I was originally planning a foodie only tour of Hobart since my stay was only two and a half days here, but my brother (I think he was the first) asked me if I was going to visit MONA, and that if I wasn’t, that I should go there anyway.
Then I had a few other people talk about it, including my taxi driver, so I thought, hey, it’s a cool place, it featured in Restaurant Australia, and everyone knows about it, so I may as well get cultured while I’m at it.
I did a walk past the information booth on the first day that I was here to enquire the minimum time I would need to get through the museum, since I was very, very time limited with all my restaurant bookings. The lady said that whole day was best, otherwise 4 hours was recommended, and that at a minimum, I’d need two hours. Well, that was interesting. Not being interested in art, I figured I could do this in two hours. However, as my first day was spent getting to know Hobart city, I had to leave it for my second day, and the only time I really had was between my 12PM Franklin booking and my 6PM Aloft booking. Given that lunch generally takes me about an hour, that gave me 5 hours, or so I thought.I took my time at Franklin since I love restaurants, and so I managed to head to the pier at about 1:15PM… which is when I saw the MR-1 leaving. Okay, so I’d just missed one. According to my memory of what I’d glanced at, there would be another boat in half an hour… right? Nope. It’s one boat, and each way takes 25 minutes. The next boat was at 2:30PM. Oops! Also, you had to book your return trip during your intial purchase, so I had to decide when to come back. The last two boats for the day were 5PM and 6PM. I couldn’t well choose 6PM since I had to be at a restaurant by then, so 5PM it was. That meant a total of just less than two hours, since I’d have to be ready for the boat by 5… meaning out of the museum at least 15 minutes early. I’m a fast walker and I like zipping straight past things, so it’s still manageable, right?
Next thing I had to decide. There were two classes of tickets – regular, and posh pit. The regular one took you there and back for $28 (free if you are a Tasmanian resident) and you could sit on the sheep (not alive! Not dead either… just sheep shaped seats!), or, for a significant amount more ($55), you could sit on the sheep and gain access to the VIP room where you had free drinks and nibbles and have a golden bench to sit on out at the front of the boat. Since I was running a carte blanche (I had allocated double what my estimated budget was for the entire Melb – Tas trip… and spent pretty much double my estimate… lol) and was unlikely to return to Tasmania, I thought, why not, let’s splurge and get the posh pit even though the free drink would be wasted on me.
Oh, yeah, I still had to actually pay for the museum entry. So $80 later, I was all set for my artsy experience.
Well hello there, VIP room. It turns out that for this particular ride, I was the only one who bought a posh pit ticket, so I had the entirety of the posh pit to myself! That was an amazing feeling! The lady at the bar immediately greeted me and asked me if I would like a drink, but I declined, saying I don’t drink, so I asked for water instead. I was free to explore anywhere I wanted, and I could hop out to the regular area if I wanted to as well.
As we departed, I farewelled the MR-0, which wasn’t in use at the time.
This boat actually moves really fast. It felt fast. It was loud too, doubled with the wind roaring in my ears. I took some videos of this too, but I haven’t yet transferred them onto my computer or started thinking about how to embed the videos, so I will probably never end up uploading them.
Woot! I got an antipasto platter that was actually really tasty! But I was so full from Franklin that I couldn’t eat it all…
Walked amongst the commoners :P
And finally, the museum was in view. The driver announced here that there were 99 steps up to the MONA, and that if you had any difficulties with this to make yourself known. Me, being the excited and energetic person that I am, ran up the stairs ahead of everyone, while trying to count. I got as far as 98 steps!!! Which step did I miss counting?!?!?!?!?! I am so disappointed! If I ever come back, I’m going to have to re-count those stairs! Argh!
The MONA is actually a very large complex, so instead of heading straight in, I took in the views from the island, as well as taking pictures of some of the stuff outside.
OK. Start the clock. I’m officially in. What’s really cool was that there are free lockers here to dump your stuff. I was carrying a bit so I was incredibly relieved to be able to store everything, and only take my phone, camera and spare lens with me, and attached the locker key to my camera strap. I actually got really, really lucky because I was wearing a dress with pockets to be able to go bag free with all that stuff!
The people at the entrance recommended that we start from the bottom first and work our way up, so I did exactly that. They also said we were free to take as many photos as we liked, but we weren’t allowed to touch anything. However, there was a third thing: there are no signs or explanations of artwork in the MONA. Instead, you have to pick up an iPhone looking device that would give you audio via headphones, and information via the screen. It also tracked your location within the museum to keep a log of which exhibits you visited, so that you could, at the end, submit your email address and then be sent information on what you’d seen. That is techy, and cool! However, call me hipster – in a hipster art museum – but I figured, no, I don’t want to carry a device, I barely read signs as it is, so I was gonna go with the pure definition of art, and interpret everything as I see it. After all, the artwork is only complete when the viewer has seen it and reached their own conclusion, right? /worsthipster
You hear the first exhibit before you see it. Cascading water and lights display various words! Without explanation, my guess would be that this was displaying either the most used words on the internet in real time, or, the most used words on the internet/media over the course of this year. I will never know if my theories are right or not!
Everything is pretty big, but yeah, they fit a lot of everything on this lower floor. Get ready for an overload.
It became immediately obvious why we weren’t allowed to touch anything. Dinosaurs made of old things, and even one dino-cetpion!!
Artworks that were interesting, but that I didn’t really understand or interpret since they aren’t my preferred subject matter. A lot of it seemed to be a representation of things that are “wrong” though.
This one caught my interest for a while, and look, even Noddy made an appearance! Basically these were toys and everyday objects fashioned into the likeness of guns, with the barrels staring right down at you. There were also rockets on the sides, with a plushie puppy and other toys strapped to the sides. While I can’t quite describe the emotions that these triggered in me, I do know that I found it very intriguing, and very “real”. I use the term “real” a lot, usually to mean that it’s an accurate reflection of real life (eg. the show Black Mirror is also very “real” to me).
Moving on, I was impressed there are people who can write smaller than me! But I didn’t stop to read these.
I stayed at this exhibit for a while because who doesn’t love paper aeroplanes! They’re so cool! They looked like old fighter jets to me, since I don’t recognise planes. There were a few big battleship looking like aircraft too. I spent ages wanting to take a bottom-up angle for these ones, since my camera and phone have a really cool remote control trick so I could literally place my camera face up to take pictures from underneath.
I overheard someone say “taxidermied kittens!” for this one.
Haha. This was the first thing I saw on the second level. From far away I couldn’t figure out what the white plaster things on the wall were, so I took a closer look and laughed. There were three different “versions” of this, repeated over and over against a long wall. I would have posted all three saying, “which one does yours look like?”, but my middle shot was blurry. So one’s all you get. I’m totally a mature person :P
Also, the gift shop sold these as soaps. LOL. I really wanted to buy the mini soaps because they were a gift shop exclusive and not available online, but soap doesn’t last forever, so I didn’t get one. Would have been cool to get these and give them as gifts!
This was by far my favourite exhibit. It was also the one that was the most impossible to take a picture of, because it’s actually a room within a room within a room, in complete darkness except for the lights emanating from the space where the wall connects with the floor. Strings of binary lined the walls, but if you looked close enough, some of these groups were words instead of numbers. I can’t remember which words I saw, but I’m pretty sure they were all about darkness and being alone or something. Very, very cool. I really liked this and related to this one the most. The innermost room had an entrance that was shorter than me, and right in the middle, I had a mild shock (and looking at instagram posts for MONA, it turns out I’m not the only one who managed to give myself a little jump), but pretty much instantly smiled. I had a thought cross my mind that this would be an excellent torture room LOL.
This was the one exhibit where I would have loved to listen to the artist’s meaning, so I really regretted not having the little info device, but at the same time, I was so happy just being in here alone in darkness :)
Because I got handed a pamphlet, I at least know that this one is called Kryptos. Constructed between 2008 – 2010 by Brigita Ozolins, a Tasmanian artist. This is their take on “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” Wow, no wonder I connected to this one so well.
Gosh I sound so morbid for a happy person.
One of the more (in)famous exhibits in here, you’ll smell it before you see it. Again, because I didn’t have the info device, I didn’t know what it was, though I had a pretty good idea because someone else said that this exhibit would be here. It’s basically a digesting and pooping machine. It feeds at 11am and 4pm, and it’ll poop at 2pm. Amazing.
Oh what, there’s a LIVE exhibit inside the MONA?!?!?! HOW COOL. Oh my goodness, I thought I was hallucinating or this was some sort of mirror trick at first, because I was on an upper level looking down, going, WOAH THAT’S A REAL PERSON I CAN SEE HIM BREATHING OR maybe it’s just a really good animatronic BUT I THINK HE’S ACTUALLY REAL, and then by the time I went back downstairs, he was GONE with only a cloth and headphones at the pedestal? Woah.
Ok yeah, I was really wishing I had the info device right about now. However, later on, I did read somehwere that this is indeed a living person, and what’s really cool is that he actually has an agreement with MONA that they can keep his skin after he dies. Woah, yep. This was the most mindblowing exhibit for me, mainly because he was there one minute, and next, he was gone! If he had been there the whole time I think I wouldn’t have been half as excited!
I loved this exhibit too. Very whimsical in my eyes. Apart from the animal tower coming off the hedgehog’s (?) back, all the other floaty things were hanging from the thinnest of strings, so thin that I actually think spider web was probably used to suspend them. Again, I’ll never know unless I do research. But I liked this because I feel that there’s a lot of death represented in this one to me, and I love the some of the concepts of death. There was something absolutely breathtaking about the suspended creatures, too. Lots of insects, I felt that this at least partially represented decay in some way.
Gosh I love how happily morbid I am.
Teehee! This was in a tiny room and actually moves :D
The single exhibit that was interactive. Each of these is a box that you can pull out, and an audio plays with all different people saying “I love you,” and had a story that you could read.
And stop the clock. I’d used up one and a half hours and I thought I got through all of it, including this one little dark exhibit that only let in two people at a time because it was a deathly still pond, so yes, water, with only squares of rock to step on, up to a tomb with a mummy in it. However, I think I might have still missed things even on a second sweep of the second floor. I’d say that I somehow missed the Supersymmetry experience (oops!), and I didn’t find the White Library, Hound in the Hunt or the Library Gallery.
There was still plenty to see outside too, once I’d done two rounds of the gift shop, agonised over the really nice skull earrings and instead bought a tshirt that I’m too embarrased to wear outside.
The panoramic shot of the outside. At the left, yes, that’s a trampoline. I totally should have gone on the trampoline!!
And if you venture really far, to the winery (yes, the Posh Pit tickets also gives you a free, 30 minute tour of their cellar door, but I was definitely out of time), you get to see the pets!
I didn’t count the stairs going back down…
Bye bye MONA, bye bye sheep shaped seats!
This time, the posh pit had a lot more people so I didn’t feel like a silly person who was the only one who forked out $$$ for the premium seats. Since the trip back had a lot more people, I was glad I took the pit this time. The lady at the bar welcomed me back and asked if I was happy to have water again! How nice! So I told her that I didn’t want the antipasto plate again since I needed to save stomach space for dinner. She said that there wasn’t antipasto this time, it was actually a dessert plate! How could I say no to dessert :P and this was actually really nice too. I was actually surprised at how tasty the snacks were! I would totally do this again!
Okay so, speaking of doing again. I admit, I took completely the wrong approach on this one. I don’t even appreciate art, and there was stuff that I really felt like I connected to here. I would not allow anyone to try MONA in two hours. You need at least 4 hours, like the lady at the pier said the first day. But, definitely take the whole day, the posh pit and the cellar door tour. You’re only going to do this once, right? So do it right. And DEFINITELY take the info device thing.
I would actually come back to Tasmania to redo this, and spend a whole day here. In fact, I’d do my Tasmania trip completely differently the second time round, but I’ll explain that when I actually get to posting about my Tasmania trip.
Yep, this was totally worth it. I want to live in the Kryptos again.
I love darkness!