A gamble on sex and death

DAVID Walsh, as probably everyone knows by now, is a kind of mathematical prodigy who has made a very large amount of money from gambling.

DAVID Walsh, as probably everyone knows by now, is a kind of mathematical prodigy who has made a very large amount of money from gambling, owing to his ability, it seems, to keep track of cards and numbers that have come up and to work out the odds on the next one to appear.

He's spent a lot of that money on building himself an eccentric monument in the form of a vast underground bunker-museum filled with an unusual mixture of antiquities and contemporary work of uneven quality.

The museum was obviously hugely expensive to construct, many of the pieces will have cost far too much and the staffing bill must be enormous. But how rich is Walsh? In an interview published just before the opening he said he had spent all his money on the project and was deeply in debt, but not overly concerned since the computer applications he now employs were winning money for him around the clock.

The state of his bank account is not the only obscure thing about this man who has apparently switched from reclusiveness to a passion for self-advertisement. The tone of comments made about the museum in the lead-up to the opening has been surprisingly inconsistent.

On the one hand, Walsh will talk lightly of it all being a bit of fun, and he met the media at the launch wearing a T-shirt saying "F . . k the art, let's rock 'n' roll". All very well, but meanwhile his associates were hinting that this was destined to be one of the world's great contemporary art museums and smugly reporting that people overseas who haven't heard of our big public galleries are agog about MONA (Museum of Old and New Art).

Anything is possible in the fashion-driven world of contemporary art, but it remains to be seen. Walsh is quick to dismiss other museums and would like to think he is doing something radically different.

He seems a little naive in this regard, not quite grasping how omnivorous and levelling the contemporary art world can be: a business in which the radical and the subversive, like the naive and the primitive, are simply new taste sensations for jaded palates.

Walsh has called his museum a soapbox or a megaphone, a vehicle for publicising his views. Does he have views that we care about? Well, his thing seems to be that he hates religion and the spiritual and he thinks that human beings are simply bodies driven by basic impulses such as the desire for sex and the fear of death.

He wants to use art to shock us into agreeing with him. Hence the various works that evoke pain and mortality, and the Jannis Kounellis installation in which sides of beef are left to decompose, but only for a few days. He has even commissioned a very expensive machine that mimics the human digestive system, turning food into faeces, which are evacuated at three o'clock every afternoon.

No one will deny the importance of sex and death as powerful human motivations, but what is really interesting is how the psyche builds imaginative responses to these realities, as the oyster makes a pearl around the irritant of a grain of sand.

Walsh, though, takes a strictly reductive view of the matter and appears to be morbidly obsessed with various manifestations of death, physical corruption and putrefaction. Oddly, this is traditionally a line taken by religious zealots and hellfire preachers in an effort to turn the audience's attention away from the vain pleasures of this world and towards the path of holiness.

If you look closely, although there is plenty of death, there is not much sex, at least not sex that is free of mutilation, putrefaction and so on. As for eroticism, it could not be more rigorously banished by the most tightlipped puritan, who would indeed applaud the way the sexual body is consistently associated with blood, faeces, obesity and other things designed to short-circuit the erotic appetite.

The only model of sexuality that is, on the contrary, strangely prominent is masturbation. Although Walsh can use the term in a disparaging way, as when he declares curated shows of contemporary art are merely a form of mental masturbation, he has rather significantly called MONA's first exhibition Monanism.

In the museum, which has no labels, you walk around with a hand-held device that monitors your progress and gives you the title and basic information about the work in front of you. If you want more detailed information, you press a little icon with a childlike pictograph of a penis and testicles, and the word "artwank".

No doubt Walsh would agree with Woody Allen when he said, "Don't knock masturbation: it's sex with someone I love."