MONA was what drew me to Tasmania, and happily I made it over there - with C - in time to catch the inaugural, eponymously apt exhibition. MONA itself is an impressive set-up, with its own ferry from town, a striking building housing the museum itself, very engaging and effective self-guided 'tour' material on customised ipods issued to all visitors at the door, and appealingly labyrinthine internal layout; we made a day of it - 11am ferry out, 5.30pm back, only a short break for lunch at the internal cafe - and while museum fatigue had started to set in by the end, I didn't feel close to having exhausted the art.
In part, that was because there's a focus on video and 'moving image' work (generally taking longer to absorb because of their specifically temporal dimension), reflecting the generally extremely contemporary flavour of the collection. There was something of a feel of the works being the collection of an individual (rather than an institution) - there were a few threads running through a lot of the works, particularly certain expressionist-surrealist and kitsch-grotesque elements, as well as a bit of a Romantic streak, although a thoroughly post-modernist, contemporary flavour is very much dominant in the exhibition as a whole.
There weren't many individual pieces that really stood out at the time or immediately after, but with the benefit of the passage of a week or so, here are some that have particularly stuck:
* Reynold Reynolds - "Secrets Trilogy" ("Six Easy Pieces", "Secret Life", "Secret Machine"). I stood there and watched the whole of this, a series of stop-motiony HD video transfers from 16mm and stills that reminded me of Svankmajer's Alice, cryptic meditations on art, science, philosophy, consciousness, corporeality, nature, life.
* Patrick Hall - "When My Heart Stops Beating". In a room - on one side, a wall of square boxes that can be pulled out to intone, repeatedly, 'I love you' and reveal a poetic, elliptical set of thoughts about love and loss; and on the facing side, a wall of vinyl records, spinning, each in its constituent layers radiating out from the centre. In some ways obvious, but also cute, and not entirely unaffecting.
* Anselm Kiefer - "Sternenfall / Shevirath Ha Kelim". A large room, unusually (for this exhibition/gallery) well lit by sunshine from outside. Large lead books, shattered glass on the floor. Monumental and personal. Unsurprisingly, artist studied law, literature, linguistics.
* Balint Zsako - Untitled (2010). Two women painting themselves then the canvas in a giddy flurry of inky, acrylic and water colour.
* Nolan - "Dog and duck hotel". A painting of a duck in the air alongside a hotel. Appealing. Curious.
* Callum Morton - "Babylonia". From outside, it's a huge, knobbly rock. You walk inside and find yourself in a low-ceilinged hotel-style corridor, swirling Italian-sounding romantic music, a mirror at either end of the corridor reflecting into infinity, all very Alice in Wonderland.
... and there are scattered images from others that have stuck in my mind, too, fragmented, disjointed, adding to an already cluttered internal associative landscape, which is all to the good.
All in all, a very satisfying trip.
