Mona Blog

My conversion, my Damascene moment, was at Anselm Kiefer’s La Ribaute, on the road to Barjac. I was there with Olivier and at his instigation (‘It’s the best studio visit in the world!’ and I could hear the exclamation mark), but I only had eyes for Kirsha. We had met a week or so before, in Basel. I had followed her to a party at a mad castle and been escorted from her presence and evicted (‘Gotta go now’). We’d reconvened in Hannover and Münster, and trained south from Paris, all cuddly and coquettish. I really wanted Olivier’s ‘best studio visit’ epithet to be accurate. I wanted to impress this girl.

The boat ambles up the Grand Canal in Venice, pulling up at the train station at the top of town. From there, I walk to meet the car that will take me north to Vicenza. It’s about a two-hour drive. The driver is very entertaining, and when I’m not asleep, we talk about cars. I begin the studio tour with a glass of locally made sparkling wine, Cortenera Extra Brut Metodo Clássico. I’m informed this is a regional speciality. The bubbles are very fine, and the dryness suits me. We are sitting on the crates used for transporting Sassolino’s dangers around the world.

You may have glimpsed it from the poplar-lined drive, or perhaps from the western edge of the museum. Stone Sea Passage may appear to you, at first glance, as a kind of sea wall, jetty or breakwater—a long tumble of sandstone chunks advancing into the water.

How much is a piece of paper worth? Not as much as we paid for this one. I told my colleague Olivier to bid up to £110,000 (too much). He bid £165,000 to secure it.

I went to school in a small town out past the airport called Sorell. I got a pretty good education there, given my socioeconomic position and that of the school more broadly (which is to say, not great; not terrible, but skewed a little toward the latter). I’d already learnt to read, but school got me my maths and taught me titrations; foundations for a house I’d never build.

One day last year, my colleagues Jane and Jarrod were discussing ‘Murray’s book’ about the Australian artist Ian Fairweather (that’s them namedropping Murray Bail, the writer). Jarrod found slipped inside the cover a copy of Jane’s exhibition catalogue about Fairweather, from her time at the NGV.

Towards the end of Renoir’s life he developed rheumatoid arthritis, but he kept painting. When asked why, he said, ‘The pain passes, but the beauty remains.’ That could mean that he wanted to look at his paintings tomorrow, but I take it to mean he wanted to perpetuate some sort of life after life: an opportunity for others to continue to enjoy his paintings, a form of symbolic immortality.

A few years ago, the New Zealand–born, Berlin-based artist Simon Denny bought at auction seventeen silk scarves once owned by Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, and transformed them into a series of Patagonia puffer vests and sleeping bags.

What does a close friend become when a close friend becomes dead? I’ve had a few of those, including Stephen, whose suicide virtually guaranteed the absence of a legacy, and Robert, who knew everything, including how to die.

‘… Art is a lie that makes us realise truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of [her] lies.’

This diary entry is the first of many coming from members of our Forest Congress team and various representatives of conservation, First nations (Palawa and elsewhere), activism, and industry, who will share their experiences and perspectives.

In a recent ruling by the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, artist and curator Kirsha Kaechele was ordered to allow men entry to the Ladies Lounge, her artwork at Mona. On a recent flight to Milan, Kaechele sat down to discuss the court’s decision and the future of the artwork.

At Mona Foma—Mofo—at the Peacock Theatre, we joined the Zen Circus, and Italian punk came to live, rent free, in my head.

A few years ago, I was invited to do the keynote for the Tasmanian Economic Forum. You’ve got the wrong person, I told them. Of all subjects on earth, economics is the one I know least about. And definitely care least about. One need only begin to say the word, econo … zzzzzzz … and I’m snoozing off. But they insisted: they wanted someone from outside their world, someone fresh, to shake things up. Fine. But I should at least offer something relevant to their forum. So I did some calculations and presented this graph:

David’s COVID-19 diary returns. 7/4/20–4/8/22.

What happens when we want to undertake a journey, but a government-mandated intervention delays it, because, they say, it serves the greater good? Is that an infringement on our rights?

I met Christian Boltanski at a restaurant in Paris, introduced by his close friend Jean-Hubert Martin. Drunk we got. And fun we had.

David’s response to Dark Mofo’s cancellation of Santiago Sierra’s Union Flag. Posted on 23 March, 2021.

David wrote this statement on 17 March 2020, when the decision was made to temporarily close Mona due to COVID-19.

The quiet, foggy streets of Richmond—the southern end, just before you cross the river, where Church street gives way to Chapel. On the radio, the early ABC news, which I listen to as I run, using my new bluetooth headphones. A pandemic present to myself.

David's COVID-19 diary part four: Monday 6–Thursday 9 April 2020

David's COVID-19 diary part three. Wednesday 1–Saturday 4 April 2020.

David's COVID-19 diary part two. Monday 23–Sunday 29 March 2020.

Day one, Sunday 22 March 2020, 9.10 am

Charles Ross’s Spectrum Chamber was recently installed at Mona, as part of the extension to our museum, called Pharos. Mona curator Jarrod Rawlins spoke to Ross, who was in Hobart to oversee the completion of the artwork.

Ai Weiwei's White House will be installed at Mona mid next year. I spoke to him during the recent Sydney Biennale, in the days leading up to the release of his film Human Flow, which is about the worldwide refugee crisis.

What’s the worst decision I’ve ever made? I’ve made a few bad ones. In my brief bad bridge days, I put down a cold four clubs contract, or so my mates told me. One former friend was particularly precise—‘the only bridge you seem to know is an open space spanning construct’. Those words taunt me thirty-five years later. And romance—I’ve messed up great relationships, and persevered with some shockers. After a bikie taunted me with, ‘Don’t bash us up’, I heard my weaselly fifteen-year-old voice, ‘I won’t, but only because you asked nicely’. When asked by the Israeli airline (El-Al) security guy if I was traveling with anyone, I gestured towards my Palestinian mate and replied, ‘Only that terrorist over there’.

Unless you are an internet pioneer, a libertarian, a Deadhead, or my wife, you probably have never heard of John Perry Barlow, who died today after lingering too long (or not nearly long enough), but after having had a serious crack at reframing the internet in terms that didn’t make it a perverse analogue of the default world. —David Walsh

I bought, and years later sold, coins of Ptolemy I Soter. Ptolemy was a general of Alexander the Great. After Alexander’s death he ruled Egypt as satrap and pharaoh. He also built the world’s first lighthouse, the Pharos of Alexandria, a Wonder of the World and a model for all lighthouses thereafter. Our new wing of Mona is a lighthouse too, but not one designed to warn ships of the risk of foundering on rocks. Our lighthouse is a testimonial to the power of light as art—not just as a medium for artworks, but as an object.

Next month, an extension to our gallery, called Pharos, will open, housing four new works by James Turrell, as well as works by Jean Tinguely, Charles Ross, Richard Wilson and Randy Polumbo.

Tasmanian artist Patrick Hall made this two-part cabinet, called When My Heart Stops Beating, as a commission for the opening of Mona in 2011. It was made to sit at the entry to what used to be known as Mona’s ‘sex and death gallery’ (which doesn’t exist anymore) and Patrick was specifically responding to the sex and death theme. ‘What I wanted were these two opposing sides,’ he said to me in an interview in 2011.

In my opinion, people consume meat because they like it, and they consume art because they like it. When art (even accidentally) makes explicit what eating meat entails (slaughter, pain, blood, guts) they don't like it. Of course, that's an ends-justifies-means argument, a fat-man-on-the-track argument, so it doesn't buy any social currency.

I wondered whether Ah Xian could really call himself the true creator of the sculpture. What is the difference between Ah Xian, the named artist, and the person employed to bring to life his creative vision? That doesn’t seem so interesting to me now.

A conversation between Elizabeth Pearce, Mona Senior Writer and Research Curator, and James Pearce, Director of Architecture at Fender Katsalidis.

Elizabeth tells me Jannis Kounellis is dead. I already knew that, obviously. It demoted Putin and Trump to the second page of the National Enquirer. She wanted me to write a blog. Coz, you see, I like death. And Kounellis, who was alive, now isn’t.

In the Macquarie Point vision, David Walsh and Leigh Carmichael have started, among other things, a conversation about how a public space might appropriately refer to the history of Tasmanian Aboriginals, and the relationship of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

Later, at 4.10am, her name comes to me unbidden – Shirley Jones. I feel strangely placated by my memory. I didn't like her on TV, but now her death and my poem make us kindred sufferers of the real.

The following is a conversation between David Walsh and Tim Jenison about Vermeer, Viagra, and the nature of genius. (Interviewed by Elizabeth Pearce, with a cameo appearance by Mona curator Jarrod Rawlins.)

Paul, 2014, is a creepy man-child self-portrait (of sorts), by Melbourne-based artist Ronnie van Hout.

Painter, 1995, by Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy, regularly tops our list of works most hated by Mona visitors.

My name is Sunday Walsh. Apropos of nothing, I just had my first birthday. The relevance of that, apparently, is that the angle subtended by the Earth-sun system through the plane of the ecliptic is the same as that angle when I was born.

Mike Parr’s Asylum [Entry by mirror only] was an exhibition and performance that took place during our most recent Dark Mofo festival. Parr took up residence at Willow Court, New Norfolk – a clutch of buildings that once housed Australia’s oldest asylum for the criminally insane. There, he drew continually for 72 hours, in memory of his brother, Tim, who died in 2009 after suffering from mental illness for much of his life. Video, sound, photos, objects, and installation works were dotted throughout the buildings. Visitors were welcome to come and go, on the condition that they brought a mirror to deposit somewhere on the site.

Kirsha was interviewed by Elizabeth Pearce, Mona Research Curator and Senior Writer, in July 2016.

When we went to see the LHC there were a few Large Hangovers Colliding. We acquired these hangovers the previous night, celebrating Olivier's birthday ('What's good for a hangover? Drinking a lot the night before'). Olivier is a curator at Mona, but he lives in Geneva, so we were in Geneva, which is just down the road from CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN employs 12,000 people to do fundamental scientific research. It was at CERN that the Higgs boson was discovered a couple of years ago. That's a big deal, a Nobel Prize-winning deal, because the Higgs is the particle that allows mass in the universe (but not in the church, despite the press calling it the God Particle).

My meagre effort to implement Graeme Garden’s scheme to become an Earl and receive an OBE, and thus become an Earlobe, was long ago thwarted when Australia abandoned the English honours system.

I’ve been trying to work out what I think about the art of Gilbert & George.

There is an old Soviet joke that insists that ‘the future is certain. It is the past that is unpredictable’.

Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh? —Monty Python, Four Yorkshiremen, 1974

When the museum first opened, this artwork, by Jon Pylypchuk, was displayed alongside a ‘spin’ painting by Damien Hirst.

Recently I proposed establishing a casino at Mona to shore up Mona's financial position, despite an existing monopoly held by the operator of Tasmania's two casinos, the Federal Group. In the last week or so opinions have been voiced on my proposal in parliament, in the press, and on air.

Peter Singer recently published The Most Good You Can Do, wherein he advocates effective altruism, the idea that it is incumbent on all of us (at least anyone with the opportunity to read a blog) to live inexpensively, and to benefact causes that spend the donations in ways calculated to do the most good.

Sometimes I find myself, in conversation, filling in a detail concerning an aspect of neurology. It might be the nature of colour blindness, or the clinical manifestations of synaesthesia, or the pain engendered by a misrepresentation of self. When I do this I'm occasionally, even often, right.

We own one small etching by Francisco Goya, part of his famous series The Disasters of War. It has recently gone on display in the museum.

These are Gros Michel bananas. Unless you've carefully sampled exotic fruit varieties in Thailand, or are over seventy, you don't know what they taste like.

Expecting verb (used with object)

I like cricket. Today is a bad day.

I'm in New Orleans and, right now, I'm missing my kids and my cat.

The Christoph Buchel exhibition closes next month.

I don’t have synaesthesia, or at least I don’t think I do, but it has been in my life since the beginning ... before the external beginning, even ... since the womb. My mother was a synaesthete. She associated colour, numbers and sound (particularly pitch), so my joke now is that I couldn’t burp or fart at the dinner table without her telling me it was the number ten, a slightly murky orange and a B flat.

And, behold, I come quickly. —Revelation, 22:12 So reads the back of this year’s Dark Mofo staff hoody.

Last week Mona opened Southdale/C’Mona, an exhibition that explores, among other things, the unintended consequences of created utopias. The colonisation/invasion of Tasmania by Europeans, and the debilities that resulted for its inhabitants, are among the areas explored. Another was the potential establishment of a Jewish nation in southwest Tasmania. That project, however, didn't come to such a fraught conclusion, since it disappeared, as did its major proponent.

Last night, after Diamanda Galás entertained, confused and mesmerised me in turn, I spoke to Dark Mofo revellers from Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane (and the latter complained that the Hobart weather was not nearly cold enough to justify the hype). One of them thanked me for the festival. Everybody does, even though I had very little to do with it. While Dark Mofo boss Leigh Carmichael and his mates put it together, I was on my honeymoon. And then she said, ‘Thank God it's not like the Big Day Out. Dark Mofo would be completely ruined if someone like Coldplay played’.

I have stepchildren, and I am one. I suppose it is for this reason that I picked up The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love, by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson.

Tim, my brother, died over twenty years ago. Some of my earliest memories are of him writing poetry.

Me boss and his missus are on their honeymoon in Istanbul. Which reminds me: I told me boss’ missus I was planning to write a blog about their wedding, which I attended in March. Here it is.

There is a lot to protest in Turkey. Injustice is rife, with crony capitalism at its heart.

Tessa Farmer’s The Depraved Pursuit of a Possum will be de-installed on Tuesday.

Forty years ago I remember waking up in recovery, and squealing like a child (which causes no shame, for I was a child) to be taken back to the ward.

Gee Americans are swell. We just had Steven Pinker and Mark Changizi visit us at Mona.

I put ‘pen to paper’ the day of Nelson Mandela’s demise.

In the early 90s my endless search for technological satisfaction resulted in me adorning my stereo with a five CD changer, and it had a shuffle mode.

In about two weeks, so I’m told, I’m giving birth to a gi-mungous baby.

Over dinner last night Elizabeth, Kirsha and I chatted about my recent blogs and I remonstrated with myself that they focused on death, darkness and injury.

Did you know Hitler was a vegetarian?

My nearly-nine-year-old daughter was leaving a high-rise apartment building in Sydney with her mum, Jemma, when she was struck on the back of the head with a rock, apparently dropped by some witless miscreant from a high floor.

So the Skywhale has gone viral.

Yves Netzhammer’s The Subjectivisation of Repetition is on display at Mona now.

I was halfway through Middlemarch when I got (‘fell’) pregnant.

I just made a Facebook friend.

The museum urn collection is stupidly growing, and its growing is stupefying me.

I’ve been telling tales of death recently

Throat-clearing.

Those Roman Catholics

There are so many ways a thing can make you shiver. A cello in a crowd. A chorus in a stairwell. A story about a child who didn’t stand up for another child. The fury of chilli and the honest, expected loyalty of a potato. A single note. The memory, a moment later, of that same note.

A while ago, I met a photographer from The New Yorker at the museum.

I don’t know a lot about permaculture, but I know that the reason it works is that it increases the number of interactions between the species in a given plot.

Last night my friend Martin hugged me twice.

This worm bears the face of its creator, Jan Fabre.

‘We try for purity but still we’re glorious blobs of meat.’ Michael McClure

New York artist Meghan Boody’s bizarre pin-ball death machine, Deluxe Suicide Service, is on display in the museum at the moment.

Vernon Ah Kee, a Brisbane-based artist, is co-founding member of the Aboriginal artist collective proppaNOW. His pencil portrait 'unwritten #8' is on show in our exhibition Theatre of the World.

Gild the lily

Robyn McKinnon is a Tasmanian painter. Her work Mrs Vermeer’s Kitchen, part of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) collection, will be shown in our up-coming exhibition, Theatre of the World.

As children, my sister and I would go to stay the night at our grandparents’ house on Chapel Street, Glenorchy.

1. The art of knowing whether you are flirting or The art of consuming modern art

Easter, 2012. My little girl's first words when she awoke this morning: ‘One more day to go’.

Eleanor has asked me to write something about Easter. Eleanor is our Blog Mistress.

I wish I had a girl like you Who looks and talks and smells like you I know one girl would have to do But I wish I had two girls like you

I mentioned in my interview with Daniel Mudie Cunningham meeting the artist Nell (no surname) the same day. I left it in the transcript because I wanted to segue into this.

On display in the museum at the moment is Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s Funeral Songs.