MONA: The world's most far-out museum
MONA hugs the Derwent, ripping the "stuffy" out of art museums.Chiseled into an escarpment on the banks of the Derwent River in the northern suburbs of Hobart is a subterranean fortress housing one of the most confronting and controversial collections of art in the world.
The crowning achievement of Tasmanian David Walsh, a mathematician and art collector who made millions perfecting algorithms that let him to beat casinos and bookies at their own game, MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) has made a name for itself by breaking every rule in the book since opening its doors in January of last year.
The entrance, for example, casts aside the grand porticos and columns commonly seen at museums in favor of a synthetic tennis court and unmarked doorway.
“When you go to a conventional museum you are forced to walk up stairs and past pillars meant to make you feel small and then have academics tell you it’s culture,” says research curator Delia Nicholls. “But David wanted none of that so he built this place underground.”
Why the tennis court? “Because he likes tennis,” says Nicholls.
Into the deep
MONA’s foyer is incorporated in a heritage-listed building that looks like something out of “The Jetsons.”
Visitors are given an iPod touch that uses GPS to work out which artwork they are standing in front of, then gives a running commentary from Walsh himself, interviews with the artists and plenty more.
That all comes via a button on the iPod marked “Art Wank” -- you get the idea of the tone Walsh is trying to set now, perhaps.
From the lobby, a spiral staircase descends 17 meters underground, ending in a cathedral-like basement cordoned by a 250-million-year-old Triassic sandstone wall that Walsh, who once described himself as a “rabid atheist,” left exposed to challenge creationists on their beliefs.
What follows are three levels of steel and stone festooned with art and objects based around sex, death and evolution that are concurrently shocking, educational and entertaining.
To impart just a taste of the museum, first among these is a chocolate sculpture of the remains of a Chechen suicide bomber. Yes, chocolate.
One level up, a wall has been lined with white porcelain molds of female genitalia, while another wall shows a very large image of a man engaged in an unhealthy act with a dog.
A room-sized machine made of giant test tubes fed by a series of pumps parodies the digestive tract by turning food into a brown gooey paste, while an engorged and distended Porsche Carrera sagging with fat offers comment on mindless overindulgence.
Then there’s “Bit.fall,” a “rain-painting machine” created by German born artist Julius Popp. Spanning two stories, this multi-million dollar contraption uses 128 computer-controlled nozzles to drip cascades of water in the shape of phrases selected daily from news websites. You really need to see it, of course.
Sprinkled among these masterpieces of modern art, as though there were never a reason to keep them apart, are selections from Walsh’s private collection of antiquities.
They include a 1,500-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus, gold coins taken from one of the statues at the Partheon in Athens and a collage made of Neolithic flints.
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