As an artist, a lover of sculpture, and the owner of a sensitivity enriched by all that art brings to humanity, a visit to Tasmania’s Museum of New and Old Art (MONA) held promises on many levels.
First, let’s get a disclaimer out of the way. I’ve invested 24 years in academic and vocational learning around art, and 13 years satisfying a broad palate of sculptural taste. I still don’t claim to be better qualified at defining art, or separating good art from bad, than anyone else.
Everyone’s entitled to any number of opinions, and to change those opinions as and when they see fit. I ask you to read these comments in the spirit in which I offer them: a personal commentary on MONA as an idea, a place, and a self-appointed arbiter of taste.
Personal and island redemption
By all accounts, MONA has all but single-handedly resurrected the fortunes of sleepy Hobart, if not Tasmania, as a destination. It carried off the 2012 Australian Tourism Award for best new development. It’s also come to signify a kind of personal and island redemption based on the character of its founder and guiding spirit, David Walsh.
Most Tasmanians know, and many proclaim his rags to riches story. Walsh was the third child of a blue-collar family in working class Glenorchy, a near neighbour of the Berriedale Peninsula, now home to Walsh’s Moorilla Estate winery, and MONA.
A University of Tasmania drop-out, he and a local partner used their mathematical skills to develop complex logarithms that allowed them to legally cover vast numbers of sporting bets. Over decades, he amassed a fortune in winnings, devoting some of it to the personal art collection that lies at the heart of MONA.
Cultural and architectural enigma
The museum itself is a cultural and architectural enigma. A cultural mystery, because it represents the very personal views and tastes of its founder and benefactor, while preening in the embrace of its home city as a statement of public artistic belief.
As a physical concept and a realised space, it’s also a series of contradictions. Built on a spit of land jutting into the majestic Derwent River, many visitors’ first view is close to pedestrian if, as vast numbers do, they approach by water taxi from central Hobart.
On the surface, it presents a disarming understatement that Walsh says is in deference to two Roy Grounds-designed heritage properties on the site.
Breath-taking, in-your-face-audacity
Once inside, a dramatic structural twist takes place through a remarkable feat of excavation and construction. The gallery draws you into a journey that plunges you 30 metres through a series of darkly lit chambers carved out of solid sandstone. For breath-taking in-your-face audacity, the engineering alone is a world-class work of art, sculpture, and vision, even if that vision is dystopian.
As we descended into this subterranean, multi-layered, windowless world, I wondered if the scheme behind the design might have had a classical influence. Under-educated as I am in the great poetic sagas, I couldn’t help but feel a parallel to Dante’s Inferno.
By the time I surfaced, I’d begun to get a sense of the concentric circles of hell his immortal verse describes.
Spare us the condescension
The gallery has three dominant themes that regularly appear among a bewildering variety of the owner’s personal obsessions. No quibbles there. If you have a casual $100 million to spare on a show-and-tell of what you think of art, go right ahead. Just spare us the condescension, advice I’d share with some of your staff members who have heaps of your attitude, but none of your money.
The themes appear to celebrate (or should that be enforce?) sex, excrement, and death. The visitor’s progress through the downward spiralling chambers does evoke sensations of a disturbingly arousing passage through the alimentary canal. And we all know where that ends.
Hell, or a septic tank?
Maybe I went a little too far making a distant connection between MONA and Dante’s concentric circles of hell. Perhaps it was more an exploration of the mysteries of the septic tank through human eyes.
Emerging into welcome daylight, I reflected on the deathly, scatological experience my children and I had just undergone in the name of art. I couldn’t help remembering a joke that percolated from On the Beach, the movie of Neville Shute’s nuclear apocalypse book, made in Melbourne in 1959.
A journalist had invented a quote by the movie’s abrasive female lead, Hollywood star Ava Gardner, describing Melbourne as ‘the asshole of the earth.’ A wag quipped back: ‘And you’re just passing through?’
If you yearn for clarity on art, beauty, and fulfilment through sculpture, join the conversation with Todd Stuart on +61 4 5151 8865, or visit www.mainartery.art. On the other hand, visit this link MONA, sculpture, and the wank debate for more perspectives on the MONA experience.
Equally, go to underwhelmed by sculpture for a cautionary tale on what to avoid on your journey to art acquisition.
