sharplittleteeth

Back 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.

( Here's why... )

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/

I took yesterday off work so we could go see the Ron Mueck exhibition at the National Gallery Victoria.

Mueck is sculptor who creates hyperrealistic statues of people, mostly nude. And he plays with scale: the scupluters are tiny, or huge. The work that made him famous was Dead Dad, a three foot long scuplture of his father lying naked and dead on the floor. The exhibition also includes Wild man, a nine foot tall bearded giant perched on a wooden stool the size of a table, and A girl, a 5 metre long newborn infant.

The photos I'd seen of his work made them all look kind of creepy.

But in the flesh (so to speak), the first thing that struck me was how dream-like these sculptures were. There's an Alice In Wonderland quality about them and their sizes.

The second thing you notice is the detail. Every skin crease, every blemish, every hair is there. The detail on these sculptures is astonishing.

And then, after the obvious, the third and most important thing I noticed about these sculptures is how vulnerable and how endearing they are. The wild man looks shy and self-concious, as if he'd like to go back outside now, please. The Dead Dad is so small and fragile. One of my favourites of the works displayed, Man in a boat, features a naked middle aged man peering with keen curiousity out from his rowboat.

There's so much character and expression in the faces of these works, you can't help imagining stories about them. The catalogue even mentions that Mueck doesn't like his works to be displayed too close together, because it creates unintended narratives between them.

What Mueck's insane detail and wild distortions of scale ultimately reveal isn't the weirdness of these figures - it's their simple humanity.

This is a small exhibition, with only a dozen works. But it's utterly fantastic. I definitely recommend it.

(If you're going, try and go early in the day, before the crowds get too thick. That way you can appreciate the scale of these works more.)


Interesting Facts:
Ron Mueck was born in Melbourne, Australia. He moved to London to make props for advertising and film. One of those films was Jim Henson's Labyrinth, in which he provided the voice for Ludo.