Why MONA succeeds where the rest fail
This extremely disparate exhibition appears to be a cheeky send-up of the Biennale industry – but it works, thanks to the notes.
Namedropping is ostensibly about status; a wall label informs us, in inimitable MONA-style, that “The bloke who owns Mona (let’s just call him David Walsh, because that’s his name) says what he wants to do in this exhibition is to figure out what status is and why it is useful, in a deep sense – as part of our evolved biology.”
The suggestion seems to be that status is an essential structural principle in all cultures and that one of the reasons we value art is because of its association with status. We admire people who have exceptional skill and do things well, and wealthy people vicariously acquire some of that socio-cultural value when they buy pictures and sculptures and support artists.
In fact, however, the “namedropping” extends to famous people, pop stars’ framed records, luxury brands and even household and consumer logos.
The most amusing inclusion is a copy of a rather cranky poster by the Guerrilla Girls titled Advantages of Owning Your Own Art Museum (2016) in which they list 30 private museums recently opened by “billionaire art collectors”, unfortunately omitting the Museum of Old and New Art itself, even though it was inaugurated in 2011. Nonetheless Walsh no doubt relishes the irony of displaying a document that implicitly criticises his own institution.
The poster complains that “you’re the boss, you call the shots … you decide what art the museum collects and exhibits – under the influence of a cartel of multinational galleries and auction houses who manipulate and define today’s art market”.
This is all quite true, but the result is certainly not to exclude the contemporary, which is what these galleries typically seek to collect; presumably the Guerrilla Girls’ gripe is that not enough women achieve the international art star status promoted by the current system. A more serious objection is that this culture has led to all galleries buying from the same shopping list, except that public institutions are even worse since they are now obsessed with diversity and inclusion as well as keeping up with fashion and trends.
Just above this poster is the portrait of a peasant, formerly attributed to Vincent van Gogh and acquired as such for the National Gallery of Victoria by the Felton Bequest in 1940. Early this century its authenticity was called into question and, following an investigation by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the NGV accepted that it was not by Vincent’s hand, although some still maintain that it is autographed. Meanwhile it also turned out to have come from the collection of a Jewish industrialist, Richard Semmel (1875-1950), who was forced by Nazi persecution to sell much of his collection in 1933, while other works were later confiscated. A decade ago the NGV agreed to return to work to Semmel’s heirs, who have chosen to leave it in Melbourne on indefinite loan.
Some of the most interesting things in this extremely disparate exhibition are several modern academic paintings whose stories are explored in the notes available on the museum’s app which, as regular visitors will know, take the place of wall labels.
One of these is Henri Ottmann’s Sleeping Courtesan (1920), a curious picture poised somewhere between the academic virtuoso Jean-Leon Gerome and Henri Matisse, with whom Ottmann exhibited in 1922.
A contemporary critic called it “a very modern reply to Manet’s Olympia”, no doubt largely because of the combination of white courtesan with black maid. The naked courtesan lies in an attitude of abandon that feels oddly post-Freudian and perhaps most important recalls Henry Fuseli’s erotically charged masterpiece The Nightmare (1781); we learn from the notes that she is Celine Coupet, “a country shepherdess who originally moved to Paris to work as a maid”. The black girl sitting on the end of the bed and holding a tray is Aicha Goblet, a well-known artist’s model who has a whole Wikipedia page devoted to her.
Another slightly odd image is by Anglo-Australian painter William Strutt, best known for his panoramic view of a terrifying bushfire very early in the settlement of Victoria, Black Thursday, February 6, 1851 (1864). His much later The Nubian barber (1888) was painted when he fortuitously met a group of Nubians who were travelling in England in 1878 as part of a kind of ethnographic spectacle. The State Library of Victoria has a book of his sketches of these men and their camels, which can be viewed online.
A third and much bigger work is William Francis Calderon’s On the Sea-Beat Coast, Where Hardy Thracians Tame the Savage Horse (1905), which today belongs to Auckland Art Gallery. The artist was the son of painter Philip Hermogenes Calderon, who among other things painted one of the most famous of Pre-Raphaelite pictures, Broken Vows (1856). The younger Calderon’s painting is more neo-classical, with a title drawn from Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer and clear allusions to the young horsemen in the Panathenaic procession on the Parthenon frieze, today in the British Museum, even if the youths look rather more like boys from an English public school than like the ancient inhabitants of Thrace.
There are plenty of bizarre objects in the exhibition, including a model of a tiger mauling a man, who appears to be a British soldier. This is a version of the famous Tipu’s Tiger, today one of the most popular exhibits in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The beast, which opens up to reveal a miniature organ, was found in the palace of Seringapatam when it was stormed by British troops in 1799 and brought back to England. It is possible, though there is some disagreement about this, that the sculpture recalls a sensational and very well-publicised event a few years earlier, when 17-year old cadet Hector Sutherland Munro was carried off and fatally mauled by a gigantic tiger in December 1792. This event, in a form undoubtedly derived from Tipu’s tiger, inspired a very popular line of pottery sculptures produced in Staffordshire from the 1820s. And a final point of interest is that the unfortunate victim of the beast was among the ancestors of Edwardian author HH Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, whose delightfully and acerbically witty stories often are marked by a vein of cruelty or violence associated with animals.
In fact this copy of Tipu’s tiger is part of a more complex contemporary work by Huang Yongping (1954-2019), a Chinese-French contemporary artist. Les Consoles de Jeu Souveraines (2017) takes the form of a dilapidated carousel apparently inspired by one the artist could see across the road from his flat in Paris. The figures on the carousel evoke power and international rivalry, and the merry-go-round structure suggests the futile repetition of conflict from generation to generation; the word console in the title adds the connotation of video games as well.
Another contemporary animated work is an extraordinary mobile sculpture by Jean Tinguely (1926-91), Le Sanglier de Roger (1990), in which a trophy head of a huge boar has been turned into a robotic monster that lurches aggressively at the viewer. This reanimation of a dead beast contrasts with the deflation of a war machine in Tank Project (2011-13) by another Chinese artist, He Xiangyu (born 1986), who reproduces a T-34 Soviet battle tank of the kind first used in World War II and then supplied to the Chinese army. The artist paid a team of women to reproduce the tank in high-quality Italian leather: it is made of 400 pieces from 250 hides and stitched with more than 50,000m of waxed string. Not surprisingly, this extravagant object belongs to the private collection of a very rich man in Singapore.
There are many other individual works of interest – from a touching 18th-century memorial painting in multiple episodic scenes of a Greek Orthodox pilgrim’s journey to the Holy Land to a copy of Donald Friend’s bawdy Codex Bumbooziaticus (1978-80); it’s good to see Friend making a discreet return to view after the cancellation of recent years. Perhaps Ian Britain’s brilliant biography of his youthful years (reviewed here on January 27-28) has helped demonstrate that the story is more complex than the facile caricature so often promoted.
As for the exhibition as a whole, it must be apparent by now that it has no coherence at all; but I suspect this is precisely the point. My guess is that the whole idea arose from a sudden insight by Walsh that Biennale-type exhibitions equally lack all coherence, even though they make a huge effort to disguise the fact with meaningless titles and spurious thematic distinctions. In reality, they too are little more than namedropping, as we see from the assortment of more or less resonant artists’ names that are always prominently advertised, often long before the things they are to exhibit have been produced or even thought out.
So Walsh’s show is an unapologetically cheeky send-up of the international Biennale industry; but what makes the whole thing work to the extent that I have suggested is the quality and depth of the notes mentioned earlier.
The best of these are by Jane Clark, who previously worked at the NGV, where she co-curated the celebrated Golden Summers exhibition in 1985-86, and then at Sothebys. This exhibition in particular makes one realise that the success of MONA arises from the combination of a kind of crazy flair with a capacity for art-historical depth that is no longer common in our big state galleries.
Speaking of crazy flair, I am told Alfredo Jaar had been thinking of his Dante installation-journey for some years but never thought he would find a museum director mad enough to fund its exorbitant cost. But then he met Walsh.
This installation is well worth seeing if you go to MONA, although you can book only when you are on the spot because it is complex and apparently temperamental, with many moving parts, and they won’t let you in unless it is all working properly.
It is such an experiential work that it would be a pity to spoil the effect by giving too much away, but suffice it to say that it involves moving through some dangerous and impressive environments, and exploits not only light and dark and sound like so many other installations but also, much more unusually, temperature. There are some disturbing and at times completely unexpected effects on this journey from hell to purgatory and finally to an intimation of heaven.
Meanwhile, if you’re still thinking about your social status and how art can help you reach greater prominence, you can pay to have a gallery temporarily dedicated to you as a sponsor, and your name will be tastefully emblazoned in LED lights above the exhibits, while those who haven’t yet realised what is going on are vaguely bemused to find themselves in an exhibition space named after a nobody.
Namedropping
Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, to April 21 next year
Alfredo Jaar: The Divine Comedy
MONA, semi-permanent
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