My life and business is sculpture. I know about heavy lifting.
When your seven-year-old daughter asks you in a public art gallery: ‘Dad, what is wank?’ you know you have some heavy lifting ahead.
As an artist and the owner of a commercial sculpture business, I provide benefits to my clients: silly, simple, emotional values like joy, meaning, and beauty. If I don’t, my customers vanish, leaving an unexpressed speech bubble on the air: ‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. And that ain’t art.’
Art serves deeper needs
I have to think in terms that consider my audience and customers as pivotal stakeholders in all I do. Sculptures I create or supply must serve their deeper needs. Is it fair then, to compare an artist to a promoter or curator; a painter to a gallery owner? Is it reasonable to put rock stars and their managers in the same box?
I asked myself these questions during and after my first visit to Tasmania’s and Hobart’s Museum of New and Old Art (MONA).
In Part 1 of this blog — Just passing through — a visitor’s impression of art, sculpture, and MONA — I made a heart-felt admission. Despite 24 years of art and design study and experience, I’m no better placed to define art, or separate its brilliance from its poverty, than anybody else.
Foundations of freedom
In case you think I’m a curmudgeon, I’ll repeat another observation. I have no argument with what people do legally with their time, money, resources, and beliefs. The freedom we cherish to live as individuals within agreed privileges and responsibilities must always rest on these foundations. If they don’t prevail by muscular consensus, we’re lost as social beings and communities.
But I do have a bone to pick with art grandees who dictate taste simply because they can. And I will question the right the artocrats arrogate to themselves to make us feel the less for exposure to a suffocating cultural imperialism.
I’ve not ignored the possibility that MONA might one day become an expensive, possibly priceless, gift to the nation. At this stage, it’s not for me to judge if it equates, or can rise to the level of Arthur and Yvonne Boyd’s Bundanon, John and Sunday Reed’s Heidi, or the NGV’s still unprecedented Felton Bequest.
For now, it remains a public display of owner, David Walsh’s private art collection. Commercial enterprise or not, he chooses to share millions of dollars of private assets in a startling architectural marvel. It deserves some of the international adulation it receives.
The big but
Here’s the big but. When I consider the MONA artistic experience — shared with my eight and seven year-old daughters — it struck me as a peacock display: ‘I can do, say, and show what I like because I can afford it. If it bothers you, it’s your problem.’
My view of the role of art in society is simple and positive: it should explain and uplift.
In the relentless battle between good and evil, I believe true art helps us penetrate the myriad mysteries life confronts us with. It’s a companion on a journey of discovery. It captivates our imagination, and reveals our soul. For art to be art, it must guide us towards hope and beauty, otherwise it’s just cynicism and despair.
Assaults on humanity
MONA left me having to censor content from my daughters’ innocent curiosity, and shield them from consistent assaults on humanity while masquerading as reality and truth.
Three examples illustrate my point:
‘Tattoo Tim’ featured a real man seated on a plinth five hours a day, five days a week, displaying his heavily tattooed back. Whether or not you like or approve of the ancient practice of tattooing, the image was no better or worse than any tattoo you see on the streets daily. Does putting it on a pedestal in a museum transform it into art? Or is it just old-fashioned pretentiousness with a new name?
‘Cunts and other conversations’ showed a wall of human female genitalia, a work claiming to normalise our view of our private parts. From the title down, the effect was degrading: to women, to viewers, and to the work’s creator.
‘Kittens’ Tea Party’ arranges 18 kittens around a table engaging in a coy, Victorian high tea. How could I explain to my cat-adoring children that this act of ‘anthropomorphic taxidermy’ had been carried out in the name of art?
Self-parody
MONA eschews labelling of any kind. In their place is the O, an iPod-borne device offering explanatory notes under the self-parodying name, Art Wank.
Fairfax Media’s Traveller website announces:
‘There are no plaques explaining what you are looking at — or what it means — as you are supposed to experience the work personally. If you want detail you can consult the O. Typically obtuse, the O is an iPod you receive on admission that provides all the information that traditional, uncool galleries usually display on labels beside the artwork.’ http://www.traveller.com.au/mona-hobarts-art-of-darkness-gs4yc2
What was I saying about wank?
Share your views on art’s contribution to humanity while you learn more about sculpture with Todd Stuart — +61 4 5151 8865, or visit www.mainartery.art. Or take in another perspective on MONA at this link: Just passing through — a visitor’s impression of art, sculpture, and MONA, part 1.
Or visit 10 questions you should answer before you marry a sculpture as a guideline to purchasing and owning sculpture.
