Interview with Marty St James



Marty St James on 'Mr & Mrs', HTV (1977) Image courtesy of Marty St James


  We interviewed Marty St James, Professor of Fine Art at the University of Hertfordshire and former student of Cardiff College of Art at his London studio this week. Marty has been making performance work since his late teens, working with Ian Hinchliffe, Rob Con, Roland Miller and Shirley Cameron amongst many others.


At Cardiff, he made a number of pieces for the symposium that John Gingell ran in the Reardon Smith auditorium, and made an appearance on the HTV show 'Mr and Mrs' as part of his final year show. After graduating, he continued to produce conceptual and performance pieces around Wales, including his 'Morris 1000 Dancing' which visited a number of towns and villages, and 'I'll See You' which he presented at several art centres.


We would like to thank Marty for allowing us to interview him, and also for his help in identifying some of the images of his work that we have found in different archives.

Sited interview: Mike Pearson at Chapter

Yesterday we travelled to Cardiff to interview Mike Pearson around the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff.  This followed on from the series of sited interviews we did with Mike around Cardiff last November that included various spaces within Cardiff University, Llanover Hall and the Sherman Theatre. 

Mike has been involved with Chapter since its inception 40 years ago, and was one of the first people to move into the building and produce work, firstly with Transitions, later with Cardiff Lab.  He also witnessed many performances by a number of artists and groups including Nigel Rolfe, Pip Simmons and Moving Being.

We hope that this will be the first in a series of interviews around Chapter with people.

Thanks to Mike for his recollections and taking us on a tour of the building as he knew it, and to James Tyson and his colleagues at Chapter for making this possible.

Lectures and Presentations

It's been a busy summer - we have been doing a number of presentations and lectures about the project at different events - here are some of them.
For a full list visit: http://www.performance-wales.org/english/events/lectures.htm

SYMPOSIUM PRESENTATION AND CHAIR (Heike): "Living Archives - Session with Rose English and Anne Bean"
Performing Idea symposium, part of Performance Matters, Goldsmiths University of London, Roehampton University and Live Art Development Agency, funded by an AHRC Research Grant, Whitechapel Gallery and Toynbee Studios, 6 October 2010. Details

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CONFERENCE PRESENTATION (Heike): "Performance art (in) history: disconnecting traditions, connecting histories"
"TAPRA: History and Historiography Working Group", TaPRA THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE RESEARCH ASSOCIATION conference, Glamorgan University, Cardiff 9–11 September 2010. Details

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PRESENTATION (Heike and Rebecca): What's Welsh for Performance?- Creating a record of performance art in Wales
"Documentation and the Cultural Record" session at Culture Colony-Y Wladfa Newydd launch day, 7 September 2010, Aberystwyth Arts Centre. More information and documentation; response

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CONFERENCE PRESENTATION (Heike): "Teaching the Avant-garde - (Mis)Performing Pedagogies"
"MISperformance -an inverted approach to doing Performance Studies (international?) - PSi15 follow-up event" conference, Rijeka, Croatia 3–5 September 2010.

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PRESENTATION (Heike and Rebecca):"'Welsh Not': Performing Wales in 1970s Performance Art"
"Theorizing Wales: Gender, Culture, Politics" conference, Swansea University, Gregynog 12–14 July 2010. Details

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CONFERENCE PRESENTATION (Heike): Performing An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales
"[Record] [Create] Oral History in Art, Craft and Design (Oral History Society Annual Conference 2010)" conference,Victoria & Albert Museum London, 2+3 July 2010. Details
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Interview with Dave Stephens

We travelled down to Brighton this week to meet with Dave Stephens at his home.  Dave is originally from Cardiff, and studied for his Art Foundation at Cardiff College of Art before moving to Leeds College of Art for his degree.

At art college Dave began performing monologues on different subjects; sometimes confessional, sometimes provocative, he went on to tour the UK, Europe and North America.  His final show was at the Central School of Art in 1985 and he has not performed since.

We would like to thank Dave for his generosity and hospitality, and for talking to us about his performance career.  Also, we'd like to thank Matt Page for filming the interview for us.

Swansea Fringe Festival and Newport College of Art

This week, Rebecca met with Robin Hall and David Hurn. 

Robin came to Swansea to work with the Open Cast Theatre, and later worked for the Swansea Fringe Festival for several years during the 1980s.  The festival brought many performers to the city, including the then-unknown comedians Paul Merton and Arthur Smith.  He worked closely with the performance artist Rob Con who was also the festival administrator in its first year.

David is a member of Magnum, the photographers cooperative, and founded the photography course at Newport College of Art nearly forty years ago.  He was also a colleague of the artist Keith Arnatt and taught Arnatt photography, and later curated an exhibition of Arnatt's work called 'I'm A Real Photographer'.

We would like to thank David and Robin for their time and contributing to our research.

Project featured on The Wire website

The project has been included by Rhodri Davies on his Wire magazine portal link (click the title to this blog entry and if should take you straight there).

Rhodri is featured in the 'Invisible Jukebox' section of the new edition of the magazine, and an MP3  of his installation room harp at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle is available here: http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/4675/

Research trip to London and interview with Mo Tingey

We spent much of the last week in London, visiting the archives at the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and listening to a number of oral history interviews held at the National Sound Archive at the British Library.

We also interviewed Mo Tingey for the project.  Mo was one of the people who staged the Fluxus events at the Aberystwyth Arts Festival in 1968, along with Brian Lane - she was then known as Maurene Sandoe.  Mo brought along to the interview some beautiful leaflets and boxes that she had made back in the 1960s, containing paper dolls, small boxes that made sounds, sound scores and stage directions.  These were made in small numbers and sold to people, part of the idea about making art accessible and available to everyone.

We'd like to thank Mo for meeting with us and contributing to the project.

Group Interview 3 - Former Cardiff College of Art students

This week we met with four former students from Cardiff College of Art, as Cardiff School of Art & Design was then known. We were fortunate to be allowed to hold the interview at UWIC's Howard Gardens campus, where they had studied during the late 1960s and 1970s with (amongst others) Tom Hudson and John Gingell. A tour of the building prompted lots of memories from their student days.

 

We would like to thank Prof André Stitt, Debbie Savage and Nicola Brown for their help in arranging for us to use Howard Gardens. We'd also like to thank our interviewees, Colin Ainsworth, Tim Diggles, Suzy Peters and Mike Shaw, for travelling to Cardiff, lending us material from their personal archives, and for their memories and stories.

Interview with Sally Roberts Jones

Rebecca interviewed Sally Roberts Jones this week, about her memories of the Commonwealth Poetry Conference, which took place in Cardiff in 1965 as part of the Commonwealth Festival.  Poets and writers that attended the conference included Clive James and Les Murray of Australia, Alexander Trocchi, Brian Patten, Adrian Henri and George Macbeth. 

The Conference included a happening organised by Tom Hudson at Jackson Hall in Cardiff called 'Assembly Line' - this was possibly the first happening to take place in Wales, and among to participants was the American musician and composer Philip Corner.  We would love to hear from anyone who remembers the poetry conference or took part in 'Assembly Line' - email mail@performance-wales.org

Rebecca and Heike would like to thank Sally Roberts Jones for her sharing her time and memories with us.

Interview with David Briers

David Briers was the Visual Arts Organiser at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff between 1976 and 1984, responsible for programming the galleries.  Rebecca went to interview David this week his interest in performance art, and his time at Chapter. 

Among the artists that David invited to the centre was Nigel Rolfe, who had caused outrage in some areas of the press following his 'Towers' performance at the National Eisteddfod at Wrexham in 1977 (or as the Daily Mail put it, 'The Welsh art of paying an Irishman to demolish bricks with his head').

David invited Nigel Rolfe to do a performance of the 'Towers' piece, and also one called 'Treatment of Individual Parts' (see above and right - copyright Steve Benbow).

If you remember seeing this, or any other performance work in Wales during the 1960s and 1970s we would love to hear from you.

Heike and Rebecca would like to thank David Briers for his help with the project.