MOT Tour Day 57 - MONA

The front door of MONA

I have mentioned before that we had half a dozen "big ticket" items for this tour - generally things we could only see in Tasmania and have been the movers and shakers behind our desire to make a tour here. Today was the last of them: the Museum of New and Old Art or generally referred to as MONA.

We have always held the highest regard for this museum, having seen several programs extolling its contemporary vision and delivery and without a doubt, it was the main reason for coming to Hobart, yet along the road and in campsites since arriving in Tasmania, the opinion of MONA hasn't even been mixed. Without exception it has been bagged in conversation, so we had developed a slight besmirch on our anticipation.

Well, how dopey can some people be! 

MONA was just brilliant! From the beginning, the design of the building buries itself into the landscape and exposes the sedimentary layers of its host with a massive feature wall which extends from the floor of the entry foyer to the roof of the highest sub basement (you enter the museum by circular staircase or circular glass lift). I would have been happy to pay my entrance fee and just sit and look at that huge wall. For the rest of your visit you are drawn back this wall or smaller versions of it and through long burrowed cylinders which are lit to create the feeling of science fiction stories. A map is wise but not to be regarded unless necessary, tired, hungry or in need of a toilet. Wandering in the maze is part of the fun a mouse doesn't experience.

The exhibits are world class. Yes, a few weren't to my taste but fair warning is given. I emphasise a few because even the others than challenged me were intriguing. There was a series of cubes with binary code running around the walls, on cube inside the next, opening on opposite sides. When you arrive in the last one and look up, you realise you have been on a journey to discover yourself. There was a library room where all of the 5,000 books were blank and all of the covers plain white. Some were open on a desk. The concepts there were asking were how much knowledge we retain from what we read; the retention of books as a status thing; the one I liked best, the more you read the more your realise you don't know.

Tomas Saraceno spider webs

Spider webs spun in large glass boxes - maybe two cubic metres - by real spiders then lit from below and displayed in black out conditions. A long bar suspended in front of that giant sandstone wall, computer programed to emit water droplets in the shape of words: I'd still be there watching if Sue hadn't dragged me away.

Yes, there is a wall of plaster casts of vaginas. Yes, there is a poo making machine which defecates at 2:00pm each day. As I age, that sort of regularity is desirable. There was also a lot of what be called "traditional" art, with the odd sarcophagus from ancient Egypt; shell necklaces by Lola Greeno; paintings by Sydney Nolan including the massive 46 metre long :Snake"; and Brett Whiteley, including the rather beautiful "The Naked Studio" from 1981.  Perspective is the thing and that word I mentioned before, challenge. Contemporary art should do that. Perhaps all art should. It should move us from what we expect and what we feel comfortable with - kick us off our stool - and make us think during our response to it. Art should bend our perspectives and help us see around the edges we have placed on our thoughts. Its one of the reasons why the app designed to be your companion for a visit at MONA is so important. The creator of the Museum - who grapes grow on the slopes which lead up to it - refused to have labels beside the art pieces because he wanted people to respond without the crutch of what other people think. Instead, the app uses bluetooth and location services technology to recognise where you are and each art work is identified and in many cases, described. The app also provides that map I talked about and direction to places for food and drink and then places to remove same.

I think MONA is the best museum of art I have ever been in. 

Click here for today's photos

Lunch on the lawns entertained by live music was awfully good too.

Sue says I can be a bit petty in my criticism of things I see and do, always with suggestions of how it could be better. No such suggestions after MONA. It was perfect plus.