Hello! I’ve been in Australia! Back in London now and almost over jet lag.

Here are some advantages of being in Australia: loud birds, saw a koala in a park, lots of friends and family, the food is great, the weather at the moment is lovely.

Here is a disadvantage of being in Australia: a really excessive desire from drivers on small roads to stop and let pedestrians cross in front of them. When I am walking along a small road, I do not want this! You are the driver! You are in your little machine, doing your little machine tasks! I am in the beautiful world! You should be exactly as aware of me as you need to be to not run me over, and no more. I don’t want to have to think about what people in cars are thinking about me, to model their intentions, I don’t want to have to do a little grateful wave or to stand by the side of the road pretending to be on my phone to avoid this abstracted arms-length no-you-go interaction through glass and machinery like the grabber on a claw machine. Hateful! 

ANYWAY, here’s what’s in this week’s newsletter, covering the first half of my month away: 

• Melbourne (should I live there? no, I should live in London, all my stuff is here, plus most of my friends and the cats, AND YET) 

• Hobart (is its big rich-guy museum any good?)

• Launceston (but what do they call it?)

MELBOURNE

There are cities that are nicer than Melbourne, and there are cities that are more interesting than Melbourne. But the nicer cities are all less interesting, and the more interesting cities are all less nice. A good third of Melbourne’s cafes would, if you moved them to London, be the single nicest brunch place in the city. Why don’t I just live here, a thing I could legally do, the constant thrum goes, every time I’m in Melbourne, which of course does in fact make it a bit less pleasant to be in.

Anyway, I don’t have much new to say about Melbourne but the current exhibition at ACMI, Game Worlds, is exceptional. It’s closing at the end of the month but hopefully it’ll tour.

HOBART’S BIG FANCY MUSEUM

International readers may not be aware that Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, has a big art gallery called MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art. MONA has been around in something like its current form for fifteen years, and it’s the third most visited thing in Hobart, after kunanyi (a literal mountain) and the markets in the middle of the city. It’s been credited with kicking off an increase in the number of visitors to Tasmania over the last fifteen years; it’s a big deal for the state, although I think there are some mixed feelings about it.

MONA is owned by a guy called David. I know this because a good 30% of the MONA experience is devoted to David facts. For example, the suggested way to get to MONA is by ferry, and when you get off the ferry the recorded announcement says something like “MONA is approached by 99 steps, which is part of David’s concept for the building, and he says you have to take them if you’re able”. This tone of voice — kind-of lightly satirical, but not satirical of anything in particular — is widespread over the site. When you wander around, for example, there’s a bunch of hoardings up saying Yes, David’s building something new. At this point we’ve given up trying to stop him.

Because of the focus on David, MONA ends up feeling a bit like a physical parable about fine art’s function as a way to store and display money. The museum is aware of this, and names it repeatedly, but of course naming something doesn’t stop it from being true.

There are no informative signs on the walls at MONA: instead you’re encouraged to download an app. And as gallery apps go it’s actually pretty good. It figures out which artworks you’re near and offers you basic information and sometimes videos or longer essays about them. For the BIG ARTWORKS it works great, and at first I was really impressed.

As you move through the museum into the galleries where there are dozens of paintings or vases or masks or objects, it falls apart a bit. With so many pieces there, I just couldn’t be bothered to look them up! Almost nobody could be bothered to look them up! And without even artist names listed on the wall, the effect was to kind-of smear all the individual works into a sense of general Artness, a vibe of Things David Likes.

Speaking of Things David Likes: the guy’s taste is very BIG ART, very ART MACHINES, very THING THAT SEEMS FUNNY. Famously MONA has been home to a wall of vaginas (currently off show) and a shitting machine. It doesn’t just have a Sidney Nolan: it has the BIGGEST SIDNEY NOLAN PIECE that SIDNEY NOLAN EVER MADE. Some of the art is great and some of it is terrible. Almost all of the big pieces — the pieces that people are going to bother to look up — are by boringly famous men. Though there was a good BIG ART section focusing on Arcangelo Sassolino, whose work I hadn’t seen before.

I think your experience of MONA probably depends on what you think is funny. For example: there’s an adults-only room with a lot of art about sex and death. I mostly wasn’t a fan, there was a lot of ahhhh what about THAT, what do you think about THAT, this looks like it’s an ORIFICE but actually it’s a BULLET HOLE do you SEE that I didn’t get on with. But at the same time, I did think it was quite funny that this section was situated off the cafe with a bunch of tables and chairs so you would get people sitting by, like, big drawings of dicks while drinking their overpriced cup of tea. And I also thought it was funny that in the middle of the room there was a nineteenth-century oil painting of, you know, a woman standing in a pond looking a little startled and trying ineffectually to cover her boobs with her hands; I do think seeing that alongside a bunch of giant photos of various inventive sex acts is quite a good joke about how normalised Startled Winsome Boob Ladies are in art galleries and the wider world compared to other types of art about sex. 

The suggested route through the museum is: walk up 99 stairs (David says you have to), and then enter the museum, and then walk to the bottom of the museum as far as you came up down a separate big staircase, and then work your way up again. Is that funny? I think it is now, as I write this. When I was walking down the stairs in a crowd on a quite hot day I thought it was mean and a bit silly. I guess these categories are not mutually exclusive.

Anyway! Is MONA good?  Well. As an art gallery? No, obviously not. As a thing for a very rich man to do with his money, as opposed to the vast majority of other things a very rich man is likely to do with his money? Yes, of course. As an experience? Maybe! How much do you enjoy BIG ART and/or thinking slightly shallow thoughts about the interrelation of art and capital? I personally enjoy both those things so I had a pretty nice time.

LAUNCESTON 

While we were in Tasmania we also went to Launceston, which is lovely. However, the city’s slogan — printed on posters and flags all around — seems to be “We call it Launnie”.

Bad slogan, I think! We’re in Australia, guys, if we have managed to successfully navigate to Launceston we have probably also grasped the fundamental principles of abbreviations and we are not going to be irredeemably baffled the first time we hear someone say “Launnie”. Next time I suggest eg “It’s nice here” or “Our library is great” or “Did you know we have an outdoor swimming pool next to an impossibly beautiful river gorge, it’s pretty cool”.

Okay, that’s it for today! Next time: Adelaide, Adelaide Fringe, some things I’ve enjoyed lately.

Best,
Holly