Marty St.James

Marty St. James is a modernist in post-modernist clothes. As an artist his primary medium is digital technology but his concerns are firmly rooted in the spiritual and Utopian subtexts of modernism with its hallmark of self re-flective thinking. Whilst existential alienation of the Outsider, as exalted by Colin Wilson, Camus and Sartre, opined that life was futile, that it was characterized by estrangement, such nihilistic thinking, ironically, acknowledged its mirror image. For doubt, per se, admits to possibility. While Vladimir and Estragon knew that there was ‘Nothing to be done’, they nevertheless, waited, in anticipation, for the imminent arrival of M. Godot. Modernism admitted to a gap, to a god-shaped hole at the centre of Enlightenment is humanist enterprise…..Somewhere or In between .places (Marty St.James) …firmly in this arena between exhausted modernism and a world dominated by bland of celebrity and co modification. It is an uncomfortable place, more concerned with the witnessing of truths than with offering easy or glib panaceas. His natural progression as an artist has stretched from Performance art, through video to digital video. For him creativity  - line with Joseph Beuys’s legacy – is the purest form of political statement. For Marty St.James believes that art only matters if the artist has something important to say, that his or her work is not simply an item of commercial transaction.

Sue Hubbard   Art critic of the Independent Newspaper