Just back from two days in Hobart on a work junket with some colleagues, visiting TMAG (Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery) and MONA (Museum of Old & New Art). TMAG is almost entirely closed as they prepare for a major overhaul, rebuild and refurbishment. The Master Plan to reinvigorate the city-block complex of eleven clustered buildings called for an injection of $200 million, of which they look like having just $30 million. Which is a great shame, though they are putting on brave faces and buckling down to do the very best they can with the time and funds available. On top of which they took time out to give us a comprehensive tour of the site and explain all their intentions. It sounds like, despite the limited budget, they are going to effect a significant transformation of the institution and I wish them all the very best with the project.
Meanwhile, one of the gallery spaces that currently remains open is the year-long series of immersive art experiences entitled ‘star/dust’. The current installation ‘The Reading Room’ by Brigita Ozolins (until 16 October 2011) is one of the most restful and inviting environments I’ve had the pleasure to inhabit for some time. There will be those (I suspect) for whom a room filled with books is not an inducement to stay but the very calm and comfort and informality of this gallery, with its deep armchairs, expansive woollen rugs, subdued reading lamps and spilling, cascading, stacks and rivers of books of every description had me wishing I could linger all day. It had the perfect blend of active and passive engagement for the visitors – from simply sitting and dozing (the staff assured me this was not uncommon), to browsing the books and dipping into their content, or sitting back to listen or watch the constant, quiet, evenly paced, projected video footage, huge on the end wall, of numerous people both known and anonymous, reading brief extracts from their favourite publications.
A significant part of the success (I feel) of the space was the comfort you felt as a visitor due to the obvious lack of order of the volumes – many thousands of them – stacked in a great undulating wall around the perimeter of the room and in seemingly random piles dotted about the floor and against the armchairs. Clearly, very clearly, they were not alphabetically sorted, or arranged by Dewey classification, or separated into size or subject categories. Equally clearly, you were permitted to just wander about, picking them up, flicking through, reading, scanning, browsing, and then putting them back down again, most probably somewhere else. Indeed I almost felt I could have selected a couple to take away with me to read on the flight back to Sydney.
But is it art? Well it’s not a library and it’s not a shop. It’s not a private home and nor is it a school. It’s certainly not a business venture or a sports venue. It does invite you to stop, to look, to ponder, to feel, to enjoy, to question, to explore, to react. Perhaps to react with anger, or disbelief, or humour, or frustration. Sounds a lot like art to me. I loved it. Beautiful. Well done Brigita and top marks to the people at TMAG that had the initiative and courage to put it on their calendar. Thank you.
Day two saw us at MONA via its dedicated ferry up the river from Hobart docks. I spent the trip on deck despite the strong wind and spots of rain from the clouds scudding across the sky and periodically blocking Mount Wellington from view behind us. Then up the 99 steps between sandstone wall and rusty steel fence, past the tennis court and enter through the giant sliding door in the wall of distorting mirrors. Clearly, this is not the typical 19th or even 20th century model of a museum. Brilliant! However, much is said (especially by MONA itself) about the ‘Museum without labels’ approach they have taken in an attempt to liberate the artworks in the galleries, so it’s a little disappointing that they are so very determined to herd you directly to the distribution point and briefing for their ‘wonderful’ O device. It is of course nothing more than an iPod touch running a dedicated app which gives you access to fanciful or factual information, artists’ or curators’ commentary, professional or popular critiques and a Facebook like ability to ‘Like’ or not the various exhibits as it tracks your location in the museum. As if it wasn’t bad enough that we spent most of the last century being told we needed a professional voice to give us permission to understand or appreciate what we experienced in our interactions with art, now it seems we must entrust our enjoyment and comprehension to the vagaries of popular opinion?
OK, it’s great that someone has thought to question the prevailing paradigm of art galleries’ presentation of information but it seems to me that they’ve done little more than replace one intrusive data delivery system (labels on walls or printed gallery guides) with another that’s just, if not more, intrusive – this one you have to wear around your neck and seemingly forever be fiddling with it to gather the particular output you desire. I say seemingly because, being the wanker I am, I went out of my way to not accept my O and instead, to wander the museum almost at random, unfettered by technology or other voices intruding on my enjoyment of the works and the spaces they occupy. And, thus freed from that constraint, what were my impressions of MONA? Several of the happiest, most interesting and inspiring hours I’ve ever spent in the presence of other peoples creative endeavours.
Creating sonic scapes by caressing suspended pot plants that emit curious and delightful sounds; making graphite rubbings from stones that survived the atomic bomb at Hiroshima; observing the mummified skeletal remains of Pausiris as their coffin is slowly, digitally, excised from view; laying, seemingly floating, above my mirrored doppelganger, in a labyrinthine crypt filled with coded messages and drone-note harmonies; strolling, entranced and with many lingering pauses, past 150 pure white, cast from life, wondrously beautiful and diverse pudenda (not shameful at all!); watching my heartbeat give pulse and rhythm to a string of gloriously warm-red filament incandescent globes; and laughing with glee as I enter a doorway into what I thought was a giant synthetic rock, only to find myself in an infinitely long hotel corridor where the doors are all at once both tantalisingly inviting yet frustratingly locked, despite the ringing phones and barking dogs I can hear behind them and my expectation, my wish, to run along its length and hear a voice say ‘turn left … the other left’.
And the building itself invites play – a cylindrical corridor with booming acoustics, a crazy steel stair to nowhere in particular, vast sandstone walls that simply beg you to caress them and rusted steel balusters that chime like some grand xylophone when you slap them in passing (though I elicited an admonishing stare from the staff as I did this). Red velvet lined corridors that the visitors, like Allenesque spermatozoa, must penetrate to enter the womb of sexually explicit content beyond. Spiral stairs that beg you to race the glass elevator they encircle. Slender bridges, gaping voids, concealed doors and surprising fenestration revealing unexpected vistas.
The juxtapositions of old and new, related and dissimilar, large and small, were also delightfully considered. Spectacular gold and turquoise Egyptian jewellery, plush bench seats that bark, giant stone phalli immersed in water and surrounded by swimming fish, a dying bird falling through a drift of dandelion seed, ancient coins of such obvious weight and texture that you long to fondle them in your trouser pockets and a futuristic spherical vagina that you do indeed have to probe and fondle to elicit a (wonderfully humorous) response.
I know the choice of exhibits and style of presentation will not be to everyone’s taste, but they certainly appealed to me. A very obvious element of numerous of the works on display was their invitation to the visitor to interact (or ‘engage’ in current exhibition jargon) with them in a wide variety of ways from simply sitting or touching, to pressing your body against a photo-scanner or moving about erratically in front of light receptors, completing a rubbing (as mentioned earlier) or shaking your head to find words hidden in a digital stroboscopic projection. It really is (or was for me at least) a giant art playground – and all the better for it. My thanks to David Walsh (owner), Nonda Katsalidis (architect), Adrian Spinks (Operations Manager) and all the other contributors and staff of this wonderful museum (especially the barman who let me taste the Moo Brew 2010 vintage stout – wow!)
Finally, a quotation from a staff member that gives a clear insight into perhaps why this place works so well – ‘He (Walsh) wants you to push his boundaries as much as he pushes yours.’
