The Old and the New
I’ve just returned from Australia, where I visited the new Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, which opens to the public this weekend – entrance is free. It’s the biggest privately funded museum in Australia (which isn’t actually saying much, as there are only a couple of others in the country) and, as far as I know, is the only one in existence to include a crematorium – visitors are encouraged to buy a life-and-after-life membership, which means they will be cremated at MONA and stored there for eternity. (I’m not joking.) Around 460 pieces are on display, from a collection of more than 2,000 works. Less than half of this is contemporary art; it includes a lot of antiquities from Egypt and various parts of Africa, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica: the oldest is a 6,000-year-old jar and the most recent is a new version of Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca (2010), which was specially commissioned for the museum (as were about 20 other works by artists including Julia deVille, Christian Boltanski, Tomoko Kashiki, Gelitin, Roman Signer, Erwin Wurm, Tessa Farmer, Masao Okabe and Dasha Shishkin.) Works are displayed in a non-linear fashion – three Sidney Nolan paintings, say, are hung next to a pile of ancient Chinese coins – and MONA is designed to be intentionally disorientating: it’s a place that privileges the journey over the destination. Similarly, connections between objects and periods are never explained and there’s not a wall label in sight. Information can be gathered from state-of-the-art individual iPods, which each visitor will be given on arrival. (At the end of your visit it can email you information about the works you’ve looked at it; it also registers exactly how long each visitor looks at each work, which would, apparently, make it possible to assess which is the most popular work in the collection – which, I was told, might swiftly effect its removal from display.) MONA is a wonderfully eccentric, philanthropic endeavour that includes a winery, brewery, restaurant, café and self-contained pavilions for guests and it’s run with as much humour and self-deprecation as scholarship.
Wim Delvoye Cloaca (2010)
The museum is funded by one man: David Walsh. A gambler and something of a mathematical genius, he started out playing blackjack before moving on to horse racing. He’s a self-confessed ‘rabid atheist’ who, when I met him, was dressed in a T-shirt emblazoned with a Richard Dawkins’ line about what a malevolent creature God must be if he exists. Walsh talks non-stop; his enthusiasm for his project is electric, but he’s not what you’d call a listener – he has Asperger’s syndrome and expresses himself without censorship. He’s passionate about his museum, which he describes as a kind of ‘secular temple’ to the ‘pursuit of sex and the avoidance of death’, themes which, he says, are the two fundamental motivating factors in life. He never seems to tire of discussing this, despite the fact that it’s all a little reductive – after all, you can wander around the National Gallery in London for hours and be inundated with images of sex and death, but that’s not, obviously, all that is being communicated. But it soon becomes clear that Walsh likes to provoke. (He recently told one journalist: ‘This is how you should start the story. David Walsh is a rich wanker.’) But for all of his bluntness Walsh is a more nuanced thinker than he likes to let on. The more time you spend with him the more apparent this becomes; he rattles off facts and figures and theories with the rapidity of a machine gun. He is never dull, often illuminating, quite frustrating, always irreverent and very funny – and his humour infiltrates every aspect of his museum. Take, for example, his description of the Keifer Pavilion on the MONA website: ‘Books, says Keifer, are a manifestation of time. He also says you must build a pavilion to house my massive sculpture. Otherwise you’re not having it.’ Or this, for the ‘Boltanski Cave’: ‘What kind of idiot would pay two-and-a-half grand a month to watch an old guy sitting around picking his nose? David Walsh has too much money, obviously.’ Similarly, Walsh’s online invitation to the public for the opening weekend, which includes an extensive programme of bands and performances – from Wire to the Cruel Sea, Grinderman to Phillip Glass and more – is nothing if not inclusive: ‘The Museum’s opening’ it declares. ‘We’re having a party. Want to come?’ Yet, he’s more tentative in his surprisingly enigmatic written introduction to MONA: he compares someone opening a museum to someone aspiring to be a writer:
‘This is good, I think: but maybe not useful, too clever, clever.
You think you’re a great writer. But you’ve got writer’s block. You’ve had it for a while, your whole life in fact. You’ve never written anything. But you’re a great writer. Finally, here, now you’re lifting the pen, putting it to paper. Will the words pour out in a delicate, delightful stream, conveying the depth and beauty of all the ideas you have ever had, lovely capsules of meaning in perfect prose? Or will they resemble the chaos of your mind, words tripping each other in a tangle of obfuscation, only misconceptions conveyed?
The writing is on the wall. I call it MONA.
I await the museum opening with interest.’
But ultimately, of course, what Walsh has created speaks for itself: despite my reservations about some of the work (I can do without the bombast of, say, Jenny Saville, Marc Quinn and Damien Hirst et al), a lot of it is wonderful – in particular some gems of Australian Modernism (such as Sidney Nolan’s largest work, the fantastic 46-metre Snake, 1971, which comprises 1,620 separate images and which forms the heartbeat of the collection), some great contemporary Australian work (by Callum Morton and David Noonan, among others) and an eclectic array of international works by artists from Egon Schiele, Wassily Kandinsky, Gerry Judah, Su-en Wong, Fernando Botero to Paul McCarthy and Erwin Wurm – and, of course, the exquisite antiquities.
Julius Popp Bit.Fall VI (2010)
The breathtaking building, designed by Melbourne firm Fender Katsalidis, is a three-level structure built into a sandstone hill overlooking the Derwent River. From land it’s almost invisible; the most visible thing about it is a tennis court. From the water though – and it’s possible to visit it by ferry from Hobart – it appears, like some kind of startling and elegant sci-fi monastery. (Walsh wrote about it in 2007: ‘Even those that ridicule the theoretical underpinnings and abhor the capriciousness of the new venture may glory in its physical manifestation just as I do the by-product beauty of the architecture of the catholic church.’) The site includes two buildings by the late Modernist architect Roy Grounds, who designed the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne; they’re sensitively incorporated into the new museum as a library and accommodation. When I visited, the collection was in the process of being installed. We descended more than 30 metres down a winding staircase into a breathtaking, vertiginous space. The lighting is a dramatic chiaroscuro; the enormous sandstone wall reminded me a recent visit to Jerusalem. (Such a reference is, of course, intentional.) During the course of the next few hours we wandered around the beautiful, disorientating spaces where works were still in the process of being hung; the spaces are astonishing, yet never distract from the work on show. I’m sad I couldn’t be there for the opening to see the final hang – which, of course, will have nothing final about it. All that is locked in, as far as I know, is an exhibition curated by Jean-Hubert Martin in 2012 and a shifting landscape of other possible shows. Time will tell. Lucky Hobart.
I’ve just returned from Australia, where I visited the new Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, which opens to the public this weekend – entrance is free. It’s the biggest privately funded museum in Australia (which isn’t actually saying much, as there are only a couple of others in the country) and, as far as I know, is the only one in existence to include a crematorium – visitors are encouraged to buy a life-and-after-life membership, which means they will be cremated at MONA and stored there for eternity. (I’m not joking.) Around 460 pieces are on display, from a collection of more than 2,000 works. Less than half of this is contemporary art; it includes a lot of antiquities from Egypt and various parts of Africa, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica: the oldest is a 6,000-year-old jar and the most recent is a new version of Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca (2010), which was specially commissioned for the museum (as were about 20 other works by artists including Julia deVille, Christian Boltanski, Tomoko Kashiki, Gelitin, Roman Signer, Erwin Wurm, Tessa Farmer, Masao Okabe and Dasha Shishkin.) Works are displayed in a non-linear fashion – three Sidney Nolan paintings, say, are hung next to a pile of ancient Chinese coins – and MONA is designed to be intentionally disorientating: it’s a place that privileges the journey over the destination. Similarly, connections between objects and periods are never explained and there’s not a wall label in sight. Information can be gathered from state-of-the-art individual iPods, which each visitor will be given on arrival. (At the end of your visit it can email you information about the works you’ve looked at it; it also registers exactly how long each visitor looks at each work, which would, apparently, make it possible to assess which is the most popular work in the collection – which, I was told, might swiftly effect its removal from display.) MONA is a wonderfully eccentric, philanthropic endeavour that includes a winery, brewery, restaurant, café and self-contained pavilions for guests and it’s run with as much humour and self-deprecation as scholarship.
Wim Delvoye Cloaca (2010)
The museum is funded by one man: David Walsh. A gambler and something of a mathematical genius, he started out playing blackjack before moving on to horse racing. He’s a self-confessed ‘rabid atheist’ who, when I met him, was dressed in a T-shirt emblazoned with a Richard Dawkins’ line about what a malevolent creature God must be if he exists. Walsh talks non-stop; his enthusiasm for his project is electric, but he’s not what you’d call a listener – he has Asperger’s syndrome and expresses himself without censorship. He’s passionate about his museum, which he describes as a kind of ‘secular temple’ to the ‘pursuit of sex and the avoidance of death’, themes which, he says, are the two fundamental motivating factors in life. He never seems to tire of discussing this, despite the fact that it’s all a little reductive – after all, you can wander around the National Gallery in London for hours and be inundated with images of sex and death, but that’s not, obviously, all that is being communicated. But it soon becomes clear that Walsh likes to provoke. (He recently told one journalist: ‘This is how you should start the story. David Walsh is a rich wanker.’) But for all of his bluntness Walsh is a more nuanced thinker than he likes to let on. The more time you spend with him the more apparent this becomes; he rattles off facts and figures and theories with the rapidity of a machine gun. He is never dull, often illuminating, quite frustrating, always irreverent and very funny – and his humour infiltrates every aspect of his museum. Take, for example, his description of the Keifer Pavilion on the MONA website: ‘Books, says Keifer, are a manifestation of time. He also says you must build a pavilion to house my massive sculpture. Otherwise you’re not having it.’ Or this, for the ‘Boltanski Cave’: ‘What kind of idiot would pay two-and-a-half grand a month to watch an old guy sitting around picking his nose? David Walsh has too much money, obviously.’ Similarly, Walsh’s online invitation to the public for the opening weekend, which includes an extensive programme of bands and performances – from Wire to the Cruel Sea, Grinderman to Phillip Glass and more – is nothing if not inclusive: ‘The Museum’s opening’ it declares. ‘We’re having a party. Want to come?’ Yet, he’s more tentative in his surprisingly enigmatic written introduction to MONA: he compares someone opening a museum to someone aspiring to be a writer:
‘This is good, I think: but maybe not useful, too clever, clever. You think you’re a great writer. But you’ve got writer’s block. You’ve had it for a while, your whole life in fact. You’ve never written anything. But you’re a great writer. Finally, here, now you’re lifting the pen, putting it to paper. Will the words pour out in a delicate, delightful stream, conveying the depth and beauty of all the ideas you have ever had, lovely capsules of meaning in perfect prose? Or will they resemble the chaos of your mind, words tripping each other in a tangle of obfuscation, only misconceptions conveyed? The writing is on the wall. I call it MONA. I await the museum opening with interest.’
But ultimately, of course, what Walsh has created speaks for itself: despite my reservations about some of the work (I can do without the bombast of, say, Jenny Saville, Marc Quinn and Damien Hirst et al), a lot of it is wonderful – in particular some gems of Australian Modernism (such as Sidney Nolan’s largest work, the fantastic 46-metre Snake, 1971, which comprises 1,620 separate images and which forms the heartbeat of the collection), some great contemporary Australian work (by Callum Morton and David Noonan, among others) and an eclectic array of international works by artists from Egon Schiele, Wassily Kandinsky, Gerry Judah, Su-en Wong, Fernando Botero to Paul McCarthy and Erwin Wurm – and, of course, the exquisite antiquities.
Julius Popp Bit.Fall VI (2010)
The breathtaking building, designed by Melbourne firm Fender Katsalidis, is a three-level structure built into a sandstone hill overlooking the Derwent River. From land it’s almost invisible; the most visible thing about it is a tennis court. From the water though – and it’s possible to visit it by ferry from Hobart – it appears, like some kind of startling and elegant sci-fi monastery. (Walsh wrote about it in 2007: ‘Even those that ridicule the theoretical underpinnings and abhor the capriciousness of the new venture may glory in its physical manifestation just as I do the by-product beauty of the architecture of the catholic church.’) The site includes two buildings by the late Modernist architect Roy Grounds, who designed the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne; they’re sensitively incorporated into the new museum as a library and accommodation. When I visited, the collection was in the process of being installed. We descended more than 30 metres down a winding staircase into a breathtaking, vertiginous space. The lighting is a dramatic chiaroscuro; the enormous sandstone wall reminded me a recent visit to Jerusalem. (Such a reference is, of course, intentional.) During the course of the next few hours we wandered around the beautiful, disorientating spaces where works were still in the process of being hung; the spaces are astonishing, yet never distract from the work on show. I’m sad I couldn’t be there for the opening to see the final hang – which, of course, will have nothing final about it. All that is locked in, as far as I know, is an exhibition curated by Jean-Hubert Martin in 2012 and a shifting landscape of other possible shows. Time will tell. Lucky Hobart.
