The Art Newspaper

Monanism

Until 1 Jan 13

hobart. Tasmania is the unlikely setting for the most exciting museum opening of the year.

On 21 January professional gambler David Walsh unveils his Museum of Old and New Art (MoNA) in an underground building hewn out of a limestone cliff north of Hobart.

It will show Walsh’s collection of antiquities, Australian modernist paintings and international contemporary art.

MoNA is a museum building of stunning ambition with 6,000 sq. m of display space over three floors. Designed by Melbourne architects Fender Katsalidis, it will be Australia’s largest private gallery, and its boldest.

“MoNA was conceived as a component of my personality,” says Walsh, who describes himself as a “full-on secularist”.

The displays will range from the violent and the scatological, to the poetic and bizarre. This is a museum where Egyptian mummies will be shown alongside the bodies of suicide bombers sculpted in chocolate; where you can perform sexual acts on installations; and where an entire wall will show a work titled Cunts...

and Other Conversations consisting of 142 ceramic sculptures of female genitals. While some works shock, others will delight, such as Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s walk-through aviary for zebra finches furnished with electric guitars.

As the birds perch on the instruments, they “play” them. Completely frank about his motives, Walsh has entitled the opening display “Monanism”, which he defines thus: “Noun, 1.

Obsessive activity characterised by an inability to discriminate between normative public behaviour and displays of immorality and alternating self-loathing and egotism; 2.

A behavioural disorder which, when observed by a representative member of a population (esp. Australian) elicits the epithet ‘wanker’.” Cristina Ruiz Categories: Contemporary (1970-present) Curious

• Monanism, Australia
• British Design 1948-2012: Innovation in the Modern Age, United Kingdom
• 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Germany
• Owen Jones: Islamic Design, Discovery and Vision, United Arab Emirates
• This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s, USA

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