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Sex, death and religion

Touring MONA

Anne Marsh
Eyeline 76
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Ten thousand dandelion seeds were collected in Tasmania by the Irish artist, Claire Morgan, and glued onto nylon threads, to trap a tiny bird which she brought from London. Tracing Time was installed at MONA for its opening in 2011. It is a work so delicate that it needs a museum person to guard it—could such a work be held and exhib­ited in a public collection? Would the state have the funds to protect one work of art? Morgan’s instal­lation is fragile and ephemeral; the tiny bird sus­pended between the seeds presents a precarious death in a sublime balance. We dare not breathe. The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) opened on 21 January 2011 after a seventy-five million dollar renovation to what had been the Moorilla Museum of Antiquities (2001–2007), which was housed in a villa designed by Roy Grounds and built for the original owners of the Moorilla Winery. David Walsh, a local Tasmanian who made a fortune through his gambling enterprise, bought the winery site in 1995.

MONA is now the home for Walsh’s art collection, which is valued at over one hundred million dol­lars. Spanning a time from centuries before Christ until the present day, the collection is at once quietly traditional and robustly provocative. Most of the press coverage to date has concentrated on David Walsh, the man, with very little being written about the art, apart from those works deemed to be sensational, shocking or blasphemous. Even less appears to have been written about the architecture created by Nonda Katsalidis and built by Hansen Yuncken to house the collection.

Dubbed the ‘Bilbao of the south’ and the ‘Getty of the antipodes’, MONA is... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Stephen J Shanabrook, On the Road to Heaven The Highway to Hell, 2008. Remnants of the suicide bomber cast in dark chocolate, edn 2/5. Photography MONA/Leigh Carmichael. Image courtesy MONA Museum of Old and New Art.

Stephen J Shanabrook, On the Road to Heaven The Highway to Hell, 2008. Remnants of the suicide bomber cast in dark chocolate, edn 2/5. Photography MONA/Leigh Carmichael. Image courtesy MONA Museum of Old and New Art.

Andres Serrano, The Morgue (Blood Transfusion Resulting in Aids), 1992. Cibachrome photograph, edn 2/3. Photography MONA/Leigh Carmichael. Image courtesy MONA Museum of Old and New Art.

Andres Serrano, The Morgue (Blood Transfusion Resulting in Aids), 1992. Cibachrome photograph, edn 2/3. Photography MONA/Leigh Carmichael. Image courtesy MONA Museum of Old and New Art.