Monday 28 March 2011

Matthew Stone interview

Excerpts from an interview by me and Jack Armitage carried out with the artist Matthew Stone on art and spirituality last summer.



How do you think attitudes towards spirituality in the west will change (or not) in your life time? 

Spirituality is a difficult term, with many meanings. I believe that people are engaging spiritually all of the time. Warhol said that the churches of the future would be "going to big rock concerts". I guess that for a lot of people, these non-logic based experiences and ways of processing the world feel unimportant and nefarious. I feel that a fully developed approach is better than just logic or just intuition. We are born with the capacity to think and feel intuitively but learning to trust and then develop these abilities is more difficult. Perhaps someone will develop a contemporary name and ideological structure that would validate these subtle skills. The history of Modern art could be understood as an attempt to do so.

Technology will continue to develop physical phenomena that could be seen as being similiar to ideas that have long existed within spirituality. Individuals flew in dreamtime and in trance, using technology and logic we developed planes. Similiarly the vast interconnected web of consciousness is given physical metaphor as the internet. So you could say:  The Internet is man's attempt to map and metaphor the spiritual interconnection of human consciousness. 

"Andy Warhol took the everyday and turned it into art, whereas Beuys wanted our everyday lives to become art"

To what extent do you believe these sort of ideas manifest themselves today, or will in the future? 

There are more artists than ever, which I believe is a very good thing. Artists are not special or worth more than any other person. They are simply those, that have come to be conscious of the fact that every action is creative and can be beautiful in some way. The mindful choices that they make not only define their own lives, but shine like happy, truth-loving stars, born to illuminate and inspire the lives of those that encounter them.

Full version features in SuperSuper issue 22

No comments:

Post a Comment