Hobart, Day 4: Museum of Naughty Art

Well, that’s how some people describe MONA, anyhow, because of its frequently confronting, and not traditionally beautiful, art. As most of you will know, though, the initials really stand for the Museum of Old and New Art. It is a privately-funded museum, and has put Hobart well and truly on the international map.

But, before I tell you more about our visit to MONA, I just need to say that in our last post on Maria Island, I may not really have told you how much we enjoyed the trip. I got so carried away with telling you about the island that I may not have conveyed how beautiful it is, and what a thrill it was to visit the place, and to visit it with someone who not only knows it but loves it. I will try in future to be better at conveying not just information but our feelings and reactions!

I wish that art would go away

And, where better to start this new leaf but with the astonishing MONA. We can see why it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. There’s nothing traditional about this place – not the art with its sometimes broadly defined, sometimes not so, focus on sex and death; not the style of presentation (for example there’s not a label in sight); and not the tone and style of interpretation (which includes “art wank” from the curators and “gonzo” commentary by gallery owner, David Walsh.) You may be pleased to know, however, that it does have gift shops, and cafes that serve very tasty food, so not all is lost.

But, how best to give you a sense of it? Perhaps by telling you about an exhibit we saw near the end of our tour. It is called The Blind Leading The Blind by Peter Buggenhout, and is described as comprising “various materials, household dust”. It is suspended from the ceiling and looks like a bunch of found objects stuck together willy-nilly, but the location was dark so there could have been more method to its madness, “could”, though, being the operative word. It wasn’t my favourite piece by any stretch, but I did enjoy David Walsh’s “gonzo” commentary, which included the following:

If I were an artist, a worthwhile artist, then this is a work I might have made. There is an idea here, consciously and cleverly embedded in this piece, which speaks of something I’m hoping that Mona echoes. This work isn’t of anything so it hints of many things. Each viewpoint looks a bit like something but that something never quite reveals itself. It doesn’t reveal itself because it isn’t there. No perspective has privilege, no way of looking leads one to the correct interpretation. So make of it what you will. And what you make of it will do. But the ghosts of all the things you didn’t see, those things that aren’t there, constitute the art. Here a perspective taken has no more validity than one unobserved, and so it is with Mona.

Here Walsh gives us his philosophy for the gallery. I love this line, “so make of it what you will. And what you make of it will do”. How reassuring for those of us who have gallery-anxiety (particularly in modern galleries!).

Walsh’s commentary goes on to present various riffs on William Hughes Mearns’ famous “Antigonish” poem. My favourite riff is this self-deprecating one:

Yesterday on the MONA stair
I saw some art that had no flair
It had no flair again today
I wish that art would go away.

This is how some visitors feel but, I like the art. MONA is unashamedly about ideas, values, and attitudes, rather than what we’d call traditional aesthetics. It challenges us to think in different ways or to see the world through different eyes. It is irreverent and not afraid to take the mickey – but there’s something serious underpinning it too.

Here are just some of our favourite works (in no particular order):

• Death Gallery is a space you can only enter two at a time (and luckily Helen spied a short queue for us – it wasn’t so, half an hour later). I won’t tell you what you see, except that the instruction given is that “where it’s dark it is water”. So, you walk gingerly on a white path and stepping stones to the exhibit at the end. The Light and Dark conjures up Life and Death. Simple? Except that doesn’t Water usually mean Life? But, the Water was Dark. Life is a conundrum – and yet, also, a continuum.
• Skull, 2001, by Jan Fabre, comprising Beetle carapaces, a taxidermied bird, and plastic. This skull looked like jewels, like something out of, say, ancient Egypt, but once again it contained the paradox of beauty set against death (of the beetles and bird) and a grotesqueness that that evokes.
• Queen (A Portrait Of Madonna), 2005, by Candice Breitz, comprises simultaneously running videos of 30 fans singing a particular Madonna song that each had been previously recorded singing solo, a capella style. This was mesmerizing. Fun to watch the individual singers, but it also made me think of fandom, of popular culture and media and self, and of those images you see on Facebook of young poppets singing to/imitating music videos.
• Bit.fall, 2001-2006, by Julius Popp, is one of a few exhibits that play with words. In this one, words, like Abbott, Turnbull, $95M, Hilary, are derived from internet sites and then formed by waterdrops that drop curtain-like in front of a wall, like a waterfall. As the artist describes, it’s “a metaphor for the incessant flood of information we are exposed to”.
• Kryptos, 2008-10, by Brigita Ozolins, comprises series of binary digits (bits, or is it bytes) that form computer language – you know, like, 01101000 – presented as raised reliefs on a concrete wall that you follow around to a little room. Every now and then, a real word appears, like “heat” or light”, and a couple of cuneiform pottery pieces are inset strategically in one of the walls. I loved the idea that objects with a very ancient script (cuneiform) were juxtaposed with a very modern script (computer language), neither of which can be understood (by ordinary people, anyhow) without mediation. What does that say about communication?

I could go on, but that’s enough. Luckily I can now access my very own personal tour on the MONA site, because every artwork I clicked on when using my “O” device (the iPod Touch you are given to enable you to identify the works) was saved to “my tour”. Len and I haven’t compared our tours yet – but I’m sure they’ll be subtly (haha) different despite the same path we took.

We visited MONA with Ian and Helen, they driving in while we took the Mona Roma ferry. The four of us had a wonderful time. It was their nth visit and our first. This gallery, with its open-mindedness, its celebration of paradoxes, its encouragement of unusual linkages, its subversive sense of fun is a wonder. Lucky Hobartians.

A few images from our visit …

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(part of) bit.fall, by Julius Popp

Bouncing up and down … in MONA’s entrance area