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| untitled (The Miracle of Human Vision) 2016, by artist Kwame Akoto. Image courtesy of The Museum of Everything |
Ms Janet Carding, Branch President, Museums Galleries Australia (Tasmania) invites members to Mona during the wintry Dark Mofo
Date: Thursday 15 June 2017
2pm: Meet and welcome by Janet Carding at the Mona
entrance
2pm to 4pm*: Self-guided O tour of The Museum of Everything
4pm to 5pm: Hear the inside story from Mona curators about
The
Museum of Everything in the Mona cinema
RSVP by Tuesday 13 June 2017: Belinda.Cotton@launceston.tas.gov.au
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| untitled (2010) by artist Davood Koochaki. Image courtesy of The Museum of Everything |
Wondering how to get to Mona?
See https://mona.net.au/visit
for details
Wondering how to pay?
Admission to Mona is free for Tasmanians carrying
proof of residency. The talk is free for members
*No one will be watching if
you decide to have a break in the café or hit one of the bars—see https://mona.net.au/eat-drink/museum-cafe
The Museum of Everything
"The Museum of
Old and New Art is a strange and wondrous place. When owner David Walsh and
curator Olivier Varenne invited us to stage an epic ten month drama, we could
only say yes - and we have done so with an explosion of depth, meaning,
complexity and flavour. On this journey, you’ll meet over 100 of the most
astonishing art-makers you'll ever encounter: people who make not for us, but
for themselves. It is the private life of art, and it is rarely seen in museums
and galleries. So forget all you've heard about insiders and outsiders ... if
nothing else, this exhibition proves once and for all that art is not from the
outer reaches, but from within."
James Brett, Founder The Museum of
Everything
The purpose of this museum is to
advocate for the visibility of art that falls outside the confines of the art
world proper; the work of ordinary people, working far
(literally or otherwise) from the cultural metropolis. That word, ‘ordinary’,
is an interesting one. Because oftentimes, the art that we are talking about —
let’s call it the art of everyone — happens to be made by people who can only
truthfully be described as extraordinary.
With over 100 artists
and almost 2,000 artworks, ranging from 1800 to the present day, this
wide-ranging production will be the largest international exhibition of non-academic
art ever staged in the country. These
artists don’t have degrees, but they might have visions or compulsions; they
are transcendent scientists, self-taught architects, and citizen inventors;
sometimes, they are dedicated followers of personal belief systems, or
producing art from inside a hospital or prison. Some create their own visual
folklore to sit alongside (or challenge) established histories of culture and
place.
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| untitled (1965) by artist Marcel Storr. Image courtesy of The Museum of Everything |
Mona will shape 30 individualised
spaces within its river-front home. The domestically-inspired installation
juxtaposes paintings and drawings with sculptures, objects and furniture,
leading visitors on a vivid unexpected journey through an alternative art
history. James Brett is the founder of The Museum of Everything and has a
background in film, photography, architecture and design. Eve Stewart is the
award-winning production designer of such films as The King's Speech and Les
Misérables. Together with Mona designer Adrian Spinks the innovative layout has
been designed and themed by The Museum of Everything. This trio aim to set a
new standard not only for The Museum of Everything, but for Mona and Australia.
Artists
Among the many self-taught
masters on display, one of the highlights is Victor
Kulikov - the former
head-teacher, whose daily weather chronicle was discovered during the museum's
tour of Russia in 2012. Another fountainhead is self-titled visionary architect Paul Laffoley, represented by
several works, including his infamous masterpiece, Das Urpflanze Haus : a
future home, grown from genetically-modified ginkgo biloba trees.
Legends of what the artist Jean Dubuffet defined as art brut are here too.
Early drawings and letters by Swiss polymath Adolf Wölfli complement knobbled furniture from
Karl Junker's fictional family residence in Germany. The anonymous French stone
carvings known as Les Barbus
Müller, collected by Tristan Tzara and André Breton,
sit beside faked flint-stone proofs of Neanderthal art-making, peddled by the
Polish nobleman, Juva.
Science and mathematics play a
significant role. From the predictive calculations of Kentucky-born savant George Widener, to the personal
talismans of Melvin Way, numbers
evolve as pathways to wisdom and certainty - be they the thickly-painted
theorems of New York legendary modernist Alfred
Jensen, or the schematic inventions of French patent king, Jean Perdrizet.
Studios for artists with
communication issues lend international and contemporary relevance. Alan Constable's ceramic
cameras give insight into a sightless world. Text-based works by California's Dan Miller, Osaka's Kunizo Matsumoto and Hamburg's Harald Stoffers offer alternative uses for everyday
language. These provide an elegant contrast to physical three-dimensional
works, like the giant flying cities of Hans-Jörg
Georgi or the majestic yarn
sculptures of Judith Scott – whose oeuvre, along with Miller's,
is being curated in this year's Venice Biennale.
The Museum of Everything often
presents art-making as inherent human behaviour. Hence the abstracted spirit
drawings of two pioneering female artists - Sweden's Hilma af Klint and Britain's Georgiana Houghton - whose 19th century mark-making
anticipated 20th century modernism. Their beliefs are in many ways mirrored by
later activators, like the futurist cathedrals of Parisian road-worker Marcel Storr, or the monumental
Last Supper created by Perth handyman and electrician, Stan Hopewell.
As with other multi-part
projects, the exhibition at Mona devotes space to monographic assemblies.
Chinese spirit-scribe Guo
Fengyi, Haitian metalworker Georges
Liautaud and meat-slicing
moonraker Charles AA Dellschau are defined by their own bespoke
worlds. As ever, the climax is an environment devoted to panoramic tale-teller, Henry Darger, whose perverse,
complex and tremendously moving sequences depict his fractured childhood.
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| untitled (broke!), c.1950/80 by the artist G.T. Miller Image courtesy of The Museum of Everything |
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| untitled (Père Ubu), 1925, by the artist Pascal-Désir Maisonneuvre Image courtesy of The Museum of Everything |
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| untitled (c.1955) by artist Josef Wittlich. Image courtesy of The Museum of Everything |
Yet these are only a handful of the
artists on display.
Note: all information about The Museum of Everything was taken from its press release and Mona. For more information go to the website or to Mona's exhibition website
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