf, a pseudonym like Marcel Duchamp's Rrose S'lavy or a Subcommandante Marcos-type nom de guerre, Chetwynd's adopted moniker seems designed to make us stage a mock-heroic mini-drama in our minds, in which she persuades a band of artists to stop pitting themselves against each other and instead revolt against their masters. Push this fantasy a little further (and Chetwynd's art is nothing if not about pushing idle thoughts as far they'll go), and we might imagine the defeated rebels refusing, pace Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film Spartacus, to identify their chief, instead claiming one after the other I'm Spartacus, only to be symbolically crucified by a poor auction result or a less than complimentary review. If this flight of fancy resembles the absurd, unexpectedly telling narratives and motifs that characterize Chetwynd's work, then this is no mistake. In her practice the epic and the everyday speak through each other in accents of giggled hope.
Over the past few years Chetwynd has, with the aid of an elastic troupe of some 20 friends and family members, staged a number of performances that draw on everything from Conan the Barbarian (1982) to The Incredible Hulk, from the performances of Yves Klein to Hokusai's erotic print The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1820). Equipped with jerry-built costumes and props formed from an assortment of found materials, the artist and her mummers' band tell tall tales in a manner that recalls at once the theatre of Alfred Jarry and Bertolt Brecht, a disco at a science-fiction convention, and a primary school nativity play. Although carefully produced, these spectacles seem always to teeter on the brink of joyful anarchy: the performers sip beer, extemporize lines and distractedly check their text messages, as though what's important here is not persuading the audience to suspend their disbelief but instead to introduce a measure of the carnivalesque into everyday life. While future art historians are likely to read ritualistic, socially dynamic dramas such as 2003's An Evening with Jabba the Hutt - in which the grotesque Return of the Jedi (1983) villain is re-imagined as a smooth ladies' man through the lens of Chetwynd's undergraduate training as an anthropologist, I can't help but think her works are just as influenced by the let's-put-the-show-on-right-here-kids attitude found in the BBC children's television series Why Don't You? (1973-95).
Read the entire article here
Source: frieze.com
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Other artists in ABSTRACT AMERICA: NEW PAINTING AND SCULPTURE 2
Dan Bayles | Matthew Brannon | Dan Colen | Andy Collins | Judith Eisler | Inka Essenhigh | Will Fowler | Dana Frankfort | Eric Freeman | Barnaby Furnas | Joanne Greenbaum | Marc Handelman | Douglas Kolk | Ryan McGinness | Ivan Morley | Michael Phelan | David Ratcliff | Scott Reeder | Halsey Rodman | Ruth Root | Josh Smith | Marc Swanson | Garth Weiser | Aaron Wexler
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