I am interested in time. Time in relation to the human condition of Being In Time. I believe that art is a social metaphor, which allows us to consider our condition on a grander and more profound scale. I believe that digital technology as a medium allows the outside in (via the lens) – in a variety of ways. The process of working both behind and in front of the camera/computer sets up a certain dilemma, which causes an interesting energised conflict. For me the electronic technology has a type of poetry, another source of reflection.
I am interested in a condition, which I call Somewhere between the moving and the static… - a state between the frames of our reference, somewhere between the lines of the movie frame. Marty St. James is a modernist in postmodern clothing. As an artist his primary medium, along with that of drawing, is digital technology but his concerns are firmly rooted in the spiritual and Utopian subtexts of modernism with its hallmark of self-reflexive thinking. Whilst the existential alienation of the Outsider, as exalted by Colin Wilson, Camus and Sartre, opined that life was futile, that it was characterised by estrangement, such nihilist 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 the Enlightenment’s humanist enterprise. Post Nietzsche there flowed into this void the secular credo of Marxism. That, too, collapsed so that at the beginning of the 21st century our psychic and sociological landscape is now defined only by the insatiable appetite of the Market. As the philosopher Andrew Wernick writes: “In the stasis of the Dionysian dance, the bomb has already dropped. The revolution has already happened. There is no rupture to fear or hope for. We are left only with the eternal present of late capitalism, a febrile recurrence of the Same from which there has never been, nor ever could be, any but an imagined escape.” (1)
Theological themes in Baudrillard’s America . Andrew Wernick. Shadow of Spirit. Postmodernism and Religion. Ed. Phillipa Berry and Andrew Wernick. Routledge. London and NY. 1992
Sue Hubbard and art critic for The Independent.