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Location : Wasted Space
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 |  Subject: OZschwitz Idiot: David Walsh at his Museum of Old and New Art  Fri Jan 14, 2011 10:52 pm | |
| For Australia's newest gallery money is no object, nor is the sensitivity of the establishment, writes Gabriella Coslovich.
The air has started to chill, the light to fade. Twilight, rich with ambiguity and dark promise, is a fitting time to be heading towards the netherland of the most curious and macabre museum Australia has seen: the Museum of Old and New Art.
Next week MONA, the $80 million private museum and ideological playground of Hobart-born David Walsh, will finally open to the public, two years overdue. A project of this scale was bound to experience delays. Indeed, it seems miraculous that Walsh's grand, obsessive vision is finally coming to fruition.
Walsh is a self-made millionaire, a professional gambler and entrepreneur, beholden to nobody, which leaves him free to present art and ideas that public institutions or private museum owners with more polite tastes would not dare touch.
MONA will subvert the notion of what an art museum is and can be; it will question, delight, repel, titillate and cause a stink, literally. One of the key works, Cloaca Professional, by the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, is a machine that mimics the human digestive system, producing excrement at regular intervals.
Another work that is sure to pong is the Greek-born artist Jannis Kounellis's Untitled: a huge steel frame the same size as Picasso's great anti-war painting Guernica, from which will hang chunks of raw beef that will slowly decay, and require changing every three days. (Walsh, by the way, is vegetarian.)
From bodily functions to bestiality, euthanasia to evolution, death to deviance, MONA will explore them all. Walsh doesn't call it his ''adult Disneyland'' for nothing.
But, beyond the shock tactics, he has a serious point to make. The ''rabid atheist'' wants to encourage debate about subjects such as euthanasia and blind faith and, most importantly, the role of art and art museums.
He wants to offer an alternative to a society increasingly in thrall to the fuzzy thinking of religious zealots and their political agents.
The last thing he wants to do, though, is to tell people what to think, or make them feel inferior or intimidated. Indeed, he is not averse to sending up the pretensions of the art world, and visitors will be encouraged to have an opinion. People don't have to like his art; he's not even sure he likes all of it.
''We don't know what 'good' is,'' he says. ''We're never going to know what 'good' is because there is no such thing as 'good'. There's taste and there's style and there's charisma and pizzazz and charm and chutzpah. We've got a million words for describing the same thing and nobody really knows what it is.''
He says while many museums hide behind a cloak of authority and demand quasi-religious faith from their audiences, he wants to do the opposite.
''Let's bring the disputation and uncertainty back into the gallery. It's an un-museum, that's why it's underground, I guess.''
In Hobart, Walsh has become an unlikely local hero. Taxi drivers, those barometers of public opinion, lavish praise on him. Walsh could have spent his millions anywhere, they'll tell you. Instead, the working class boy from the humble Hobart suburb of Glenorchy chose to invest in his home town.
MONA, they'll say, will put Hobart on the map, not just in Australia, but internationally. And it's highly likely they're right.
Even on a world scale, MONA is an audacious undertaking, architecturally and philosophically. The museum, by the Melbourne architect Nonda Katsalidis, is an engineering feat, three levels underground, carved into the sandstone cliffs of Berriedale Peninsula. Some commentators have lauded it as the Bilbao of the south, but that is a label Walsh abhors.
''Yeah, I've got to say that gives me the shits,'' he says. ''I don't like the Bilbao of the north at all … It's just a bloody architectural masturbation: 'How good am I? How good am I?' It's like a dog barking. All [Frank] Gehry's buildings are the same. All Nonda's buildings are different because he's actually trying to solve a problem.''
There is a tennis court on the roof, and you walk across its fake turf to the museum entrance.
From the entrance, housed in a Roy Grounds building (formerly the site of Walsh's Museum of Antiquities) visitors will descend a spiral staircase into the gallery. The first painting they will see, Christoph Ruckhaberle's Le Grand Macabre, sets the tone with its three menacing dancing figures.
Further along is a fully functioning cinerarium. Walsh's late father, Thomas, is its first occupant. He told his father about it before he died: ''He thought it was funny.'' For$75,000, others will be able to join him.
Near the cinerarium a long corridor leads to the ''sex and death'' gallery. Works here include Matrix, a huge, confronting painting by Jenny Saville of a naked trans-gender man, his modified genitals thrust in your face.
This section will not be on the ''family-friendly'' trail Walsh has organised, although he hopes that, on subsequent visits, parents will see all of his collection and explain it to their children, just as he intends to do with his six-year-old daughter, Grace.
Some of the works from Charles Saatchi's controversial exhibition Sensation, once prevented from coming to Australia, will be at MONA, including Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary (featuring elephant dung and porn-magazine cut-outs of genitals), Jake and Dinos Chapman's grotesque life-size sculpture Great Deeds against the Dead (based on a work by Francisco de Goya) and Mat Collishaw's Bullet Hole (a suspiciously pornographic-looking photograph of a wound).
The museum is not all R-rated. Some works are funny - Erwin Wurm's Fat Car (a pugdy, life-size car) and James Angus's Truck Corridor (a monster truck squashed into an impossible space). Others are exquisite, such as Walsh's Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, including mummies and sarcophagi.
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