Owning a private art museum is the ultimate status symbol, second only to owning a spaceship. In the case of David Walsh, establishing the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart boosted not only his status but that of the entire state. MONA’s latest exhibition, Namedropping, is that status writ large.
It charts Walsh’s evolution from working-class nerd, whose homespun collection included a cricket bat autographed by the cricketing stars of the 1980s, to multimillionaire nerd with the power to order in works from the world’s most prestigious museums. The Centre Pompidou in Paris has lent several to this show, allowing Walsh to name-drop Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, Sylvie Fleury and more.
Namedropping is no cheap exercise in the glorification of Walsh, however, even if some of the objects on display are cheerfully tacky. The exhibition revolves around a familiar MONA theme – Walsh’s pet theory that human creativity is wrapped up in the biological drive to procreate. The theory goes that, like a peacock flaunting its feathers, humans parade their artistic and cultural prowess to enhance their chances of attracting a mate. As Walsh memorably told me in 2020, his museum “acted as a lure for me to bang above my weight”. And, yes, he meant “bang” in the biblical sense.
Namedropping homes in on the question of status – what it is, why humans seek it and what part it plays in the perpetuation of the human race. These big, serious questions are tackled with a mixture of humour and gravity in MONA’s most expansive exhibition since 2016’s On the Origin of Art – “so big that we cancelled one of our festivals to help fund it”, as Walsh claims, that festival being this year’s Dark Mofo.
A maths whiz who funds MONA through gambling, Walsh has never been afraid to send himself up, as well as the art establishment, and Namedropping begins on a fittingly irreverent note. In a pine-panelled room with a garage roller-door and 1970s man-cave vibe, a mash of incongruent objects jostle for attention, among them the autographed cricket bat, a “hotted-up” 1977 Holden Torana, a dartboard, a poker table, a framed platinum album of David Bowie’s Changesonebowie, an autographed letter from Charles Darwin to Sir Charles Murray dated 1855, a signed nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe, Walsh’s Order of Australia and a Guerrilla Girls’ print that wryly lists the advantages of owning your own art museum: “At fancy Art fairs, parties and Biennales, everyone sucks up to you – and your wallet”. (“Banging above your weight” doesn’t get a mention.)
On the wood-panelled wall above the Guerrilla Girls print hangs a familiar painting of a bearded and curly-haired man. Give yourself bonus status points if you recognise it – the work was the National Gallery of Victoria’s prized sole van Gogh, until experts decided it wasn’t a Van Gogh at all. Authenticity is, of course, central to status.
A cacophony of signals is transmitted by the eclectic group of objects – and that’s the point. The clothes we wear, the cars we covet, the hair we flaunt, the food we eat, the books we read, the art we show, the furniture we buy, the museums we build are all markers of our position in society. We send signals hoping to attract others with shared interests and beliefs. As Walsh told me in 2020, “MONA is my hotted-up Torana”.
One approach to this extensive, amusing, surprising, enchanting and at times disturbing and perplexing exhibition, is to go where impulse takes you, to see it as a reflection of your own alignments, interests and even pretensions. Will you linger over Sylvie Fleury’s furry riff on Mondrian, or Linda Marrinon’s painted plaster figurine of Germaine Greer? Over Vincent Namatjira’s power-skewering self-portrait with Donald Trump or Elizabeth Peyton’s small, tender painting of two young grieving princes? Over a leopard skin coat or Chopper Read’s self-portrait in the guise of Ned Kelly? Over the world’s only copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s seventh studio album or David Bowie’s handwritten lyrics to the song “Starman”, on display for the first time since Walsh bought the A4 sheet at auction in London two years ago for £200,000?
Some objects turn everyone’s head, such as the giant, deflated army tank meticulously hand-sewn from luxurious Italian leather. Artist He Xiangyu had the life-size tank fabricated in a factory that usually manufactures fake luxury-brand handbags. Here we’re confronted with the flip side of status-seeking – forgery, exploitation, violence. Xiangyu was three years old when tanks rolled in to Tiananmen Square.
The lust for power can fuel abominable deeds. I had to stop reading the words inked on skin in Jenny Holzer’s distressing photographic series Lustmord, inspired by her research on the brutal rapes carried out as an act of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s.
Santiago Sierra addresses the status of skin colour in a series of photographs titled Economical Study on the Skin of Caracans, Caracas, Venezuela, September, 2006. In a mathematical experiment, Sierra calculates the relative wealth of those with lighter or darker skin. His conclusions will not surprise – but the cosmic difference in economic wealth probably will. Many will recall the Spanish artist was at the centre of a furore over his work Union Flag, featuring the British flag soaked in the blood of First Nations people. Intended as a condemnation of the blood spilt by colonialists, the work was seen as perpetrating further violence on First Nations people and the outrage forced its cancellation from the 2021 Dark Mofo festival. Some MONA workers were so incensed they wanted Walsh to sell Economical Study on the Skin of Caracans in protest. He didn’t and here it is, on display just as it was when MONA opened in 2011. It can now also be read as an emblem for how easily reputations are made and unmade.
First Nations artist Steven Rhall pokes at the ethics of the high-status art world with a giant billboard – a new commission – installed on the MONA headland and visible to those arriving by ferry. Rhall stars in the billboard, like a snake-oil salesman with a dodgy smile, beside the words: “Aboriginal Art? Better call Rhall (1800) Authentic.”
Naming rights are an ego-kick reserved for the mega-wealthy, but at MONA you can have your own name up in electronic lights for a starting price of $5. The price goes up each time a new person pays for the privilege of having their name on one of the exhibition’s galleries.
Namedropping doesn’t answer all the questions it sets out to examine and some of the works seem only loosely related to the central thesis, but it doesn’t matter. The exhibition succeeds on many fronts and for days afterwards left me thinking about the many ways that status infiltrates our lives, influences our choices, disturbs our self-esteem and drives us to judge.
All of our posturing, preening and status-seeking ends in death, as the last dimly lit gallery in this exhibition reminds us. But even in the afterlife, status rules. Will you go out in a coffin shaped like a Mercedes-Benz, or an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus? Emma Bugg’s Big Mac Brooch, featuring a Big Mac purchased in 2015 that has yet to grow a single filament of mould, is a bleakly comic statement on the hereafter. Like a sturdy cockroach, the Big Mac may outlast us all.
Namedropping is at MONA until April 21, 2025.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
June 22, 2024 as “Faking ranks”.
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