MONA – now maybe I’ll finally go to Tasmania

So the talk of the town this weekend was the grand opening of the much anticipated new museum  - the Museum of Old and New Art.

 

Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania

The museum is located in the Moorila vineyard on the Berridale Penisula in Hobart, and is now the largest privately funded museum in the southern hemisphere, showcasing the antiquities, modern and contemporary art collection of the millionaire David Walsh.

The new museum is exciting not just because of its size and the scope and quality of its collection, but it also presents a refreshing new museology. Without the restrictions of public opinion and often conservative museum boards, MONA’s director has been given strict instructions by David Walsh, who has funded the museum, to be provocative and controversial. His aim is to delight and entertain, to shock and offend. While publicly funded museums must constantly cave in to the cries of protest from the tax-paying public, MONA’s hands have been untied

I attended a talk by MONA’s curator last year, who described Walsh’s unorthodox approach. Walsh is an atheist, and while most museum’s shy away from being overtly political or religious, MONA’s labels will describe how their antiquities are proof that the world was not created 6,000 years ago, as creationists would have us believe.

Walsh has confessed that the museum is his soapbox, and he aims to shout loud his opinions. While I can see how this sort of thing could be problematic and it is certainly egotistical, a feel like MONA is a breath a fresh air!

While I was not one of the lucky few who managed to get an invitation to this weekends grand opening, I very much look forward to visiting MONA soon.

Guilty Pleasures

Rupert Bunny, Dolce farniente c1897 (Sweet idleness). Private collection, Melbourne, courtesy of John Playfoot Fine Art

Art has a lot of power. To inspire us, to make us think about important issues and to feel deep emotions. But sometimes it just really really nice to go into an art museum and just soak up pure aesthetic beauty. To just promenade through the gallery from painting to painting and think nothing of politics or social issues but to just marvel at colour and form and sumptuous figures with a feeling of utter calm while experiencing the sweetness of idleness. This is how I felt on Tuesday when I paid a visit to Rupert Bunny: Artist in Paris (26 March – 4 July 2010) at the NGV.

Rupert Bunny, Mme Sada Yacco ‘Kesa' c1900 (1907). Collection Philip Bacon

I knew very little about Rupert Bunny before I saw this exhibition and I must say I was surprised that I did not encounter the stuffy ‘old people’ kind of art I had expected to see (a la Heidelberg School). My eyes just melted at the beauty of these paintings. And that’s really all I can say of them… they are just so so pretty. I don’t mean to belittle these works in any way and sure I could say something of how beautifully they evoke the Belle Epoch – the golden age of the European elite prior to World War I. But I really enjoyed the guilty pleasure of it all – of feeling like I was one of less ladies of leisure without a care in the world. In fact for the first time EVER I read every single text in the exhibition and stopped and looked at every single painting. This is very unusual for me. I tend to get quite overwhelmed and distracted by big exhibitions. As soon as a reach one artwork, the corner of my eye is always wandering to the next. But here I was just happy to idly sit with each painting for a moment, soaking it all in, and then slowly sauntering on to the next. It was like a beautiful dream…

Rupert Bunny, A summer morning c1897. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. MJMCarter AOCollection through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2009. Given in memory of Jean A Sutcliffe (1921–2004)

He is … a brilliant and spirited artist who knows

how to evoke the poetry of an evening … and at

the same time is able to express the radiant joy of

a beautiful day, a delicate flesh blossoming in the

light. The artist … is, at one and the same time,

a realist and a visionary, an observer of truth

and a poet of the world of dreams.

Gustave Geffroy in Exposition Rupert CW Bunny, Galeries Georges Petit, Paris 1917

Ahhh he sure can.

FYI:  The NGV just launched their new website and I couldn’t be more thrilled! For years now – particularly since MoMA launched their new amazing website last year – I have lamented the uninspiring website of my national gallery. Their new website looks beautiful, with lots more content and images. It’s so shiny.

Cabinets of Curiosities

Display of animals and fossils in McCoy Hall (later Redmond Barry Reading Room), National Museum, Melbourne, ca. 1910, gelatin silver, State Library of Victoria Collection, URL: search.slv.vic.gov.au

I have only the vaguest of memories of the old Melbourne Museum. I went there twice when I was quite young – once in school in grade Prep, and another time with my dad. I remember coins, I remember Phar Lap’s heart, I remember mummies (I think… although this could be a false memory formed from literary or cinematic sources), I remember being too short to see many of the exhibits, and I have a memory of everything being clothed in a dense dusty brown hue. I also remember that, even as a child, everything in the museum was very old, very important, and very much beyond my level of understanding. It was wondrous and I remember walking around wide-eyed and smiling. And most importantly I remember the experience fondly.

The new Melbourne Museum over in Carlton is nothing like those memories – and this perhaps explains why I dislike and distrust it. It is big and bright and… informative. When I go to the new museum I feel like I am way beyond the level of understanding it caters to. This makes me sad. The museum never grew with me… it grew backwards. And I wonder, would I as a child be so enraptured by this new museum as I was by the old? The new museum has all the bells and whistles to attract a child’s attention. It speaks to their level and interactive displays to suit their learning style. But in trying to hard to appear like a playground, do kids actually get anything out of it? Museums shouldn’t just be about teaching kids a fact, but about inspiring them and giving them a thirst for knowledge for life!

Now I know the new Melbourne Museum has been around for long enough for the comparisons to have stopped, and I’m not saying the old methodology was right… its just after stumbling on some photographs of the original museum, I suddenly felt a yearning to spend a day lost in a dusty old museum filled with walls and cabinets filled to the brim with artifacts and natural specimens. There is something about them that invites self-guided exploration, something that the new Museum, with its giant flashing arrows screaming “something you should know, over here!”, just doesn’t.

Interior, National Museum, Melbourne, State Library of Victoria Collection

Every Painting in the Museum of Modern Art

How many can you name?

NEW010 at ACCA: Electromagnetism and Suspended Agriculture

I have to admit that this year I was more curious about what they would call NEW this year, than I was about finding out who the artists were. For the last decade NEW’s title has followed a O formula that rolled off the tongue quite nicely – NEW04, NEW07, NEW09, and so forth. What would they do this year, I pondered. NEW10 just sounded wrong to me. But after discovering they had decided to stick with the 0 formula and call it NEW010 I was aghast. It doesn’t make any numerical sense. Why not just make it NEW2010. And in hind sight, given the alternative, NEW10 sounds great! But oh well, live and learn.

This year the exhibition tried something new! Acca’s three galleries were divided into seven unique spaces to be responded to by the seven participating artists. I liked this concept.

Out of the seven artists on show only three really stood out to me: Fiona Connor, Alicia Frankovich and Susan Jacobs.

Susan Jacobs, New010, 18 March - 23 May 2010, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

The one work that totally blew my mind was Susan Jacobs. The space was by far the most unusual out of the seven – a narrow corridor circumventing an inner wall that stopped half way down revealing another empty room beneath it. Jacobs placed three small metallic assemblages in the gap in the inner wall. On walking through the first time the assemblages seemed uninspiring but the large warning signs on the entrance of the gallery – Warning! Electro magnets in operation – made me take a closer look. Bending down on the gallery floor I was able to see at last the miniscule wonder of a tiny piece of metal suspended in space. I was awestruck. Then the very helpful volunteer motioned me to look at another assemblagewith yet another piece of metal suspended in the air – and delicately with her finger the volunteer gently pushed the metal which wobbled frantically before it settled once more above the block. No string just the wonder and might of electromagnetism! I love it.

Fiona Connor, New010, 18 March - 23 May 2010, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

Fiona Connor, NEW010, 18 March - 23 May 2010, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

The space given to Fiona Connor was a long wall on the right of the first gallery. Rather than hanging work on the wall Connor punched straight through it, installing salvaged windows that open up onto the space beyond the gallery: a utility corridor that separates the space of the gallery from the inner workings of the museum. This corridor – an unfinished wall cavity filled with wires, light switches, and various tubes – was never intended to be seen by the public, and in fact it is a surprise to discover its existence. I thoroughly enjoy anything that pulls away the wizards curtain, so to speak, and sheds light on the artificiality of the museum’s white walled, sterile galleries.

Alicia Frankovich, New010, 18 March - 23 May 2010, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

Alicia Frankovich was given the largest space of the seven and filled it was a multitude of hanging plants suspended upside down from the ceiling. The plants are not merely decorative – they are alive, suspended in plastic bags filled with dirt and rigged up to a large water tank in the corner of the room. A big sign on the wall warns the viewer: CAUTION FRUIT MAY DROP. The reason I liked this work was not only because it was pretty but because it wasn’t disconcerting. While the installation reminded me of that movie, Our Daily Bread, which exposed the lab-like conditions in which plants are grown today – nothing like the dirty, wholesome farms we assume produce to come from – the installation is not disturbing. While their inverted position seems strange  it doesn’t feel clinical and unnatural – each plant is unique and interacts with the space in a different way. It was a beautiful experience to walk beneath these plants as they defy gravity.

The Elephant in the Room

Kaori Kato, Series of Interactive Performance, 2009. Digital Print. Image courtesy of www.craftvic.asn.au

A few months ago I watched a documentary about origami on the ABC fully expecting to see an hour worth of paper cranes and paper boats that double as hats. But in that short hour my perception of origami as a fun kiddy craft was utterly and irrevocably altered. Between the Folds (2006) took me on a journey from the Japanese origins of the tradition, to an ever increasing search for greater realism and complexity, through to its postmodern development (one fold). The film examines the use of origami by artists and  and scientists, whose use of origami have wide reaching applications. I was left feeling like something very important had been revealed to me. That the entire universe and our very existence could be explained by the simple act of folding. It was a good film.

Since that time I have been fascinated by paper folding, and have an unquestioning respect for any artist to work with the technique. And it is for this reason that yesterday I made a visit to Craft Victoria’s new exhibition, 2009 Fresh! (4- 23 December 2009) specifically to see the paper folding work of Kaori Kato, a recent VCA graduate.

Through the technique of folding, Kato explores the concept of engulfment, interaction and movement within the natural environment. In this series of works, Kato’s interaction with her large scale folded sculptures becomes an integral part of the work. The form, movement and sounds created by this interaction is whimsical and strangely hypnotic.

Justine Rouse, Trophy, 2009. Tulle, bemsilk lining. Image courtesy of www.craftvic.asn.au

Also in Fresh! I was captivated by the work of Justine Rouse and Emma Lashvah. I have a inexplicable attraction to tulle, so when I came upon Rouse’s Trophy, (above) I was mesmerised. The light, airy presence of this monumental ruffle of tulle contrasted with Rouse’s other sculpture, The Elephant in the Room, with its strange amorphic form composed of flesh coloured satin sitting awkwardly nearby. Both sculptures have a biological quality, appearing to breath out the of the corner of your eye.

Emma Lashmar, Fold/field, 2009. Blown glass, nylon thread, instrument machine heads. Image courtesy of www.craftvic.asn.au

Emma Lashmar’s Fold/field, installation suspends a mass of blow glass bubbles filled with water on wire. It reminded me of those animations of the neural pathways of the human brain, with their firing synapses.  A beautiful experience.

Victorian Era

 

Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria, Australia.

There really is something to be said about viewing art in a Victorian art gallery. It takes my breath away. And I realised, walking around the Geelong Art Gallery today, that it had been a long time since I’d looked at any art before 1900. This is regrettable because I love it. I think I often forget about these beloved works because I work in a modern art gallery and am sick to death of hearing “I don’t like this modern rubbish.. I want to see some landscapes.” I now associate pre-1900 painting with old, narrow-minded conservatism. No longer. We are far better enriched by appreciating both the old and the new. And indeed, the Geelong Art Gallery’s habit of displaying nineteenth-century painting alongside contemporary art really helps to shake off some of the dust gathering on these paintings as the result of the unwavering appreciation of those with conservative tastes.  

One painting that captured my attention was a Venetian cityscape by Arthur Streeton. You cannot appreciate it here but this painting sparkles! 

 

Arthur Streeton. (Image from The Happy Homemaker/Joseph's photostream on flicker)

 The Geelong Art Gallery also has a fantastic Greco-inspired Victorian facade facing onto a gorgeous park. Disappointingly though, this facade is no longer used as the main entrance to the gallery. Instead, the Geelong Art Gallery has relocated the main entrance to what was once the rear of the gallery, and tacked on a more modern facade complete with glass and concrete architectural embellishments. 

 

Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria, Australia

Main entrance, Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria, Australia

Geelong is not alone is doing this. Over the last twenty odd years many museums located in historic buildings have made the decision to re-orientate their entrance in keeping with the changing ideology of the museum; a move away from the idea of the museum as temple to the museum as forum. It was felt that the old facades were far to grand and imposing to be welcoming. So museums attempted to rectify this. Since these building are usually heritage listed, modifications to the existing facade was out of the question, so the only option was to tack on another entrance on the rear or sides of the building. Glass seems to be the medium of choice; most likely preferred for its transparent and thus open and inviting quality. 

I don’t think I can emphasis enough how much I utterly, utterly disagree with this. I detest these new types of facades, not only because I find them utterly dull and boring, but also because it makes me feel like I am not worthy to enter through the grand entrance, and have instead been ushered through the back door. I spend all day walking through glass automated doors. Why can’t I experience something grander when I am entering a building filled with grand objects? I feel like I am being cheated. 

Images from Geelong Art Gallery