IN ITS brief but brash first six months of life, Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art has rewritten the rules about what an art gallery can be - and given academics and critics plenty to think about.
The brainchild of David Walsh - professional gambler, canny mathematician, lapsed Catholic, and devotee of atheism and evolutionary science - MONA is a subterranean, secular temple to some of the most in-your-face art you’re likely to see in Australia, and some of the most sublime.
It’s easy to focus on the visceral and provocative, at the expense of the transcendental and beautiful: the image of bestiality, the faeces-making machine (literally), the sculpture made from huge chunks of rotting meat.
But it is none of these works that sums up all that is amiss about MONA for University of Melbourne philosopher John Armstrong. The work that he finds the most moving, and symptomatic, is a lifelike sculpture of a child, curled up in despair against a wall.
Armstrong describes the sculpture, by Taiyo Kimura, as an ‘‘image of powerlessness in the face of broken hopes, fears, confusion’‘. In Armstrong’s opinion, this dyspeptic view of life is where MONA is stuck, and why, ultimately, the museum fails to rise beyond provocation into meaningfulness.
In the latest edition of Tasmania’s Island magazine, Armstrong writes that MONA ‘‘repudiates responsibility for what comes next … it does not seek to instil in us, the beholders, the qualities of mind and character, and the relevant insights and convictions, that would help make our lives, and the lives of others, good’‘.
If that sounds like a rather evangelical view about art, it’s meant to be.
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