MONA (Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart)
Apr. 30th, 2011 07:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sharplittleteethBack from Tasmania.
We went down last Wednesday to visit MONA - the Museum of Old and New Art. It opened in Hobart at the start of the year (A. was working at the FOMA music festival that accompanied the opening.)
MONA is a private museum. All the artwork is owned by one person, David Walsh. Walsh is a Tasmanian who made millions from gambling, and decided the best way to spend all his money was free music festivals and to build a whopping great big art museum.
Walsh describes MONA as an adult Disneyland.
I would describe it as bugfuck insane. And astonishing. And essential.
We caught the special ferry out. MONA is built into the waterfront cliff face of the Morilla winery estate. It looms over the water all concrete and rusted steel, like Jabba the Hutt's palace.
There are art-themed pavilions where people can stay overnight, a wine bar, a brewery. But we didn't get a chance to see any of that. We were too busy looking at the art.
There are no information plaques next to the artwork at MONA, not even for the artist and title. As you enter the museum, you're given an iPod. The iPod contains a location-aware list of all the artworks near you. Click on a work, and you can read all about it.
And here's where MONA's true character first appears. Because Walsh and the other commentators are just as likely to insult an artist as praise them. The background essays on each work are under an icon labelled "artwank" which is a picture of a penis. You can vote whether you love or hate each work. There are random ideas, which half the time are some throwaway joke, and half the time are profound.
Academics would say that MONA is a postmodern deconstruction of the art museum experience: a gallery that comments on the nature of galleries.
But that's exactly the sort of pomposity that MONA seeks to deflate. MONA peels back the cool, authoritative façade of most other art galleries, and exposes the debate, arguments, jokes, insults, agreements, doubts and head-scratching that go on in order to present art to a viewing public.
Take this (literal) case in point:
There's a wunderkammer in the museum that contains several Meso-American skulls and a screen showing a piece of video art. The entire display case is filled with water, and there are fish swimming around inside it.
I pointed it out to A.
Why is filled with water? she said.
I explained my take: it highlighted that display cabinets are not neutral presentations of the unsullied truth, but rather deliberate creations designed to provoke a specific intellectual and aesthetic response.
A. got angry. Why is it filled with water? she repeated.
We were both tired and grumpy by then, and overwhelmed by all the art. We'd been in MONA for three hours. That doesn't sound long. But as we climbed the stairs up to the café, I had the exact same feeling I get when I surface after scuba diving: of returning to the sunlight after visiting an alien world.
Whoop-de-doo, you're probably thinking. Galleries commenting on being galleries. Sounds dreadful.
And you'd be right, if that's all MONA was.
But it's not. I like modern art and I can blather on about post-modernism at an amateur-league level. But at the end of the day, my aesthic criteria is quite old-fashioned and Romantic: I judge art by how much it moves me.
And MONA is sublime.
Just the building itself is beautiful. It's three storeys carved down into sandstone. Walsh has kept the sandstone visible with vast underground cliff-faces that run the height of the museum. Rusted metal staircases continue the texture from outside. There are vast open spaces, and narrow corridors lines in red velvet. There is antique furniture at the bar. There are tunnels and mazes.
And the art. Sweet angels from heaven, the art...
Julius Popp's bit.fall: words culled from internet serch terms transformed into flickering falls of water.
Egyptian mummies.
Neolithic flints.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Pulse Room: a flickering incandescent globe picks up the rhythm of your heartbeat, which crosses a room, and then is gone.
Wim Delvoye's Cloaca Professional: a machine of glass and steel and chemicals that produces that most organic of substances - shit.
Sidney Nolan's Snake: 1,620 rainbow coloured drawings arranged in a mural nine metres high and 46 metres long.
Tessa Farmer's The Fairy Horde and the Hedgehog Host: a hedgehog infested with miniature carved fairies like parasitic wasps.
Brigita Ozolins's Kryptos: text from the Epic of Gilgamesh encrypted in binary onto the walls of a labyrinth.
Conrad Shawcross's Loop System Quintet: five wooden mechanical arms, tracing out intricate knots of light.
Julia deVille's Cinerarium: a taxidermied Forest Raven swooping down over the cremated remains of David Walsh's father......
I was exhausted by how fantastic the art was.
On the ferry back, we got talking to another couple. They said they would have travelled across the world to see this gallery. They said it was better than the Guggenheim in New York.
If you have any interest in modern art, you need to see it.
http://mona.net.au/
We went down last Wednesday to visit MONA - the Museum of Old and New Art. It opened in Hobart at the start of the year (A. was working at the FOMA music festival that accompanied the opening.)
MONA is a private museum. All the artwork is owned by one person, David Walsh. Walsh is a Tasmanian who made millions from gambling, and decided the best way to spend all his money was free music festivals and to build a whopping great big art museum.
Walsh describes MONA as an adult Disneyland.
I would describe it as bugfuck insane. And astonishing. And essential.
We caught the special ferry out. MONA is built into the waterfront cliff face of the Morilla winery estate. It looms over the water all concrete and rusted steel, like Jabba the Hutt's palace.
There are art-themed pavilions where people can stay overnight, a wine bar, a brewery. But we didn't get a chance to see any of that. We were too busy looking at the art.
There are no information plaques next to the artwork at MONA, not even for the artist and title. As you enter the museum, you're given an iPod. The iPod contains a location-aware list of all the artworks near you. Click on a work, and you can read all about it.
And here's where MONA's true character first appears. Because Walsh and the other commentators are just as likely to insult an artist as praise them. The background essays on each work are under an icon labelled "artwank" which is a picture of a penis. You can vote whether you love or hate each work. There are random ideas, which half the time are some throwaway joke, and half the time are profound.
Academics would say that MONA is a postmodern deconstruction of the art museum experience: a gallery that comments on the nature of galleries.
But that's exactly the sort of pomposity that MONA seeks to deflate. MONA peels back the cool, authoritative façade of most other art galleries, and exposes the debate, arguments, jokes, insults, agreements, doubts and head-scratching that go on in order to present art to a viewing public.
Take this (literal) case in point:
There's a wunderkammer in the museum that contains several Meso-American skulls and a screen showing a piece of video art. The entire display case is filled with water, and there are fish swimming around inside it.
I pointed it out to A.
Why is filled with water? she said.
I explained my take: it highlighted that display cabinets are not neutral presentations of the unsullied truth, but rather deliberate creations designed to provoke a specific intellectual and aesthetic response.
A. got angry. Why is it filled with water? she repeated.
We were both tired and grumpy by then, and overwhelmed by all the art. We'd been in MONA for three hours. That doesn't sound long. But as we climbed the stairs up to the café, I had the exact same feeling I get when I surface after scuba diving: of returning to the sunlight after visiting an alien world.
Whoop-de-doo, you're probably thinking. Galleries commenting on being galleries. Sounds dreadful.
And you'd be right, if that's all MONA was.
But it's not. I like modern art and I can blather on about post-modernism at an amateur-league level. But at the end of the day, my aesthic criteria is quite old-fashioned and Romantic: I judge art by how much it moves me.
And MONA is sublime.
Just the building itself is beautiful. It's three storeys carved down into sandstone. Walsh has kept the sandstone visible with vast underground cliff-faces that run the height of the museum. Rusted metal staircases continue the texture from outside. There are vast open spaces, and narrow corridors lines in red velvet. There is antique furniture at the bar. There are tunnels and mazes.
And the art. Sweet angels from heaven, the art...
Julius Popp's bit.fall: words culled from internet serch terms transformed into flickering falls of water.
Egyptian mummies.
Neolithic flints.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Pulse Room: a flickering incandescent globe picks up the rhythm of your heartbeat, which crosses a room, and then is gone.
Wim Delvoye's Cloaca Professional: a machine of glass and steel and chemicals that produces that most organic of substances - shit.
Sidney Nolan's Snake: 1,620 rainbow coloured drawings arranged in a mural nine metres high and 46 metres long.
Tessa Farmer's The Fairy Horde and the Hedgehog Host: a hedgehog infested with miniature carved fairies like parasitic wasps.
Brigita Ozolins's Kryptos: text from the Epic of Gilgamesh encrypted in binary onto the walls of a labyrinth.
Conrad Shawcross's Loop System Quintet: five wooden mechanical arms, tracing out intricate knots of light.
Julia deVille's Cinerarium: a taxidermied Forest Raven swooping down over the cremated remains of David Walsh's father......
I was exhausted by how fantastic the art was.
On the ferry back, we got talking to another couple. They said they would have travelled across the world to see this gallery. They said it was better than the Guggenheim in New York.
If you have any interest in modern art, you need to see it.
http://mona.net.au/
