CITYist

And the winner for best blog title goes to . . . Matthew Stone! As declarations of purpose go, the 25-year-old British artist’s “Optimism as Cultural Rebellion” trumps even “Change We Can Believe In” for its Obama-esque positivism. This slightly demented messianic tone is what sets Stone’s work apart, a refreshing respite from the snide ironies of so many of the Young British Artists who have stormed our shores over the last decade. (Then again, soulless irony is apparently still a valuable art market commodity, based on Damien Hirst’s sales figures.)

What makes Stone’s slogan so powerful is that he’s not kidding. He’s not totally serious, either, but he’s not joking when he talks about the power of art to create social movements. As he puts it, “Sometimes you have to pretend to do something in order to really do it.” His first brush with notoriety came from a series of bacchanalian events he staged in London galleries — orgiastic public spectacles that seemed totally at odds with the glum times we live in. Titles such as “The Songs of the Spheres in the Palm of Your Hand” hinted at his messianic ambitions. It was almost as if he was saying, “Hey, remember when you thought life was great and filled with possibility? Well, let’s make it happen!” It’s a balance between the ridiculous and revelatory that Stone describes as being “part show man and part shaman.” Anyone watching a gallery full of half-naked hipsters writhe around on top of each other wasn’t going to quibble over the distinction.

Stone’s early, energetically sloppy art events were part of the ‘new rave’ movement taking London by storm, and he quickly gained attention as a member of the !WOWOW! collective of artists and designers. But it took a minute for people to realize he was more than the DJ for Gareth Pugh’s outre fashion shows, and Stone’s art world cred is a fairly recent development. As of a year ago, he was still living rent free in a squat in London — though he gladly admits it was pretty nice as far as illegal living situations go. More importantly, living on the cheap allowed Stone an undefined sense of ambition rare in most hyper-critiqued art school grads.

Because of that untamed ambition, part of the early confusion with Stone’s work has been figuring out just what exactly his art consists of. His exhibitions have featured lovely Caravaggio-esque photos on the walls, but the photos often seem to be documents of past events. And the photographic exhibitions were more often than not used as launching pads for new and more spectacular events, sometimes involving hundreds of participants. In some ways, the frenzy around his work felt more like the intended artwork than some static images printed on paper. As Stone says, the idea was to use the gallery to create “a hangout where things blur and people don’t realize they’ve become a part of it.” The fuzzy, overly intense ambiance of the exhibitions felt as if he was trying to take the decadent vibe of his early club kid days and somehow make it real and permanent — creating a space where it is 5 a.m. forever, a permanent moment when you are too buzzed and ecstatic to really think straight, but the world seems both overwhelmingly exhausting and filled with infinite possibilities.

Stone has recently begun exhibiting sculptures made of naturally-occurring fools gold over-layed with his photographs of writhing pale bodies, so that the limbs become discombobulated and fractured. This fall, he exhibited the work on the roof of a car park outside London, a venue that had the added appeal of opening the work up to the sky, which felt so much nicer than letting it sit around a boring old gallery. Set in the bleakly post-industrial environment, the pieces seem to writhe and twist as they reach towards the sky. Maybe we’ll still get there yet.