MONA

I’ve been to MONA. What a great place. What a great experience. It’ setting a high standard for other galleries to meet. From the start, getting the ferry across the water on a cold clear Hobart day it was a great experience. Landing, you see the gallery emerging from the rock:

From there it’s up those steps, to be handed your personal iPod. This delivers whatever level of information you want about the things you choose to investigate. There are four buttons that you can choose: Art Wank ( a straight description of the work), Ideas (describes what lies behind the work, the objective or underlying ideas), Gonzo (an idiosyncratic response to the work, often by the gallery owner, David Walsh) or Audio (for listening through headphones – I didn’t use so can’t describe).

Armed with this very modern, personalized guide, you set off looking at whatever takes your fancy – and there is plenty to choose from – paintings, installations, sculptures, whatever.

I think my favorite was an installation called When My Heart Stops Beating by a Tasmanian artist called Patrick Hall.

This consisted of a small room where one wall was taken up completely with drawers like this one, but with different pictures at the centre, and different recordings of the words I love you emanating when the drawer was opened – female and male voices, young and old, high and deep, loud and soft. Eerie sounds of familiar words echoing around the small room. Great. The Gonzo description of this work told you that David Walsh’s girlfriend didn’t like it which led him to try and work out why he was drawn to it.

Another great installation was called Bit.Fall by a German artist, Julius Popp. This consisted of words made out of drops of water falling from a great height. With the yellow sandstone gallery wall providing a backdrop, it was a very beautiful thing to look at. And with words like Syria, Children, New, Bond, Sunshine being formed, thought provoking as well. There was another exhibit, Pulse Room that used your pulse to light an old fashioned lightbulb (imported from China because illegal in Australia these days). A Mexican born artist now in Canada, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. We all had great fun seeing how bright we could make the bulb burn. The individual bulbs travelled along a railing and were all then collected in the ceiling of a single room. David Walsh saw it at the 2007 Venice Biennale and he thought it brought to mind pathos. My daughter held her breath and her bulb really pulsated!

I also really liked this small object, Delicacies of the Dead by Alicia King.

Art Wank told me it is made of : Glass, human tissue, hand-made glass bones, polyurethane, flock and rubber. This was viewed through a slit in a wall of wood. Other objects displayed along this wall included the head of a mummified cat which was pretty weird and what was called a Kitten Trophy Rug that was a kitten size bear skin. Plenty of humour at MONA.

This next work consists of porcelain objects stuck to the wall. It’s called Formations of Silence: Freudian Flowers by Juz Kitson

The Ideas button included, under the heading Flower Psychology a quote from the great man himself: Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.

I really loved the Egyptian artifacts scattered throughout the gallery, including this scarab necklace,

And this mortuary amulet.

This figurine is of the dwarf deity Bes, who protected women in childbirth and ensured the virility of men. He also drove away nightmares!

I really liked the coffin of Ankh-pefy-hery, Prophet of the fertility god Min, Horus and Isis at Coptus and a monthly Priest of the Temple of Amun on Thebes. This was viewed by individuals or groups of two or three. You were instructed to enter a dark, forbidding sort of place and to walk carefully along white steps beside, and across, sections of black water. Inside the second of two chambers you found two coffins on white stone plinths. One is of wood, covered in linen and painted with hieroglyphs. Very beautiful in itself. On the other side was a mirror image of this coffin. I wont’ describe what happens next – but this is a must see if you visit MONA.

This photo is not Ankh-pefy-hery’s coffin and mummy, but another on display elsewhere in the gallery.

There were a number of works by Sydney Nolan. Below is Snake, or part of it. Massive and beautifully displayed on a curving wall. There were also two paintings that he completed in the 1960s of Leda and Swan that I had not seen before – both lovely – still so modern. These were hanging beside an Arthur Boyd: Melbourne Burning. It was strange to see the sorts of paintings you would find in a traditional gallery here in this wonderful, modern place.

I really enjoyed the installations, which was a surprise as I have not been drawn to this form of work in the past, but they were all so interesting! This one is called Untitled (White Library) by Wilfredo Prieto, a Cuban artist.

The idea behind this room was the importance of books and libraries, summed up by a quote from Jorge Luis Borges I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. In the Gonzo section David Walsh bemoaned the irony; This artwork avoids words, but I cannot avoid pontificating. He reflects what lots of people think, especially as we move into a world of e-books, that books fulfill his needs, representing social development, culture, just by being there even if unread, a view that taken to it’s logical conclusion means the perfect piece of knowledge remains undiscovered, the perfect book unreadable.

Another awesome piece was entitled Artifact by an American, Gregory Barsamian. An enormous head made of steel, very dark, lying on its side, asleep. You could look inside through small openings scattered around and see moving things made of rubber, paper and acrylic resin. A representation of the chaos of dreams. This picture does not quite capture it, too dark!

We had lunch at the restaurant, Source, and saw this on the way in.

A lovely meal in gracious surroundings with wonderful views over the water. The whole lay out of the buildings – gallery, brewery, winery – is very graceful. And there is an amphitheatre for performances. There were ducks and water birds wandering about in the rain.

We went back for another couple of hours. It all went very quickly. There is so much to see. I really liked Kryptos by a Melbourne artist, Brigita Ozolins. This was a maze like corridor that drew you into a middle chamber. Black numbers on the walls are described as an encoding of a translation of the Mesopotamian text, ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’. All that was a little obtuse, but it was very austere and dramatic. If a little claustrophobic.

Another striking piece was Tracing Time by Claire Morgan from Ireland. This consisted of nylon thread, dandelion seeds (10,000 all collected in Tasmania), a taxidermied wren, dead leaves and lead. It was a very delicate work, beautifully lit. The Gonzo description included an email from the artist saying it was about our relationship with nature. Lots of the artworks and installations have been specially commissioned for the gallery – a MONA led art recovery must surely be underway in Tasmania and across the world.

I loved a painting called Dandelion by a Japanese artist Tomoko Kashiki. It is so delicate – a woman peering at her reflection in a puddle on a pavement – a take on Narcissus perhaps. The face a flash of colour in a palette of blues and greys. Full of grace and reflection. Another great piece of work was Waterlily Pond by Martina Schumacher which was a wonderful shimmering picture made of sequins and beads nailed to three painted wood panels with electric fans. Wonderful. A re-interpretation of Monet’s waterlilly paintings.

There is of course much more. Leave your email address on the iPod and you receive a list of all the works you’ve viewed with the information (Art Wank, Gonzo etc) about each. I looked at 76 works in total. And now I have little pictures and descriptions of all of them, here at home on my iPad. What a wonderful memento.

It was raining when we finally caught the ferry back to Hobart.

But nothing could dampen our spirits!