MONA

Sexy. Subterranean. Stunning. Subconscious. Stimulating. This week’s travel, to the Museum of Old and New Art, (MONA for short), in Hobart, is brought to you by the letter ‘S’.

1. Having a gallery built deep into the ground is a stroke of genius, setting up an architectural mirror to MONA’s curatorial favouring of a subconscious approach to the artwork on display. And David Walsh’s collection very much favours the subconscious realm. Freud and Jung would have had a field day at MONA. For those who understand astrological archetypes, MONA is very Scorpio, very ‘eighth house.’ It’s the gallery of a man who has made millions from gambling and spent most of it on a collection of antiquities and contemporary art and a gallery in which to display them, built deep into the earth. It is The Underworld. Among the ‘Old’ of the MONA moniker are Egyptian artefacts, themselves dug from the earth from ancient burial sites. Bright blue scarab beetles, mummies, Anubis figures. Displayed side by side with contemporary art in which death, regeneration, power and the body are prominent themes.

She’s a femme fatale

This week I went to an exhibition of Gustave Moreau’s work on the theme of the femme fatale. ‘Here she comes, you’d better watch your step…’  Yes it’s nigh impossible to shrug off that Velvet Underground song whenever the words ‘femme fatale’ come into your orbit, and the sound of that haunting yet faintly comic German accent of Nico’s.…’She’s-going-to-break-your-heart-in-two. It’s true’. Let’s get it out of your system so we can move on.

Gustave was painting ‘fatal women’ during the 19^th Century when the idea of the dangerous seductress was wedded to the term ‘femme fatale’. Fast forward to the ‘40s film noir era, and duplicitous women with toxic allure were turning up everywhere, accompanied by men rendered powerless by their charms. In the 1947 film ‘Dead Reckoning’, Humphrey Bogart as Rip Murdock, tries to save his buddy Johnny from lounge singer Coral ‘Dusty’ Chandler with this line: ‘Johnny, why don’t you get rid of the grief you’ve got for that blonde, whoever she is? Every mile we go, you sweat worse with the same pain. Didn’t I tell you all females are the same with their faces washed?’ Read that last line again and again. I promise it’ll keep making you laugh.