MONA, a llife changing experience
29 March 2012 | Hobart Tasmania
John
I apologize for being a few days late with our blog entries about sightseeing in Hobart. A major reason is that I really needed time to digest the experience of going to the Museum of New and Old Art (MONA).
The picture at the top of this blog entry is a photograph of the MONA building that I lifted off the internet. None of my pictures did it justice.
There are two dilemmas involved with describing MONA. One is that a lot of the best pieces would be considered profane by many people , so I have had a hard time figuring out how to describe the experience politely. The other is that its totally unlike any museum either of us has ever seen and I'm sure one visit was not enough to let us figure out what the place is all about.
One floor was closed for the installation of a new exhibit while we were there.
MONA is made up of the private art collection of a Tasmanian named David Walsh. Walsh is a very wealthy man with and incredibly developed imagination about how his collection should be displayed. I have not researched it but someone told me he made his money in gambling. I guess my source meant games of chance gambling not the stock market kind. Either way, MONA makes it pretty obvious that he is someone who has figured out what to do with his money. He has built an impressive monument.
If you are in Australia it is worth the effort to get to Tasmaina, if only to see this museum. If you are not in Australia, this place is a reason to travel here.
The building is stunning. It is carved out of a limestone cliff face on the bank of the Derwent river. . You enter on the top floor and are advised to start at the bottom and work your way up. You can either walk down the circular stair case or descend in a circular glass elevator (aka "Lift"). We walked down and when we were finished at the top we walked back down to get our elevator ride up. Its a cool elevator.
Nothing in the museum is labeled. That is something my aging eyes and back appreciate. I did not need to bring my "museum glasses" which are cheap reading glasses that have a magnification that works for things that are farther away than my regular reading glasses can focus but not far enough away that my unaided vision works. Im also getting tired of museums that put the labels at heights that work for people in wheel chairs or for Michael Dunn. If they want to put wheel chair accessible labels up why can't them put a set for people who are average height, too?
Anyway, I digress. Instead of labels MONA hands you an iphone to wear around your neck. The iphone figures out what exhibits you are near and brings up multiple levels of information about each piece. You can read as much as you want about the things that interest you. Sometimes there is Audio included. Shawn used his iphone to get maps to our next destination (Kmart) as the iphones also provide internet access. You could even check your email.
The big thing at MONA is the collection and we were there when there was a temporary exhibition of the work of someone I had never heard of but who is the most brilliant modern artist I have ever encountered. Wim Delvoye is Belgan who lives in Ghent. He was born in 1965, the year I graduated from high school. Delovye paints, carves, casts things in bronze and uses photography. He also uses laser cut steel and car tires in his sculptures. He has used live pigs as a canvas for tattoo art.
I think it would challenge an art critic for the "New Yorker" to describe MONA. How the works on display fit into the continuum of modern art and old is something Im not equipped to do,. I do want to communicate the impact this place can have on someone like me who does not know much about art but, hopefully, recognizes quality when he sees it. In a brief movie Delvoye mentioned his distain for modern artists who paint like Chimps. He is not one of those.
Wim Delvoye showed me things I would never have thought to appreciate. His observations about life, as expressed through is art, are a very powerful thing to experience.
Ill just provide a brief description of the Delvoye works that left an impression on me and also mention some of the other works we saw.
Mona records your visit through your iphone and give it to you online. You can access my visit by going to the following site and entering my email address (john@jklewis.org).
http://mona.net.au/theo/
We started our tour on the bottom floor and the first work we came across was kinetic water sculpture. I had not figured out the iphone thing at that point so its not included on my recorded tour. This sculpture is a 20 foot long bar that is suspended,horizontaly, about a story and a half above the floor. Every second or two a computer controlled array of solenoid valves, in the bar, release drops of water in a pattern that results in water falling in a way that shows the most googled headlines from the internet. The letters are close to a meter high and, as the array of drops fall, they become less well associated and eventually become unreadable before they crash into the floor. The lighting is designed to allow you to easily read the words as they fall. It is a mesmerizing piece.
We quickly found ourselves in the Delvoye exhibits.
The first works were bronze castings of various religious and anatomical objects. One piece was a 25 foot long double helix in polished cast bronze. The helix was made up of distorted images of the crucified Christ.. The Crucifixes were stretched and twisted to force them into the double helix structure.
Another piece was a polished stainless steel case for a motorcycle, including the motorcycle inside the partially opened case.
The first of Delvoye piece that really got my attention was a display of 14 enlarged radiographs where he had posed dead rats as the actors in the stations of the cross. On my iphone each radiograph's description included the biblical verse describing what was going on at the particular station of the cross.
Shawn was first to realize the irony of this exhibit when he said that mice would never do such cruel things to a member of their own species.
There was an exhibit of car tires (tyres in Tassie) carved in traditional Chinese motifs by Chinese craftsmen. It is a testimony to Delvoye's imagination that he could see the possibilities that something as mundane as tyres offered.
One room was dedicated to delft style paintings of windmills, and other typical delft scenes, but they were done on propane bottles like we use for our gas grills in the states. Some of the paintings we done on shovels. For something like this to work it has to be extremely well executed and Delvoye shows himself to be a very accomplished painter.
Another room is dedicated to tanned pig hides that are decorated with tattoos. Delvoye owned a pig farm in China (probably the only country where he could get away with it) where his staff raised the pigs and where he and other tattoo artists under his supervision could work on elaborate tattoos on the backs of the pigs. The pigs were allowed to grow to large size and were killed for their hides. I doubt that the rest of the pigs went to waste in a Chinese village.
The images he selected include on elaborate design centered on a picture of Osama bin Laden and another featured the princesses from Disney cartoons. Snow White and Tinkerbell were included. He also had one hide that was a repeating pattern of high fashion logos that he discovered are very popular on pirated goods in China.
The other tattoo art of Delvoye that was arresting is called Tim. It is a guy named Tim who is a musician from Melbourne Australia who has had his back tattooed in very elaborate Delvoye designs. The skin off Tim's back has already been sold to a collector who will get possession upon Tim's demise. Tim removes his shirt and sits on a pedestal in front of one of the few windows in this museum. Time just sits there with his back to the passing crowd.
The crown jewel of the Delvoye exhibit is named Cloaca. It is a 70 foot long and 12 foot high process chemical reactor that replicates the human digestive tract. It is fed twice a day through an insinkerator garbage disposal mounted under a polished stainless steel sink.
The cloaca consists of half a dozen glass bioreactors with feed lines and probes to allow control of the digestive process by an industrial process control computer. The device looks like something that might be used in a pilot scale biotechnology plant to manufacture a drug or other complex biochemical. Instead it is designed to manufacture poo. Every day at 2:00 PM the cloaca eliminates the product of the prior 24 hours of production.
We are always marveling at robots that can mimic human activities. Delvoye's cloaca seems to be saying that it is imitating a human activity to is frequently overlooked, i.e., poo manufacturing.
Do do this Delvoye had to build a machine the size of small truck. One can only imagine what sort of scale up would be needed if he wanted to build a cloaca on the scale of a Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich.
Delvoye also had a display of what he calls "Anal Kisses". He put lipstick on peoples anuses and had them make "kisses" on paper. The detail that made this work special is that he used stationary from 5 star hotels from all over the world. MONA has greyed out these images on their web site but you can easily see them by googling the subject. Like most of Delvoye's ideas, you wont find a sea of similar things on google.
There is also a life size model of a cement truck ,outside the museum, that Delvoye made from laser cut steel so it looks like a gothic cement truck. There are also several sculptures inside the museum made from laser cut stainless steel.
This long blog entry barely scratches the surface of the Delvoye exhibit but Im moving on to a couple of the other things that impressed us.
An Australian named Daniel Mudie was very moved by Tina Turners song "Proud Mary" so he has taken it upon himself to do a lip synched music video of the song every 5 years of his adult life to record his aging. The museum has monitors with the two most recent versions on display. This is already an interesting exhibit and one can only imagine what it will be like in 10 or 20 years.
The other modern thing that we really enjoyed is a karaoke room with 30 monitors featuring 30 different people performing Madonna's complete "Immaculate Collection" Album. The performers were a 50:50 mix of male and females. They all appeared to be 35 or younger. They are all non native English speakers and homeless. This display is hysterically funny. Some of the performers sing the background parts too. One was a drag queen who stopped to reapply makeup between songs. Some of the performers tried to mimic Madonna and others took liberty with the musical ornaments.
The museum also contained a lot of old art that was, for the most part, nicely displayed and explained on our iphones. There were collections of Roman Coins and Egyptian mummy cases and scarabs. The only issue I had with the exhibit of the coins is that they put them in tall cases where the coins were mounted from my knee height to just over my head so it was uncomfortable to get into a position to view many of them. They were also mounted so you could only see one side of the coins.
I will post some of our photos of the exhibits we saw. Unfortunately a lot of the photography on the MONA site does not do justice to the exhibits.
MONA belongs on everyone's bucket list.