From Jon Sumby …
I have been to the top of the great beam of light …
Now I appear to be falling.
Soon I will land with an enormous thump.
Such is the effect of MONA mania.
It is a unique catatonia … a strange stupor induced by extravagant assaults on the senses.
You’d be mad to miss it. Seriously, you would … because it sends you slightly mad; and who does not wish to be sometimes a little mad?
A certain amount of madness is necessary – in my view – for creativity.
Not necessarily the ear-lopping incisiveness of Vincent.
A little less dramatic.
Well, dramatic is the wrong word.
Because, one element of MONA The Red Queen is dramatic.
But guys, I have to say, it did not shock me. This, the latest of MONA’s monumentals is a tad more conservative; enormously creative, and enormously vast (bring a packed lunch) … belief systems analysed, questioned, pondered, but that great breakthrough wondrous moment of revelation, of challenge (god how much i love to be challenged, confronted, discombobulated; how much I missed Sydney and the wondrous wall of vaginas; long gone), I guess, not quite …
Here we have beauty and wonder and creativity. But I’m a shocking old man … who loves to be shocked (I actually went in search of the chocolate bomber and with enormous relief, discovered him still to be there, though not the deracinated chaps of yore (Mona according to curators Olivier Darenne, Nicole Durling and Elizabeth … has matured a tad). The Red Queen appeals enormously … but does it meet the Patron Walsh’s dictum: … that he built the museum ‘as an attempt to understand why people make art’.
Really David, you don’t have to look far. Simply inward: Well that was preaching to the converted … Every child intuitively creates art … and I’ve often wondered how diminishing to the soul (that complex inexplicable interaction of the subtle hints of parallel universes) is the mechanistic suppression of the technological brain. And how we have little journeyed from the animal brain so well described by Dr Clive Marks ( Democratic hemlock: saving earth from our animal selves, TT here ).
You wonder, well I do, how much our brain … this marvel of survival in its journey from the animalic world into self-awareness … has buggered us so completely that in our greed we destroy our fragile world ( TT: Doing the Climate Maths with Bill McKibben ).
This is why we must be so grateful to David Walsh … Why were there thousands last night at the opening party? Simply for the grog (not cheap!) and the good food … No! Walsh has reintroduced us to childhood; to ponder and wonder and be amazed … and perhaps to draw us back to what once we were …
… Of course that is why also we need to be continually challenged and shocked. It is only when we recognise the evil within each of us, that we can truly begin to face the truth about ourselves … and, surely, to love ourselves …
After all, in my view, at the end of life lie only two things: Love and Paradox …
Anyway… it is MONA … you would be the greatest fool to miss these wondrous gifts; this light and DARK MOFO …
George Soros, the financier who moves markets as god moves mountains, once said that creativity is to be found at the edge of chaos.
Couldn’t agree more.
This you will find in spades at the punter-financed frenzy of MONA.
Wherever you look, it is being dealt. And I haven’t begun to talk properly about Dark MOFO … be ready for the beam in your eye ….
(Expletive deleted) (Expletive restored, on request) Fuck! This is in Hobart … I can’t believe it!x
• Thirty eight years ago I chanced upon two maidens. Sirens both. Jewesses.
Come, they said to me, as we took flowing rivers of wine in the taverna above the Isle of Capri; celebrating with 20 other instant friends from the then-equivalent backpacker, my 23rd birthday. I was soloing down the Amalfi Coast, wondrously, aimlessly travelling as cheaply as poss.
And it was my birthday. The instant friends of the ‘backpacker’ decided to celebrate this milestone with moi. Upstairs we went to the taverna to party. I met the Sirens and in those lilting seductive tones they told me of Paradise; Paradise Beach, far over the mountains from the party town of Mykonos, where you could take all your clothes off and full-moon party.
We will meet you there, they said.
Like some panting beast who has stepped back from the world of self-awareness into animalia (not such a bad place to be!), I followed, hitching (most memorably with a Danish architecture student in a Deux Chevaux (DCV) around ancient ruins til washing up in, where is it, Brindisi? Thence via Corfu to Athens, to Mykonos; thence to Paradise: 20 permanent naked residents camping around a single taverna (nakedness in taverna not allowed; but it was party time each night in taverna; voules vous couchez avec moi, ce soir) and a few dozen tourists wishing to shed their clothes travelling by boat from Mykonos, most days; then exiting via boats in the eves.
I found a stone hut without a roof and camped for a few months. The first day a painful experience as the most tender of moi anatomy reacted negatively to exposure. It was okay after that and each day my new instant permanent-resident friends trooped, shedding as we went, to welcome the incomers for shifts at the tanning factory …
But of the Sirens there was no sign …
• This story is recounted to be in sympathy with the great Solstice Swim Sat, June 22. I thought of shedding and joining because of that vast personal experience; and to reprise those times so long ago. But it’s become far too bloody popular!x
• Beam: Vicky Frost, The Guardian, HERE: It is a quite spectacular work: something to revisit close up multiple times, and also to gaze on from afar. Something I wish I’d stumbled upon without knowing anything about it – Hobartians caught unawares have been wondering what unearthly force they’re witnessing. Certainly it is the most affecting piece of public art I’ve encountered. And it perhaps also says something bold and interesting about what public art can be. • HERE:
• Red Queen: Vicky Frost, The Guardian, HERE: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” So explained the Red Queen to Alice, in a line that has since seen Lewis Carroll’s royal adopted as figurehead for the theory that we do not evolve to progress, but to keep pace with our changing environment. Now she is also heading the bill at MONA, opening as part of winter festival Dark Mofo, for an exhibition that questions why humans create art: where does our creative drive spring from; why do we continue to have creative impulses? It is unsurprising of course, that David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art, dedicated to death and sex, wants to tackle such a question. And equally unsurprising that you won’t find a neat answer in the Red Queen’s galleries. • HERE:
• Vicky Frost, The Guardian: Feast friends: winter warmth in Hobart Huge barbecues, stalls groaning with Tasmanian treats – the June solstice can be joyful. And utterly delicious All about WINTERFEAST, here
