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N ews a nd Events

The purpose is different though – the concept of MONA is and prepare for display. It was doing something very different
one person’s (David Walsh’s) interest. from any public museum. There was no taxonomy in the
permanent collections – from how you presented antiquity
How did you get involved with MONA? to contemporary works. There was no chronology. We were
plunging into David Walsh’s collection.
David Walsh had been a client at Sotheby’s. At that time he
was buying mainly modernist Australian works like Sidney It also meant that we were very free with the interpretive
Nolan and Arthur Boyd. In those days, before he opened the material. From the beginning, David didn’t want labels on the
museum, he was noticeably quite a shy person, and he would walls. Instead, he got brilliant IT people to invent handheld
come quietly into Sotheby’s. If he was looking for a Nolan he electronic devices, like an ipod. There is no compulsion to
would chat with me because I had written a book on Nolan. read about the works. You look at the artwork before you
Quite often he would buy whatever it was I told him about. even know what it is. For example, there is a work by Jannis
Kounellis, which sometimes has
sides of beef hanging from it.
David has written something
accompanying the work about
vegetarianism, suggesting that it is
useful to think of the implications
of one’s behaviour. It’s not really
something to do with the art,
but is triggered by the art. It’s a
place about what makes humans
human and why we do the things
we do. I found it incredibly
challenging to get my head around
all this new information involving
neuroscience, psychology,
evolutionary theories and
anatomists. David is very scientific
in his interests. I enjoyed
looking at human
Jane admires
a more recent
There were some very good Nolans in the market in the early artmaking as this College acquisition
2000s. In the next few years he asked me and two of my whole continuum of ‘stencil art’ by
colleagues at Sotheby’s to work for him – at that time, we and across all cultures emerging artist
were aware that Sotheby’s was pulling out of Australia. David as a form of human Trent Crawford.
Walsh asked if we would like to work for a museum that didn’t behaviour.
then exist but may open in a couple of years. I left Sotheby’s
in 2007 and it took four more years before MONA opened in MONA can
January 2011. polarise visitors
in terms of its
At MONA what were the particular challenges and exhibitions and
opportunities? ambitions –
with one critic
There were works of art from David’s private collection questioning
– Egyptian antiquities, Greek, Roman and African art, pre- the balance
Columbian art, Australian Modernism, a bit of International between
Modernism and quite a bit of contemporary Australian and ‘democracy’
international art. He had a little museum on the side of the and ‘anarchy’ in the
Moorilla Winery, just in one of the houses where he had selection and display
been able to show only very small things – coins and one of its collections.
or two Egyptian mummies. So, the idea was to build this big
museum. He had collected these things since the mid ‘90s. For the permanent
They had been roughly catalogued but no one had done collection, that
research and got them ready to show the public. It was a is quite a good
wonderful collection to research authenticity, provenance description. Although
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