The Lure of the Sensational and the Extreme
By: Lyz Nagan
Tags: Australia, Tasmania, Design, Travel Writing, Art

I went into my MONA journey knowing very little about it — I had few details about the city, the space, or the story. It’s unlike me, and probably not entirely recommended. But there I was, landing in Tasmania on a bright Thursday morning in October, still busily preparing for my 30-hour visit.

I wasn’t sure it was worth adding the extra leg to an already-short trip to Sydney. The location was enticing: Tasmania sounded like the actual end of the world to this American Midwesterner. And the museum founder’s commitment to his vision and hometown is impressive. Ultimately, I determined I couldn’t not go, if only to avoid ever having to say, “I went to Australia and had the opportunity, but didn’t make it down to the MONA.” Plus, once you’re halfway around the world, what’s another 2-hour flight?

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) has an expansive campus just outside Hobart, Tasmania. The founder, David Walsh, is a billionaire Tasmanian who built his wealth as a professional gambler and “gave back” to his hometown by creating a destination museum that doesn’t take itself (or art?) too seriously. The brand — of the person and the museum — is very over-the-top and almost campy in nature. This was definitely a case of reputation preceding information: While I knew of the museum, that was all I really knew about the museum before buying a plane ticket three days before my departure.

The museum was designed to be approached by water, so my official MONA experience began there. As I sipped bubbly and nibbled on a plate of prepared snacks, I listened to a brief Hobart history lesson over the loudspeaker and admired the carefully considered details throughout the cabin: old fashioned looking leather armchairs, whimsical window drawings, buttoned velvet pillows, a laughably oversized bench on the bow, and pink cartoonish bullets-on-steroids stools on the second story deck. The “not taking things too seriously” attitude was apparent in everything from the decor to the menu copy to the uniforms. So far, no regrets and all fun on my part.

We sped up the River Derwent for 25 minutes and approached the waterside museum from a nearly perpendicular angle. I could make out a few core components — a roof here, a glass panel there. But there wasn’t much to latch on to. There was no obvious building that rose from the landscape. There was nothing to view, really. But, then, as I descended from the ferry toward the pier, more hints at the MONA experience emerged. A veined sandstone monolith, patinated steel panels, poured cement retaining walls, and leafy foliage filled the scene. A narrow, high-walled staircase led me from the waterfront to the main entry point. With each step, both the view ahead — corners of sculptures (and an actual tennis court) — and behind — an expansive landscape — seemed to get better. This was the experience you had by choosing the ferry approach: the building didn’t rise to meet you, but elements that slowly introduced what you were about to see did.

Leading up to my visit, I heard descriptions from people who had visited that included “irreverent and fun,” entertaining, and “the best museum on earth.” On the flip side, numerous articles poked and prodded at the founder’s over-sized personality, at the scale and seemingly never-endingness of the project, and at the controversial art inside (will the general question, “Is this art?!” ever go away? It’s really the least interesting question one can ask.).

Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued and yet I contained my expectations — it’s just a museum after all.

This museum didn’t let my curiosity down. The building is strange and unpredictable. It’s not designed to wander through sequentially. It’s a gesamtkunstwerk that gives you very little to guide you. Upon entering, I got an iPhone loaded with their custom O app and a paper map. These became my compass — providing just enough information so I mostly/kind of knew where I was, but not enough to lead me along any particular prescribed path.

A wall and hallway on the lowest level of the museum.

Forget the white-walled, austere spaces you’re used to seeing. Here, some walls are literally the earth into which the building was constructed. The galleries and floors are intentionally disjointed and connected here and there, but not logically or predictably. The primary entry point is a spiral staircase that corkscrews through sandstone to deposit you on the 1st floor, which is the lowest floor (you actually can’t get to every floor from this stairwell…I think). From here, you make your way up erratically — there are no central stairs, instead, there are a few ways to get to each floor and half-floors from the center of the galleries and at the peripheries. The paper map is helpful, but also just abstract enough that you will get lost.

A map that makes the interior space look simple, but it’s not.

Tunnels connect spaces and inside the tunnels are artworks, or maybe the artwork is a tunnel or the tunnel an artwork? You often have to double-back on your route because you reach a dead-end of sorts. In one case it was an atrium sized Anselm Kiefer installation with all the tragedy and beauty typical in his work. As someone who prides herself on a rat-like memory for directions, the layout threw me for a loop.

The museum has no wall labels, that is partly what the iPhone is for. With eerily accurate geo-location technology, the app gives you options to learn varying degrees of information about the works around you. You can get the basics: artist, date, materials. But via two other curatorial tabs within the artwork profile — the Art Wank and Gonzo — you could dive in further. With irreverent yet useful information and perspectives, each made me laugh and think. The Art Wank voice is similar to a traditional curatorial voice, while Gonzo is an assortment of voices ranging from the founder’s son to artists. Every time you click into a profile, the device adds it to a list that they will email you when you leave (a feature I loved).

Interestingly, the lack of labels made me look at the artworks more closely. I overheard a few complaints from fellow visitors that the iPhones were a distraction, but most visitors I observed were looking at art more than their phones, and maybe even more than at most museums where wall labels become a central focus. I love learning about what I’m about to look at, but with by-default-there wall labels, it is easy to succumb to reading before looking. And it’s hard to separate that historical, educational, or op-ed content from your own reaction. At MONA, looking and being were the default.

The downside to a viewing-centered experience is that it privileges people who either know about or are really comfortable around art. There were a few interactive pieces that weren’t obvious and visitors less familiar with art or particular artists may overlook some pieces. For example, the Pulse Room by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is most fully experienced if you interact with the heartbeat monitor handles (a la an exercise machine) at one end of the room. These capture your heartbeat and transmit it to the hanging light bulbs which display your beat in undulating waves. It’s very cool to see something that you typically don’t even notice inside your body externalized into a visual pattern. But if you didn’t really know what the hell those handles were, you might miss it altogether.

The collection is vast. The through-line I connected with was that each piece felt “of the body.” Some made you physically do something with your body, like the Lozano-Hemmer piece above. Some were places to put your body, like Randy Polumbo’s Grotto, a fun-house-like room “carved” into the side of a hallway. The layers of silver foam seating rise to meet plastic mirrors lining the organically shaped ceiling to create a bright, reflective nook. Over-sized plastic flora punctuates the walls, adding dimension. Instead of an of-the-earth feel, it has an other-worldliness to it. In MONA fashion, the grotto doesn’t replicate its namesake reference, it’s a tilted, twisted, version.

Grotto at the MONA.

Some art made you participate more than “traditional” artwork — like Gianluca Gimini’s bicycle-themed galleries. Upon entering, there is a small set of instructions posted on a desk with paper and pencils. Visitors are asked to draw a bicycle from memory, which quickly turns from feeling doable to being impossible. As Gimini has discovered over the years, people are really bad at drawing bikes (myself included). Upon completion, visitors add their name, age, and profession to the paper and drop the drawing into a bin. In the next gallery, it becomes clear: lining the walls are hundreds of small, framed drawings of hilariously inaccurate bicycle drawings. After viewing a few, I realized that I forgot to draw a seat on mine.

But that’s not all, that’s regular museum stuff. MONA and Gimini worked together to fabricate five drawings into actual “bikes.” The final gallery features a collection of poorly proportioned, non-sensical bicycles that are expertly crafted and perfectly displayed. The juxtaposition of absurdity and precision is perfect.

Gianluca Gimini’s bikes

And the four site-specific James Turrell pieces are about vision, but are also so soulful, that they enrapture your entire body. I planned ahead and reserved a spot for Turrell’s Unseen Seen, which you view and then proceed immediately to the Weight of Darkness. Unseen Seen is a large, enclosed circular pod that sits in the middle of one of the MONA restaurants. You sign a waiver (I’m not pregnant, check; I’m not epileptic, check; I’m not drunk, check; I won’t engage in anything sexual, check.) and then they lead you to a spaceship-like door that opens, revealing a warm interior. A maximum of two people can take part at the same time, but I was the only reservation for my time slot, so I had a solo experience. You ascend the stairs and lay on a bed at the very top of the globular space. You’re not supposed to move too much lest the infrared sensors light up and the host thinks you might be up to something…naughty. I chose the “soft” sequence (the other being “hard”) and the 14-minute experience kicked in and pulsating light washed over me.

I’ve heard Turrell comment about his works with something like they allow you to observe yourself seeing. I have seen many Turrell works and this particular one was the most intense and all-encompassing. The light screen wraps around you like an Omni theater, so there is no edge. It’s like looking at nothing and everything. There is nothing to “see” and yet your eyes work very hard to figure out what’s there.

Immediately after departing the pod, my host escorted me to the Weight of Darkness, about 100 feet away. She handed me over to a new host who explains how this piece worked. Actually, how I will have to work to access the piece. To get into it, visitors have to walk into and navigate a pitch-black hallway that snakes around twice before ending in a pitch-black room with two armchairs. The armchairs are directly next to the door, the host says, so they won’t be hard to find in the dark. The host claims he will retrieve me after fourteen or so minutes. Then, he basically says, “go on now!” I place both hands on the wall as my guides and proceed into darkness.

With the remnants of Unseen Seen still floating around in my visual memory, the blackness felt extraordinarily dense. It was like that dream we’ve all had in which you’re running but in slow motion. I inched along, groping my way through the hall and eventually into an armchair. The darkness was very relaxing with an oh-so-slight undercurrent of fear (what if they never came to get me?!). I honestly can’t say whether I kept my eyes open or not, it didn’t really matter. At the very end, I swear I saw something in the distance, but it wasn’t light nor was it an object. I’ll never be sure.

I wandered a little more aimlessly after that. But got back on track in the Nolan Gallery, which houses an immense piece titled Snake, which fills a wall that is so large it looks as if nothing could fill it. The 30x150-foot piece is by Sidney Nolan, an Australian artist. The scale is so vast that Walsh had to redesign part of the MONA to accommodate it after its acquisition. The 1,620 small compositions that makeup Snake hang in a grid that collectively creates a larger composition. Each discrete and yet part of a whole. While impressively sized, it feels particularly straightforward for a museum from which I had already come to expect something else (more?). But that might be the power of the piece — a nod to local history and an unexpected reminder of the outlandish size of the space.

At 3:54 I found myself at Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca Professional that was at the far corner at the end of whatever floor I happened to be on. I entered a room with a foul smell and five sacs hanging in a very laboratory-like setting. A small sign near the tubes and sacs said there would be a feeding at 4:00. I thought, “What timing! And what is a feeding?” Just then, at 4:00, a woman popped out to answer my question and many more.

Wim Delvoye’s “Cloaca Professional” in the gallery.

Cloaca Professional simulates a human digestive system. On the left, an employee adds real food to the system (that’s the feeding part). The machine mixes that food with some other liquids that our human system needs — like water — via a collection of tubes and dispenses it all together into the first sac. Each sac replicates a microenvironment that food moves through within our bodies (think: stomach, the intestine, and lower intestine) and the contents of the feeding move through each sac over the course of a cycle. At the very end is a container into which the machine, you guessed it, poops. It also poops on a schedule: every day at 2 pm. Except for the day I was there. It was constipated, so there was no feeding and no poop to see. The employees were working on restoring the chemical balance to get it un-constipated. What a job! (There is an amateur recording of the MONA presentation and explanation on YouTube if you’d like to watch.)

I later read that the museum focuses on art about “sex and death.” That seems too sensational and shallow to me. And very much in keeping with how the founder talks about the museum — I get the sense that he wants it to appear like a giant wind-up toy when he knows that it’s more, or could be more if you — the visitor — let it. Walsh, the owner, likes flair and clearly enjoys being awed, immersed, and swept away in art. He seems to enjoy grandiose ideas and art that is an extreme commitment to those ideas. He tried to imitate that with his work of art — the museum itself. I can see the boyish, immaturity in some of the works and in his “my museum is bigger and weirder than yours” approach to the MONA. But some of those same pieces — and the experience of the space — also draw out a sense of childish joy or “oh damn” factor that make you feel something in your body, in your bones. Maybe his biggest weakness or the museum’s most common criticism is also his, and its, strength.

I keep thinking about one of the last works I saw, Queen (a Portrait of Madonna) by Candice Breitz. It was in a closed-off room with a door you had to have the confidence to open and enter. Inside were 30 television monitors displaying close-ups of 30 different people singing the song Cherish by Madonna. Each is seemingly doing the same thing — singing the lyrics — and yet each screen was wildly different. Different sounds, different movements, different expressions; some danced, some were concentrating so hard on trying to do it well and correctly, and others were barely even trying to find the right lyrics.

Cherish the thought

Of always having you here by my side (oh baby I)

Cherish the joy

You keep bringing it into my life (I’m always singing it)

Cherish your strength

You got the power to make me feel good (and baby I)

Perish the thought

Of ever leaving, I never would

At the end of the song, the 25-screen cacophonous scene dissolves. The voices taper off, the subjects laugh and look away, and they slowly end their performance and move away from the camera.

We all enter a museum with the same general instructions: Walk around! Look at the art! And in the end, an infinite variety of experiences unfold every time. Fractured and put back together again by our own stories and impressions and opinions. We’re there in the space at the same time, and then we disperse to go back to our everyday lives.

I had a lot of questions going into this trip and about the museum in particular: Is a museum like this worth the hype? Does it live up to the hype? Is this a giant egotistical pet project or something that contributes to the place? Or both? Can a museum be about the experience and the art? What’s the tipping point and when does it become absurd? Even if it becomes absurd, is that bad?

In the end, I didn’t think about most of my original questions while I was there. I was too lost, literally and figuratively, in the experience. I missed some of the major artworks, I spent an hour and a half of my 5 hours eating, and never quite figured out the stairs. But I also laughed, got scared, felt sad, and was mesmerized. It is a physical journey to get there, but that is only the beginning. The real journey starts when you turn yourself over to the feelings and fun that go along with the visit. For an afternoon I was an explorer, a witness, and an accomplice.

The MONA required is not a typical white-walled museum experience. It requires more from you. The silent, contemplative Western visual art experience that is so common to me felt far away. I had to move, engage, listen, hear, find my way, learn new things, observe, and seek. It didn’t strip away elements to highlight fine art — it piled things on and activated my entire body and mind. I experienced the art, and myself in relation to the art, very differently. It provoked me, it provoked more, and you could feel it on a cellular level.