Marty St. James (born 1954) is a
British performance art
Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...
ist and professor of fine art in the School Art and Design at the
University of Hertfordshire. He is perhaps best known for his portrait of Olympic swimmer
Duncan Goodhew
Duncan Alexander Goodhew, (born 27 May 1957) is an English former competitive swimmer. After swimming competitively in America as a collegian at North Carolina State University, he was an Olympic swimmer for Great Britain and won Olympic gold a ...
: The Swimmer – commissioned in 1990 by the
National Portrait Gallery National Portrait Gallery may refer to:
*National Portrait Gallery (Australia), in Canberra
*National Portrait Gallery (Sweden), in Mariefred
*National Portrait Gallery (United States), in Washington, D.C.
*National Portrait Gallery, London, with s ...
– and recently migrated to new digital formats. He studied at the
Bournville College of Art
The School of Art, Bournville (formerly Bournville College of Art and Bournville Centre for Visual Arts but better known as Bournville School of Art) was an art school in Birmingham, England. It was located at Ruskin Hall on Linden Road in the ar ...
.
HTV Television recorded and presented his graduation piece 'Mr and Mrs' (1976) with his then wife Mary, the piece and his early life also feature in
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
article 'Mr and Mrs Avant Garde: art's real-life couples'.
The Swimmer is a seminal moment in video. Its use of time and fragmentation employing the analogue methodologies and equipment, which were the only ones available in 1990, and the site sensitive sculptural qualities of its installation predicting contemporary developments in video installation. In a process the artist describes as ‘sculpture in time’ his multi–channel video installations capture his subjects in a ‘sliver of time’ – moving yet frozen for all eternity, self-consciously entrapped by the technological paraphernalia, which a video work requires to deliver its message.
St. James is a member of the 'Centre for Research in Electronic Art and Communication' part of the 'Fine Art Practices Group'. In 1984 he contributed to Video Art: the early years with a performance for the British/Canadian Video Exchange, A Space / ARC, Toronto.
In 2007 his multi-monitor video art installation, The Swimmer (sitter: Olympian Duncan Goodhew) was added to the primary collection of the UK's National Portrait Gallery, the video portraits of works Julie Walters and Sally Burgess are in the gallery's reference collection.
St. James was a judge
in the art category for the UK-Japan Art Design Film Award in 2010.
UK-Japan Art Design Film Award 2010.
In 2012 he had his second exhibition in China at the Iron Curtain Gallery.
References
External links
Marty St.James— official website
The Project Room for New Media and Performing ArtsHHWF Wingate Scholarships
{{DEFAULTSORT:St. James, Marty
British performance artists
1954 births
Living people
Academics of the University of Hertfordshire
Alumni of the Bournville College of Art
British video artists
20th-century British male artists
21st-century British male artists