MONA art gallery

I went to MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, my first week in Tassie, but I had to go back and bring my camera this time to take some pics of the sweet art they got going there. I went with Venita and I hope the weird art didn't scare her too much.

For fifteen bucks you can take a ferry return from downtown to the gallery way up the river. Pricing down here makes no sense; fifteen bucks for a sweet ferry ride to a world class gallery which is FREE to enter, but it costs me thirty two bucks for 2 packs of smokes. 8 bucks for a couple bananas, 9 dollars a pint. Anyways...

This here is the Tasman Bridge. It's a big bridge as you can see, but apparently some guy in the seventies didn't see it and drove his tanker ship into one of the pillars. He broke the bridge and cars drove off it and died and nobody likes that guy anymore I am sure.

After about a twenty minute ferry ride full of useless information on cantelever designed bridges and zinc oxide power plants you arrive at MONA.

The entrance to the gallery has a tennis court for some reason. The site it's on is actually a winery; you can see the distillery in that rotunda shaped building on the left. Rotunda, good word. Let's have a look at some freaky art now!

The fat car! It's actually a porshe, and unfortunatly looks undrivable. Would be cool to pull that thing up to a Mcdonalds drive thru.

As an art nerd I was amazed to actually see this piece in this gallery. Not my favorite piece of art, but the history behind it is fascinating. It's a black virgin mary with an elephant poo nipple and cut outs of womens bums from porn magazines. Quite a shocker of an art work when it was first unveiled back in the day, but as art history will tell you the more denounced and shocking an artwork is seemed to be the more desirable the artwork becomes.

You are allowed to bring cameras into the gallery, but you can't use flash unfortunatly. Tho I did 'accidentaly' forget a few times. It's really weird to be in a gallery where thousand year old treasures from Egypt and Messopotamia are situated next to sculptures from the eighties with peoples dicks cut off and being hung upside down. THOSE CRAZY ARTISTS I TELL YA!

People HATE Jean Michel Basquiat. He's dead now so his feelings won't be hurt if you say bad stuff about him. I however love his stuff. His art is immediatly recognizable and he is by far the best of the worst artists from the eighties, in my opinion anyways. I had to write an essay about him once and I will stop now before I write another on this blog.

Is that a tattood pig skin? Yes it is. This artists as I recall, sells the live pigs with tattoos already on them as the artworks. Now this seems cruel to tattoo a pig which is still living and breathing and rolling in mud and pooping, but in actuality these pigs live far better lives then those who show up as bacon on our breakfast plates. If you buy one of the pigs you have to pay for it to stay at a piggy retirement home until it dies of natural causes and then you get the lovely pig hide afterwards. Oink Oink!

Arrrr, some pirate booty from a sunken ship!

Here's a weird one. A line of water jets drops random words of water every couple of seconds. Words like black ops and niki and Step Up 2.

It's hard to take a good photo of the gallery space because it's like a huge maze of little galleries and installations, but this shot sort of gives you a bit of scale feeling of how big it is. Apparently it cost more to make the building then the value of all the artworks combined.



Now speaking of value of artworks, this is a Damien Hirst spin painting and it's probably worth a million bucks because it's a Damien Hirst piece. People hate Damien Hirst, but artists are generally just bitchy people.

There are no titles on any of the artworks, instead when you go into the gallery they give you an iphone which has a GPS in it and shows you information on nearby artworks. This forest thing was situated directly under the spin painting by Hirst because the wife of the gallery owner hates both of them and so she stuck them together to which the gallery owner finds hilarious. (He is kind of a weirdo, but i'll explain more on him later).

A movie about a talking fat house! Same guy who did the fat car obviously. The iphone describes it simple as "This house has a really annoying voice", which it does because all it does is complain about how it doesn't know if it's a house or an artwork because it's in a gallery. It is cute tho.

This head is pretty awesome. It has viewing holes in it with this spinning film sculpture which was impossible to take a photo of but I tried.

The photo looks like chaos but it was crystal clear when you actually looked at it. Guess you will just have to come down and see it for yourself.

Another thing I have always wanted to see, the Colonic machine! It mimics the digestive process of our own bodies using a series of enzymes and 'stomachs'. It actually stinks something fierce.

Feeding time for the machine! Stupid machine eats better then I do, even gets a beer for lunch. Under the silver bowl is a blender which mimics human teeth. Then the food passes from one 'stomach' to the next until at 2pm every day it takes a scheduled....

...shit. We missed pooping time, but you san see a little bit poking out of the tube there. This machine apparently took 8 years of research to make, when I do it every ten hours or so. I win.

Cool spinning light drawing machines.

Hi mummy!

The last thing I will show you is this rock deal. It fills up a whole room and has creepy ship and wave noises. Then you come around and see this strange doorway.

Upon which you enter this cheesy movie set looking place with short doors that don't open and music which sounds like God save the Queen. I don't get it, and maybe I am not supposed to. It's actually by some Canadian Artist from Montreal whose name I can't remember or be bothered to look up.

So that was a very small look at the MONA gallery here in Tasmania. There are thousands of artworks to look at and even after my second time going there are STILL things I have yet to see I'm sure. If you were to just watch the movies in the gallery it would take you a full day of non stop looking. Tho some are pretty out there with people taking shits and being humped by dogs, and so you would probably get sick afterwards. This one movie theater room was set up watching a film about cutting meat, but they put ashtrays all over the place and filled the room with the smell of cigarette smoke. That was just torture for any smoker who walks in there knowing you can't light up.

So the guy who own the gallery who's name evades me is an interesting sort. He is a slightly autistic multimillionaire off of some gambling website or something. The kind of excentric rich guy you expect all rich guys to be. I purchased the catalogue for the gallery and on the last page is just him sitting ass naked on a chair. I bet hes a fun drunk. Anyways, the only reason why this very prestigious gallery is in such a place as Hobart with only 200 thousand people in it, is because he has a kid here and wanted to stay close by. He actually lives in the gallery somewhere, being a naked creep no doubt. And that's all my random facts about that guy. Hope you liked the walkthrough of the gallery, if you ever have the time and money head on down, it's pretty awesome.