January 21st 2012

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The shock of MONA

What is the most shocking thing about Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art?

David Walsh’s extraordinary new museum has received its fair share of media coverage since being opened a year ago. This often focused on its cost ($75 million of Walsh’s own money) or the ‘scandalous’ nature of some exhibits, such as Greg Taylor’s Cunts: A Conversation pictured above (controversy which the museum seems to delight in). More eruditely, there has been furious debate about whether the collection is simply a rich man’s Cabinet of Curiosities or whether it truly ‘helps us to lead better lives’ (the quaint, almost Stalinist view of the civic function of art argued by philosopher, John Armstrong in Island magazine).

MONA is an exhilarating place to visit. There are any number of reasons for this. The dramatic buildings and site. The eclectic, unblinking nature of the opening exhibition on sex and death: ‘Monanism’. The fact that one can freely take photographs. The irreverent comments by Walsh himself about some of the exhibits. And not forgetting the bar in the basement …

But what shocked me most was the difference made by the absence of any labels or directions whatsoever about how to view the exhibits. Our initial encounter with each artwork is totally unmediated by contextual ‘noise’. Not even the barest detail.

In other galleries, we can ignore the patronising ‘explications’ often displayed next to art works, but cannot help checking the title, the artist, the date. Yet even these interfere with our experience of the work, filtering what the eye sees through everything we may happen to know know about Rothko, about the development of perspective drawing, or Caravaggio’s tempestuous life.

Is that painted carven head from an Egyptian tomb? An anatomical model from the Renaissance? Or a new piece by Damien Hirst? Even the artist’s name or a date mediates how we perceive a work, instead of leaving the individual’s eye to see and sensibility to react.

All you could want to know about any work at MONA is on hand by checking the iPod guide, but this becomes a secondary and optional act to seeing itself. This naked, exhilarating encounter with the artworks at MONA is the museum’s most shocking revelation for the visitor - one which which will long outlast any philistine outrage over the poignant line of pudenda in Taylor’s ‘conversation piece.’

Posted at 11:36pm and tagged with: Art, David Walsh, Death, Hobart, MONA, Sex, full width, Leica, Digilux 2,.

The shock of MONA What is the most shocking thing about Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art? David Walsh’s extraordinary new museum has received its fair share of media coverage since being opened a year ago. This often focused on its cost ($75 million of Walsh’s own money) or the ‘scandalous’ nature of some exhibits, such as Greg Taylor’s Cunts: A Conversation pictured above (controversy which the museum seems to delight in). More eruditely, there has been furious debate about whether the collection is simply a rich man’s Cabinet of Curiosities or whether it truly ‘helps us to lead better lives’ (the quaint, almost Stalinist view of the civic function of art argued by philosopher, John Armstrong in Island magazine). MONA is an exhilarating place to visit. There are any number of reasons for this. The dramatic buildings and site. The eclectic, unblinking nature of the opening exhibition on sex and death: ‘Monanism’. The fact that one can freely take photographs. The irreverent comments by Walsh himself about some of the exhibits. And not forgetting the bar in the basement … But what shocked me most was the difference made by the absence of any labels or directions whatsoever about how to view the exhibits. Our initial encounter with each artwork is totally unmediated by contextual ‘noise’. Not even the barest detail. In other galleries, we can ignore the patronising ‘explications’ often displayed next to art works, but cannot help checking the title, the artist, the date. Yet even these interfere with our experience of the work, filtering what the eye sees through everything we may happen to know know about Rothko, about the development of perspective drawing, or Caravaggio’s tempestuous life. Is that painted carven head from an Egyptian tomb? An anatomical model from the Renaissance? Or a new piece by Damien Hirst? Even the artist’s name or a date mediates how we perceive a work, instead of leaving the individual’s eye to see and sensibility to react. All you could want to know about any work at MONA is on hand by checking the iPod guide, but this becomes a secondary and optional act to seeing itself. This naked, exhilarating encounter with the artworks at MONA is the museum’s most shocking revelation for the visitor - one which which will long outlast any philistine outrage over the poignant line of pudenda in Taylor’s ‘conversation piece.’

January 20th 2012

2 notes |#

Postcards from MONA

Posted at 6:29pm and tagged with: MONA, Art, Digilux 2, Leica,.

October 20th 2011

3 notes |#

OCCUPYING MELBOURNE

The mood at Occupy Melbourne yesterday was more Woodstock than Wall Street.

Economic conditions and employment rates in Australia are a world away from those in the US, let alone Greece. No Molotov cocktails on Swanston St then. Alongside posters exhorting ‘World revolution today!’ are others urging passers-by to smile, or reminding them that all you need is love.

There is something whimsical, almost bucolic about the Occupy Melbourne site: a waterside tent-village that everyone knows will soon disappear. City workers sip lattés a few metres away from earnest workshops on global peace and biodynamic farming. Children splash and giggle in what is usually a sterile ‘water feature’. It has to be said that the the tent-village, on aesthetic grounds alone, is arguably an improvement on the usual barren, sandy expanse of the City Square.

Will any of this make a difference? The pictures speak for themselves.

Posted at 4:01pm and tagged with: Digilux 2, Leica, Melbourne, Occupymelbourne, occupy,.

July 14th 2011

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VENETIAN STONES

Ferrovia, the train station of Venice, is a fascist-era structure built in the 1930s. Wide, low, and faced with plain white stone, it is the only modernist building on the Grand Canal. It’s not a bad building, as fascist-era modernist railway stations go …

The twentieth century ambience of the station only makes the shock of stepping outside even greater. For a few seconds, two versions of the city shimmer and then fuse into one for ever: the actual stones of Venice around me, and the Venice-in-my-head that I’ve known and inhabited all my life. Like New York and Paris, especially, we’ve read so many books and seen so many movies set there, that they seem as familiar as one’s own home-town.

Gustave von Aschenbach sits in a deckchair on the Lido waiting for death, while Tadzio strolls on the beach before him. Johnny Depp walks through the Piazza San Marco in a dinner suit, an unlikely tourist, while Henry James watches from a window above. Nearby, Ruskin is painting a water colour. And Donald Sutherland as Casanova breaks through the roof of his prison and leaps to freedom, landing in a water-taxi with Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now. The city looks exactly as I always imagined, and this in itself is disconcerting.

‘It’s not a real city, just a place for tourists these days,’ I heard an American voice say as I walked down the steps of Ferrovia. But he was wrong. Even in summer, you can walk away from the main streets and crowds of tourists, away from the endless shops of Murano glass and the African hawkers with fake Gucci handbags spread out in front of them, and walk left and right and across a bridge and … suddenly you are in the Venice where the locals live. Washing hangs from lines high above a peaceful street. A poster advises that a creche’s opening times have changed. A gang of children play hide-and-seek on a building site. Two rabbis sit beneath an apple tree in a cobbled square, in murmured disputation.

Every city can teach us something about the urban environment, and Venice - of course - shows us what a city without cars would look like. One of the most extraordinary things about the city is the leaving of it - by vaporetto through the canals, across the choppy waters of the strait and into the harbour of Marco Polo Airport. How different from the familiar, grim drive out to Melbourne Airport. On my first night, I went to sleep imagining the freeway at home replaced by a stately grand canal, lined by poplar trees, with sleek water-taxis of polished wood making their way along, the drivers humming arias from Verdi …

(1 June 2011)

Posted at 11:42pm and tagged with: Leica, digilux 2, Venice,.

June 23rd 2011

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THE BRIDES OF KRZESLICE

Deep in the Polish countryside, surrounded by heathland, lakes and forests of birch and pine, lies the Palace of Krzeslice.

Wide lawns surround the house, but it cannot be seen from the road or nearby village, nestled in its own surrounding woodland of broad oak trees. Like Sleeping Beauty’s domain, it sits undisturbed, with the old iron gates overgrown by ivy thick as a child’s arm. Here I woke this morning (24 May 2011) and imagined all the brides of Krzeslice.

After lying in ruins for half a century, the Palace was restored in the 1990s as a country hotel. There are few guests (for Krzeslice is not on the way to anywhere), but it survives, even flourishes, as a venue for weddings from villages and towns in the surrounding area. The brides-to-be arrive every Saturday as nervous girls, surrounded by their giggling friends wearing too much makeup. After the ceremony and the celebrations they climb the stairs with their dark-suited husbands to the great bedroom over the castellated entrance. Early the next morning, the couple rise and drive off for their honeymoon before anyone else is awake.

There must have been over a thousand of these brides over the years in their gowns with with garlands of flowers round their heads. Before them, thousands more must have married at Krezlice, for a Palace has stood here since the 1600s at least, occupied by Polish and Prussian aristocracy. All this stopped when the Germans invaded in 1939. Then after the Russian takeover at the end of the war, the building fell into ruin till the 1990s, when the brides returned.

I imagined them, these legions of Krzeslice brides. The long-dead. Those married just this summer. And others - middle-aged now, in offices or shops or stuck in traffic while taking the children to school. Each one had woken in this room and, almost trembling with happiness, seen the morning light climbing through the slats of the shutters and realised that she would never feel like this again, that life was changed utterly.

Posted at 9:06pm and tagged with: krzeslice, Leica, digilux 2, brides, wedding,.

February 21st 2011

4 notes |#

Gothic Melbourne

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, in a dark and nineteenth century mood.

Experimenting with the BW setting on my Leica DL2 on a winter’s morning.

Posted at 10:10pm and tagged with: Melbourne, Royal Botanic Gardens, gothic, Photography, Leica, Digilux 2,.