Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael
Jessica recently went down to Hobart for the MONA FOMA festival, taking her dictaphone and ancient digital camera. We’ll be bringing you her dispatches over the next few weeks.
A tiny ferry might sound quaint, but standing on its deck, I feel anything but quaint. Though my morning sickness has begun to abate, the pitch and lurch of the boat has brought it back to the fore. I can feel the sun beginning to burn a ring around my neck, and the smell of seaweed carries queasily on the wind. Never, more than when I am in motion, am I reminded that I am mid-transformation; swelling gently like the waves, with skin that is beginning to pull too tight and odd tempers and appetites. I grip the railing and think about Shakespeare: those are pearls that were her eyes. I am becoming rich and strange.
From another angle: I am a tourist, on a boat.
I’m thinking a lot about duality these, and subjectivity, and the abject. Mostly I’m thinking about these things with my body, my brain being occupied with the usual steady murmur of I really need to pitch that story and I hope I remembered to buy baking powder and I wonder what the next few years are going to feel like. As the boat approaches MONA, the murmur of thought is muffled by a babbling queasiness. I am thinking with my body—though also with all my senses; my feet ache with preemptive dismay at the ninety-nine sandstone steps quarried out of MONA’s craggy peninsula. By the time we reach the museum’s front door, we are all thinking with our bodies, and about our bodies; and sunburnt, and out of breath.
There’s a yogic singleness to MONA’s focus on the body; the kind of monomania that allows a museum to simply one day appear, dug out of the side of a cliff and one day destined to slide into the sea. The building itself is an impressive tribute to the power of sheer bloody-minded creation, and the strangeness and frailty of the human figure, which is dwarfed by immense raw sandstone walls, disorienting staircases, a glass elevator spiralling down into the core of the earth.
I wonder, as I wander around, if there isn’t a certain cheapness to that steady murmur; the way it masks the rippling tones of fatigue and nausea and change. I don’t like the iPod I’m wearing around my neck, a bit of MONA proprietary software that tells me where I am and what I’m looking at—there are no plaques—because it brings my back into myself, my physical self. I spend too much time looking at my hands, and the weight of it begins to ache. But I am here. In the midst of a museum obsessed with obscenity, sex, death, the bounds of the body—a manifestation of the collective id—I am still and solely and determinedly brought back to myself.
Visitors cluster around Rafael Lorenzo-Hammer’s Pulse Room, a sculpture that measures heartbeats and sends them, rendered into electronic pulses, flashing in order along the ceiling. In a room around the corner, there is darkness; then, as a stranger grasps the handles of the thing, an ecstatic cacophony of light. As the crowed disperses, I drift over to the sculpture, and place my hands on it. There is a pause; then, above me, my heart flashes sure and steady. I take my hands away and feel, deep in the core, a hidden echo, flickering madly to generate an energy of its own.