It is the ultimate art trip. Go about as far away from United States as you can: to Tasmania, the island dangling off Australia’s southern coast. Find your way to the dock at Hobart, the capitol, and get on a boat sporting fake pink missiles waiting to blast any anti-aesthetic interference out of the way. Make your way up the Derwent River for twenty-five minutes and alight at the bottom of a sheer rock. Walk up a staircase hewn into the cliff, and find yourself on a plaza sporting a tennis court, a James Turrell Sky Space, Wim Devoye’s concrete mixing truck rendered in Gothic filigree out of rusted metal, and Oliver Beer’s MONA Confessional, a giant mouth curving towards a black hole. Enter through the remains of midcentury modern house, with slight hints of Scandinavian influences in the curved metal fireplace and wood ceiling, and descend down a spiral staircase. There you will find three levels of tunnels, caves, and caverns in which art ranging from relics of ancient civilizations to experiences composed of pure light manipulated into room-filling hues, with a lot of imageries of sex and death sprinkled throughout, surrounds you. Take a break at the gourmet restaurant where you can either look back out over the harbor or let Turrell assault you with multicolored strobe lights for fifteen minutes as you recline in the giant egg he has placed there. Take the boat back and, dazed, enjoy some local wines or whiskey. In necessary, repeat the next day.
That is what you get if you visit the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) the largest private art museum in the Southern Hemisphere, into which the billionaire math genius and gambler David Walsh has sunk a significant portion of his fortune. Walsh opened the museum in 2011, after he had built a modest structure for his then much-smaller collection on what was his house and winery on the site in 2007. With a design overseen by the Melbourne-based firm of Fender Katsalidis –but, one suspects, with a great deal of guidance from the rather larger-than-life Walsh—MONA has continued to change and expand over time. During my recent visit, another tunnel and cave was being hollowed out to the sound of jackhammers. It will house a larger home for Walsh’s book and manuscript collection and art by the artist Anselm Kiefer, who likes to make things as large as Walsh does.
What is particularly enticing about the MONA experience –and it is a heavily curated and coordinate one, from the ferries to the “O” app that is your only guide during your visit, to the menu at the café-- is that it indeed brings representations of the ancient and the modern if not together, into a creative tension. You are in a 21st century version of Lascaux or another cave art site, with images from death masks and mummies to Greg Taylor’s array of Cunts (152 porcelain impressions of that piece of anatomy belonging to several dozen women) glowing under pin lights in the darkness, until you confront such environments as strips of red digits counting down, up, or towards some unknown conclusion all around you (Ryoji Ikeda’s Supersymmetry). The installations and environments are the anchors, and they usually take you into very abstract and ethereal spaces. The one exception is the felt-lined labyrinth you find your way through in darkness to enter the basement part of the above-mentioned MONA Confessional, a space where you can tell your darkest secrets in private, only to have them appear out of that maw you saw at the entrance, even while you remain anonymous far below.
The other interruptions are the various ensembles of sofas, chairs, rugs, and chandeliers dotted throughout the caves. Baroque and even rococo in their designs, they are both places to rest and look at adjacent art works and, at times, lounges where you can drink away your fears of this strange art or you claustrophobia, or enter into the delirious spaces much of that art evokes.
The great service Fender Katsalidis have done to the whole experience is to leave the excavations through layers of rock exposed, so that this geology becomes not only the framework for the rooms, but also part of the art displays. They then also left many of the marks of the cutting and stabilizing in place, adding stairs, rails, and other safety and circulation structures, often made of Corten steel, that are abstractions of the kind of service architecture you might find in a mine. Industrial Chic merges with land art and minimalism. Only above ground, where they extended the same reductivist version of industrial chic into background buildings that service the wonderworld below do some of their characteristics angles and flourishes appear.
MONA’s effect on Hobart and Tasmania is a large part of its story. It draws well over a half a million visitors a year, augmenting the island’s status as a tourist draw that had until recently been the result of the attractions of its nature and its wineries. Hobart is now filled with restaurants and stores catering to both the 400 people who work at the museum and its ancillary music festivals and to pilgrims such as myself. It is, in other words, one of the few examples of the so-called Bilbao Effect that has actually worked.
The museum is also a node in the international network of sites for experimental and installation art. Though its collection, a several thousand pieces, is not particularly large, Walsh’s commitment to let artists produce works whose scale, elaboration, technological complexity, and thus cost go beyond what many museums can support, is a large part of the attraction to both casual visitors looking for FOMO experiences and serious art lovers who deem the best such experiences worth going to such a far location to undergo.
That also makes MONA part of a network of art-adjacent experiences that range from Meow Wolf in Santa Fe and now Denver, the installations that appear at venues such as New York’s Armory and the Venice Biennale, and the room-size “recreations” of Van Gogh’s paintings you can now consume in cities around the world. The judgement of which of these is actually “art” has been a matter of debate for years, and MONA will not solve the discussion between those who see the best of such work as a critical response to what the philosopher Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle and those who see such venues as just an extension of such capitalist stagings of escapes from harsh reality.
What is without doubt is that David Walsh, his team, and his art have created the largest permanent collection of installations and experiences I know, and have done so in manner that is truly spectacular. The appropriation of what must be our deepest memories of our first homes in caves, that now somehow also calls up rave and disco sites, prisons, and Batcaves, is a stroke of this strange man’s genius. The explosion of forms, textures, lights, colors, and sensations that open up within those spaces are mind-blowing. Buy a baseball cap at the gift store and the front will sport the X’s that are MONA’s enigmatic logo. On the back, it says: “Trust me, I own an art museum –David Walsh.” In response, I would say: trust me, I am a critic: go visit MONA.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: Elon Musk's Space X | AMAA | DIGSAU | Art Biennales | B+ | William Morris's Red House | Dhaka | Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.
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