MONA’s On the Origin of Art ventures beyond the basics

When visitors enter On the Origin of Art at MONA, they are confronted with four different doorways.

An image by Marc Quinn. Picture: Mona/Remi Chauvin

Art galleries and museums in the modern world, except in rooms ­devoted to the display of fragile works on paper, are usually brightly lit with white or neutral walls, environments that replicate the efficient, ­rational and sanitised ideal of modernist architecture. In the temporary installations of contemporary art, however, we often find the opposite: darkened rooms or corridors leading into spaces for the projection of immersive video works.

Oddly enough, this darkened setting is much closer to the way that much art of the past was originally seen: altarpieces, for example, standing luminously in gloomy chapels. And it is certainly the preferred exhibition style at MONA in Hobart, where darkened corridors are clearly used to take visitors out of the everyday world and prepare them for the encounter with something unusual and mysterious.

For its current exhibition, On the Origin of Art, MONA confronts the visitor with four different doorways, as in those legends and fairytales where the hero must choose which door to enter or indeed, as in The Merchant of Venice, which casket to open. Each of the four openings leads into a labyrinth of darkened corridors and rooms in which one of four guest curators has been asked to select objects that illuminate the universal human instinct to make art.

The labyrinths into which we venture contain a fascinatingly diverse range of imagery and objects, from photographic or graphic natural history illustration to sculpture, ceramics, prints, oil paintings and various forms of contemporary art. Each set of objects is meant to correspond to a different thesis about the origin of art, but the objects themselves are far too ­semantically rich and ambiguous to be limited to any one argument, and so one set inevitably overlaps with the next, one theory partly coincides with another.

Perhaps the first thing that strikes us is there are phenomena in nature that seem in some sense cognate with the aesthetic faculties and yet pre-date by an immense length of time the human activity of making art and ­indeed the human species itself. The perception of something like beauty is the most important of these, seen in the most elementary and yet endlessly wondrous form in the colours and shapes of flowers designed to attract pollinating insects.

Even more striking is the nature of sexual ­attraction. The primitive and instinctive reaction to beauty is based on the fact the healthy, strong, symmetrical, well-formed individual will probably be a better mating partner than an unhealthy, weak, malformed and unfit one.

Eros by Solomon J. Solomon; India (Frost) by Ryan McGinley. Picture: Mona/Remi Chauvin

For humans, as it happens, things are not quite as simple as that: because intangible qualities such as intellect, strength of character, moral uprightness and qualities of sociability are more important than simple physical fitness for success in human communities, and increasingly so in more developed civilisations, attraction is not calibrated to beauty and physical strength in a straightforward way; social status, wealth and power — or even kindness, idealism, and other appealing character traits — may ­become decisive factors for different people.

Things are simpler for insects, and one of the most fascinating pieces in the exhibition is a video of the mating ritual of a kind of tiny fly. As a female approaches, the male ­begins an elaborate display, raising a brightly coloured abdomen and, even more remarkably, lifting two feather-like forms that appear to be neither legs nor wings but look for all the world like arms that he is waving in the air to attract her attention. In combination with the deadpan expression of eyes devoid of inner life or consciousness, the effect is unintentionally humorous.

Human sexual attraction is evoked in a number of works, but particularly in a series of Japanese erotic Shunga prints — with their monstrously oversized phalluses and vulvas, evoking the world of carnal passion hidden, but so easily revealed, beneath the graceful refinement of traditional Japanese dress.

A four-screen video animation by Jean-­Jacques Lebel, a veteran French artist, was put together over decades of collecting images of women, from high art to erotic photographs. The figures are made to morph from one to the other in a dizzying and kaleidoscopic evocation of the dream of desire, which is striking for a couple of reasons.

The first is that it reminds us how the modern world — perhaps the world since the end of tribal life — has emphasised the face as the focus of personal identity and covered the rest of the body, particularly the sexual ­organs. Naked tribespeople attach much less importance to facial features because they are less concerned with personal individuality and have no taboos relating to the naked body. In the civilised world, on the other hand, a powerful ­polarity arises ­between the face as the symbol of self or ego and the genitals as the symbol of the hidden animal instincts or, in Freudian terms, the id.

One is to be shown, the other to be hidden. To reveal the hidden is transgression — as in the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries — but to reveal both face and sex together is far more transgressive and erotic, as in the Shunga prints, drawings by Klimt or Schiele, or the softcore pornographic photos incorporated in Lebel’s work; in contrast, Gustave Courbet’s scandalous Origine du monde (1866), which also finds a place in Lebel’s montage, is essentially gynaecological rather than erotic.

The second striking thing about Lebel’s work is the importance of pubic hair as a sexual symbol. In women, it is something that both marks and masks: it declares that a woman is sexually mature and yet discreetly covers her. In regard to the previous point, it allows for a more subtle erotic tension than the crudeness of pornographic explicitness. The recent, now perhaps waning, fashion for epilation represents the paradoxical mix of a scopophilic desire to reveal and a puritanical obsession with cleanliness.

When humans begin to make artefacts, they seem from the very beginning to seek refinement of form as much as efficiency of function, and very soon they begin to adorn the things they make with designs. Countless works in the exhibition illustrate the importance of pattern, and many draw our attention to the repeated and almost universal forms of early pattern-making: zigzags, hatching, circles, spirals and other motifs that are found in early ceramics all over the world, some of them recalling the even older craft of basket weaving.

There are exquisite later examples of ceramics from the Middle East, Iran and Central Asia, in which highly sophisticated languages of design incorporate natural forms, animals and plants, and even script, with a wonderfully ­refined range of colours and glazes. In a more naturalistic vein, there is a beautiful French 16th-century dish of the school of Bernard Palissy with lizards and other animals reproduced in vivid realism. But the breakdown of traditional cultural practices today is poignantly evoked in a work by Faig Ahmed from Azerbaijan. It is a handwoven rug, hanging on a wall, with familiar nomadic patterns in the top half; but in the lower half the colours run into lines like a computer screen malfunctioning and producing random stripes. The image is also of melting, for the lines end up on the floor in what look like puddles of mingled colours, although all of it is actually still a woven carpet.

Liquid by Faig Ahmed. Picture: Mona/Remi Chauvin

From the aesthetics of pattern we proceed, historically, to narrative, and there are numerous examples of figure painting, from a Renoir bathing girl, like a young milliner unwittingly acting the part of Venus, to an elaborate 15th-century Virgin and Saints from Cologne, in which every figure is identifiable by conventional attributes: St Peter with his key, St Bar­bara with her tower, the two Saint Catherines, Saint Agnes with a lamb, and so on.

The commentary that accompanies the various objects is often thought-provoking, but has its limitations. In this case there is talk of ideal figures, as though the artist were appealing to our attraction to strong and healthy bodies, as mentioned above; but these figures are painted in a late gothic style that emphasises a kind of attenuated, almost otherworldly elegance. This picture of saints from different historical periods is not a naturalistic image of our world but a heavenly vision, out of time and place.

The guest scientists are particularly interesting on the origins of instincts and responses that underlie the making of art, some of which, like the patterns and colours of plants or the mating rituals of insects and birds, are unimaginably ancient. They talk about instincts in higher animals and in humans too, about play or pleasure, or even the social uses of art to signify status. There is thus much about what comes before art and even what comes after it, but less about what art inherently means for humans.

In the end, art is a way of making meaning, an instrument for consciousness and communication that long precedes the development of sophisticated languages, let alone the capacity for rational discourse and analytical self-awareness. In its most primitive form, as pattern, it marks the difference between the spheres of human and animal. We make things and give them shapes, marking them as the work of human agency.

And then, at a more advanced level, it is a way of mimicking, picturing, re-enacting the world in order to give shape and sense to our diffuse and fleeting experience of life. Long ­before humans could articulate abstract concepts of any kind, we could rearrange life into forms that embodied understandings of the world and of our place in it: this is the origin of myths. And even after humans developed the capacity for conceptual thought — something only fully achieved about 2500 years ago — the kind of thinking we do through art did not become irrelevant because it remains more sensitive than rational analysis to nuances of feeling.

As it happens, some of the most memorable examples of storytelling in the exhibition — and examples of ideas and insights that could not be expressed in any other way, could not be replaced by a rational paraphrasing of their narrative content — are in the cartoons of Art Spiegelman, whose graphic novel Maus (1980-91) tells the story of his family’s experience under the Nazis, here represented as cats to the Jews’ mice. Spiegelman was equally alert to the follies of contemporary life, including the futility of the art establishment. When the Museum of Modern Art held the exhibition High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (1990) at the height of the postmodern movement, Spiegelman drew a sheet titled High Art Lowdown, which includes a decomposing version of one of Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book blondes, with the voice balloon: “Oh Roy, your dead high art is built on dead low art ... maybe that’s why you’re championed by museums.”

On the Origin of Art

Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, until April 1.