MONA, the private art museum in Hobart, Tasmania has acquired an almost legendary status and I had heard about it from many different sources. One of them was a Mancunian engineer based in Melbourne whom I randomly met in a bar in Vienna and who was telling me how he sat next to Hermann Nitsch at Dark Mofo – the gothic art festival there. “You know, the little white-haired white-bearded guy who makes people throw a crucified cow carcass and offal at each other”. Another, was an elderly Tasmanian female hiker we met at a bar in Wineglass Bay who waxed lyrical about it: “you should spend at least two days there. We were there for a full day but it wasn’t nearly enough. It’s a magical place”. It’s curious to hear such opinions from people who don’t have the habit of going out of their way to see contemporary art. MONA, which stands for Museum of Old and New Art, was founded by Tasmanian billionaire David Walsh, who made his fortune as a professional gambler. He apparently built it out of guilt, (he believes gambling is intrinsically immoral) to create something of benefit for the community. The fact that there is no entry fee for locals is definitely to be applauded. MONA has quite a controversial reputation, supposedly due to Walsh’s collection’s focus on sex and death and has been called a “subversive adult Disneyland” by its owner and creator. Located in a beautiful spot (modelled on the Greek island of Naxos), it can be reached from Hobart by car or a half an hour trip on a museum-operated camouflaged catamaran, the latter with the added attraction of being able to spot dolphins frolicking in the harbour and sitting on sheep sculptures on the deck.
The building is spectacular: spanning three floors it’s like a classical-modernist art cathedral carved into a rock. There were also other buildings above the ground, a restaurant, buildings housing James Turrell’s installations as well as designer guest pavilions and a vineyard.
Inside the galleries it’s dark, but all the works are very well lit. In fact the lighting was probably the best art lighting I’ve ever seen – you just don’t notice it, the attention to detail is such that it appears transparent, even though it’s highly designed. Instead of a sterile white cube space, you find yourself in something between an upmarket nightclub, a nuclear bunker, an ancient temple, a creepy basement straight from a Scandi thriller, a masonic ritual room and a twisted version of Plato’s cave.
MONA’s approach to interpretation is very modern – there were no labels on the walls and each visitor receives an ipad-like device that automatically detects which artwork they are closest to. It provides both audio and textual interpretation in two modes – plain English and ‘art wank’ (i.e. artspeak) symbolised by a penis icon, which I found unnecessarily juvenile. But then Walsh’s intention with the museum allegedly was to “piss off the academics”, so what else can one expect?
A variety of display strategies were employed in the exhibitions – from classic ones to viewing an experimental video through a water tank with a submerged ancient Roman sculpture and colourful fish swimming around it. The works in the collection were an eclectic mix – one-liner shock-effect sculptures (copulating skeletons and plaster casts of 51 vaginas), ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, modernist masterpieces, and conceptual video art all mixed together, in a way that was somehow refreshing on a surface level. One can certainly describe aspects of MONA and the collection as tacky and populist, but there are also a few quite brilliant works – especially in the temporary exhibition section – and the experience is certainly fun, in theme park terms, which certainly draws in more general public. Perhaps it’s just the Tate of the Antipodes.
