MONA interior, December 2020. Image: MONA/Jesse Hunniford
A museum is a place of tradition, and we have all internalised what to expect when we enter one. Cavernous white-walled spaces. Deathly quiet. Special antiquities from lost worlds in bell jars. Climate controlled air. Acoustics that bounce the sound of footsteps. An air of reverence for the past. The innovation of Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), run by gambling multimillionaire David Walsh, was never its blaring subject matter—the museum is still trying to shake off its early thematic framing of ‘sex and death’—but its commitment to subverting the dullness of how museums look and feel. No stuffy wall labels. Black painted surrounds. Galleries dug underground into sandstone. And why shouldn’t we discard the strictures of sterile white spaces? After all, the museum is a relatively recent form. Humans have been presenting art on rocks, cave interiors, palaces, street walls and churches for far longer.
With its usual program of temporary exhibitions on hold due to the pandemic, items from Walsh’s personal collection have completely taken over the museum since its 26 December reopening (with shorter opening hours from Friday to Monday). Much of what’s presented in the rehang is not art—there’s an abundance of papery cartography, an enigma machine used by Germans to communicate during World War II, while Ai Weiwei’s The White House and Alfredo Jaar’s purgatory-themed The Divine Comedy both assume the form of entire buildings.
Curator Jarrod Rawlins, who estimates that just over 10 per cent of the collection is now on display, started thinking about the design of the rehang the day after the museum closed last March. ‘David and the staff are interested in museology,’ he says, insisting that Walsh’s acquisition of new items is instinctive and without strategy. ‘In the things that David’s collecting, in the way we think about them and write about them and look after them, we follow the traditions of the museum. They’re not traditions you can muck around with because they’re so good at helping you preserve things. What we do is put our own spin on the display. We turn the lights down. We put the museum underground. In the presentation, we have our own tropes.’ MONA personalised the museum experience.
‘We follow the traditions of the museum. They’re not traditions you can muck around with… What we do is put our own spin on the display.’
What remains absent is a digital program of art commissioned and curated specially for online exhibition. In 2020, MONA’s only digital presence was its weekly live stream of Ryoji Ikeda’s Spectra light show, and Tim, a livestream of a tattooed ‘regular dude from Zurich’ who sits on a plinth. ‘It’s not something that we’re doing,’ says Rawlins, regarding digital. ‘MONA is a destination. It’s a place. We want to focus on what happens when you get here.’
The catastrophe of COVID-19 has unveiled MONA’s inherent contradictions. Even with its underground cell-like structure reimagining what a museum feels like, the pandemic showed that MONA remains archetypal in its structure: a private collection of artefacts and artworks, and a physical space full of a selection of those objects, helmed by an extremely rich patron and housing the eccentricities of his worldview. Public institutions have an obligation to grant the public access to their knowledge. In refusing to construct a digital platform, MONA affirmed its place within the extremely offline, unrebellious tradition of a big, non-governmental museum.
MONA, December 2020. Image: Mona/Jesse Hunniford
Contrary to the concept made popular by the pandemic that art has an obligation to uplift and inspire during dire times, it feels cathartic to find yourself facing a totem salvaged from a mortuary death cult, a silvery Isis with her infant Horus, gleaming through the millennia. Keep moving, and the curators bombard the space with different gallery aesthetics. Eras, movements and art forms are gloriously, exuberantly muddled, like a Chrome window with 90 open tabs. A carefully cultivated sense of disorder replaces the traditional museum’s fanatical rows of ornaments and articles under glass, grids and frames. A photograph by Brook Andrews faces Egyptian scarabs and a porcelain bust by Ah Xian. A video work that remixes Wonder Woman is treated with the same veneration as the first European map to represent the island of Tasmania. Patrick Guns’ photographs of the chefs who prepare Texan death row inmates’ final meals chills and disturbs, personalising the rhetoric of capital punishment.
One room toys with the convention of the Parisian salon-style exhibition, as if you’re stepping into a crazy rich uncle’s art-overloaded lounge room. John Baldessari video works tussle for attention alongside 17th century globes on coffee tables, alongside shelves of Walsh’s book collection. His interests seem, unsurprisingly, wedded to the dystopian: J.G. Ballard and Isaac Asimov lie open boastfully. And rather than cold hard benches typical to other galleries, MONA is now littered with couches atop shag carpets, looming out of the darkness as welcome respite from the caverns of heaving art. ‘We know the time people spend here,’ says Rawlins. ‘It’s not an hour.’
If MONA has a story, it’s that certainty—in politics, dogmas, worldviews—should be contradicted and knowledge should wobble.
New to the collection’s display are the Kerry & Co collection of photography. The fifteen portraits by Sydney photographer Charles Kerry depict Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and South Sea Islander people in the late 19th century. The subjects are barely individuated props, the compositions smothering them beneath a shroud of pan-Aboriginality. Recontextualised, the works reveal how photography was weaponised for imperial conquest, and they hold a terrible grief. ‘We didn’t want it part of a broader narrative about portraiture,’ says Rawlins. ‘This is just about the people in the photos. You have to remember, they’re not Aboriginal artworks, they’re photos of Aboriginal people. We just wanted to allow these figures to be who they are.’ One man seems proud, another confused, another as if his mind has left his body.
Mona interior, level B1, with Crucifix, 1955, Sidney Nolan; The Naked Studio, 1981, Brett Whiteley; Vitalis, 2007, Toby Zeigler. Image: MONA/Jesse Hunniford
Over the years, the press has made much of MONA’s eclecticism, supposing that private museums have a unique sense of freshness guided by their owner’s taste rather than the compromises of bureaucratic committees. It’s much more than that. ‘We don’t make assessments of the value of the object to the culture. That’s an important point of difference,’ says Rawlins. ‘The [national and state] museums, by way of their briefs, have to perform that role. Public collections drill into different eras. But David has all this infrastructure around him so that he doesn’t have to make those kinds of decisions.’ He can house the smallest little coin from three thousand years ago, to Randy Polumbo’s Grotto of multicoloured dildos, arranged like flowers, blooming around a silver-coated room.
State-funded museums often collect objects with pre-existing media stories. The ‘Bungendore fridge’ and Jessica Mauboy’s gold Eurovision dress by Toni Maticevski, both recently acquired by the National Museum of Australia, speak to recognisable narratives that positively support Australian national identity. Not MONA: Its new display includes a Wurlitzer cigarette vending machine, with a hand scrawled sign advertising packs for $8. Beige couches and mid-century side tables surround it, completing an anachronistic pub mirage. Ironically, the Marlboro-branded push-button machine may speak more to a particular experience of Australian life, or rather, a 20th century childhood spent inhaling second-hand smoke in the suburbs, than any item collected with the expressly ideological intention to tell Australian stories. Through these images and objects, we access stories of ourselves. If MONA has a story, it’s that certainty—in politics, dogmas, worldviews—should be contradicted and knowledge should wobble. Pedagogy withers. ‘We’re not telling you what this art is about and why it’s here and what you should think about, but what interests us about it and what we want to learn from it,’ says Rawlins. People go to MONA to be entertained and awestruck, not drily informed.
What ails museums today is not just national ideology but exclusivity. They are not open places. Rarefied gift shop items, exorbitant entry fees, academic language and tourist food-and-drink prices conspire to tell low-income visitors that they don’t belong.
MONA has designed itself to attract a cross-section of the community, and yet, its relationship to wealth makes for another uncomfortable friction with its anti-establishment identity. Everywhere, decisions by the museum sort its attendees by class. Boat-shoed boomers pay $58 to sip bubbly in the VIP section of the ferry from Hobart and wallow in the cultural capital afforded by Walsh, while other civilians take the $15 minibus. Once there, food trucks sell ice-cream and grilled cobs of corn, or there is an airy restaurant hanging over the river, housing a James Turrell installation and serving Great Bay Oysters on marble tables. This type of demographic division is everywhere.
MONA has designed itself to attract a cross-section of the community, and yet, its relationship to wealth makes for another uncomfortable friction with its anti-establishment identity.
Significantly, there are now far more ticketed sections that require payment above and beyond the standard museum entry fee. Penthouse accommodation starts at $800 per night, and can be glimpsed on the way to Christian Wagstaff and Keith Courtney’s House of Mirrors installation—one of the most sense-scrambling art experiences I’ve had in some time, with entry priced at $10. An illicit peek inside the hotel buildings confirmed the marketing speak; they are indeed ‘super flash luxury dens on the River Derwent.’
All these class-delineated areas are reminders that MONA is not just an anomaly of the museum sector; it is embedded in the tiny Tasmanian economy’s tourism and employment structures. The concept of MONA as a destination shapes the entire enterprise. At junkets, for example, there are as many food and travel writers as arts journalists and critics. They almost always report on the museum as outsiders to the state and the arts. Few mastheads have covered Tasmanian arts workers’ or journalists’ perspective on how MONA has shifted the island’s reputation and economy to that of a luxury food, wine and art destination for the wealthy, or how local artists and independent galleries have (or haven’t) benefited from this.
Contradictions multiply. David Walsh’s outward persona chimes with the Australian media’s obsession with art’s rogue-ish, outspoken, God-like men—the Brett Whiteleys, the Adam Cullens, the Ben Quiltys—whose personalities and biographies are lazily mythologised by way of understanding their contributions to culture. Other aspects of MONA’s brand are beginning to feel forced and weary. Nobody really needs $4 MONA-branded condoms from the museum shop, or mugs with blaring text ‘DON’T PUT MY FACE ON A FUCKING MUG’ and Walsh’s face wrapped around.
Girls Rule, 2016-18, Tom Otterness. Image: MONA/Jesse Hunniford
Since this visit—my fourth to MONA, my third as a media guest—I’ve settled on the term ‘sceptical gratitude’ for how we might relate to art’s ultra-rich titans. When support flooded in for Walsh in his 2012 row with the ATO, letter-writers to newspapers advocated for his debt to be wiped on account of his generosity in the museum sector, as if heavyweight philanthropists should be governed by different financial regulations than the rest of us. To paraphrase Rachel Cusk, who was talking about literature, there is no reason to think that you can’t buy your way into the art world. Plutocrats do it all the time; they call it philanthropy, and it comes with the power of cultural influence and the responsibilities of being an employer (see: Don Thompson’s canonical book on the lust and self-aggrandisement of art possession). In the art sector, it’s common to douse any critical engagement with MONA with reminders of the scale of Walsh’s investment. We can be grateful for these investments, and thoughtful, too. The Australian art sector’s economic philosophy has always been sketchy. We tend to accept dwindling government funding as an unfortunate given, and afford big-time philanthropists an exemption from deep appraisal.
Since this visit, I’ve settled on the term ‘sceptical gratitude’ for how we might relate to art’s ultra-rich titans.
We also tend to forget that MONA prospers—as it should—from government intervention. It has been a major recipient in the first round of COVID stimulus fund, Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE), with festivals Dark Mofo and MONA FOMA and a new permanent on-site recording studio the beneficiaries. MONA’s current running costs are around $20 million per annum. In 2012, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that MONA supported 170 full-time employees. That figure is now 370 full-timers, supported by JobKeeper, which makes its team’s insistence that MONA has no long term strategy a little hard to believe.
If the pandemic revealed the horrific fragility of arts institutions, it also exposed the fatal indifference of the federal government, which sees the sector as rife with leftist political enemies. So much uncertainty—for the art and museum sectors, for the future of work and travel—hangs. But ten years into the experiment of its existence, MONA’s shape can be seen clearly: an affirmation of the institution of the museum and a corresponding negative to boring exhibition traditions, a black-walled inversion of the public collections, governed by curiosity rather than discipline, and a major engine of the cultural economy, in an island place that has been invaded, destroyed, and built back up again.
MONA is open Friday–Monday, 10am–6pm. All visitors must have a pre-booked ticket.
Lauren Carroll Harris travelled to Hobart and the museum as a guest of MONA.
