A recent visit to MONA – the museum of old and new art – in Hobart.

David Walsh, the unlikely founder of MONA, made a fortune by gambling, aided by clever maths and loads of bravado. Check out an article The Gambler written by Richard Flanagan for the Feb edition of The Monthly to fill in some of the details.

Most visitors to MONA arrive aboard the stylish house ferry whose civilized captain sometimes sports a pet parrot, pirate like, on his shoulder. Only the beginnings of the unexpected. From the jetty, the museum looms above, carved out of the rock face like some nouveau gothic cathedral. In establishing MONA Walsh probably intended the project to confront, to shock and to challenge. With subject matter including death, sex, bodily functions and conflict it certainly succeeds. On a grand scale. And with such diversity.

The white library has thousands and thousands of white books which are full of nothing but blank white pages. Obviously high art, but what does it mean? Have real libraries become redundant due to the vast amounts of virtual information that are housed in the cosmos? Think of the advantages of the white library. No controversy, no heresy, no violence, no propaganda, completely apolitical, aesthetically pleasing, suitable for severely visually handicapped clients and presumably no royalties to be paid to authors.

Just as useless as the white library is the ultimate fat cat’s fat car. The over inflated red Porche was the work of Austrian Erwin Wurm. It is said that a real Porche is housed somewhere inside, underneath all of the fat. So over-inflated that not even the tiniest child could fit behind the wheel. Clearly, the other end of the spectrum from Patricia Piccinini’s cute and cuddly bendy motor scooters.

The über gothic Chapel is the work of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye. At first glance it appears to be a confection in laser cut rusty sheet steel on the scale of a folly or large elaborate gazebo. Inside, the tall stained glass windows promise enlightenment, a religious experience. And the truth dawns, skeletons and skulls dominate the stained glass, the doors are forbiddingly heavy steel. This might be a prison. Does religion offer structure or constriction?

In a lighter vein, another Delvoye creation, a cement truck, using the same  construction method as the Chapel also sits outdoors. There must be layers of meaning and innuendo to the cement truck, maybe something to do with steel reinforcement?

One of the most popular and famous exhibits in the museum is yet another Delvoye creation. Cloaca is essentially a replication in glassware and plumbing of the digestive processes of the human body. Yes, the poo machine. The machine is fed twice daily by way of an ‘Insinkerator’ that masticates normal food. There is a daily toilet time that attracts a large apprehensive audience.

Why bother to invent a machine to do what billions of people do more or less effortlessly every day? The fascination is probably to observe how convincing is the output of the machine. The smell is particularly convincing.

Ultimately, people assemble unlikely works of art because they can. And they are art simply because someone is prepared to display them. Whether good or bad art, who is to say? Another unlikely work of art is a table tennis table that patrons are invited to use. The trick is that the table has deep lateral grooves. Most of the time the table plays absolutely true, but about a quarter of the time the table swallows the ball. Not sure how the scoring works.

Possibly not strictly a work of art, one of the more confronting exhibits is euthanasia advocate Dr Philip Nitschke’s “Deliverance Machine”. Nitschke argues that when people who are of sound mind find that life is unbearable for either physical or emotional reasons, they should be allowed, with suitable safeguards, to opt out of life with dignity rather than agony. The first caution is ‘you will die if you continue with this process’. A notebook computer and software titled “Deliverance” asks the patient a series of questions, and would administer a lethal injection of barbiturates if the correct answers were given. The machine was used legally under the Australian Northern Territory rights of the terminally ill act 1995. Nitschke preferred to leave the patient with the family when the button was pushed by the patient. The act of sitting in the chair looking at the loaded syringe while answering the questions is a heavy experience, even in the knowledge that nothing is connected to ones veins.

David Walsh has the wherewithal to utterly indulge his tastes and obsessions. So the museum has a high density observing the more quirky aspects of torture, sex, death and Egyptology (mummified cat) and he likes to drink, so he acquired and developed 2 wineries, Moorilla adjacent to MONA and St Matthias in the north. The Moo Brew brewery is also part of the complex.