Abstract
Hailed as the most important cultural event since the opening of the Sydney Opera House, the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Tasmania seemingly made very substantial changes to visitor experiences of an art gallery, catalysed a significant cultural florescence in Hobart and achieved tourism-led urban and regional regeneration on a par with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Drawing on a large survey of visitors this article illuminates the origins, social aims and impacts of successful attempts to push art museums beyond what Hanquinet and Savage call ‘educative leisure’. It contributes to our knowledge of the processes by which traditional forms of ‘highbrow’ cultural experience associated with the dominance of the classical and historical canon are being eclipsed by newer, performative, emotional and sensual forms of cultural taste.
Keywords
you should learn to weep in a museum Almost all of the museums of Europe and America of the last decade are offensive. Based in its own Dionysian landscape, complete with vineyard and brewery, and its compound and gallery space resembling something from Alice in Wonderland, Mona expected visitors to be lost rather than saved, changed rather than improved, enlivened not elevated.
In recent years contemporary art has enjoyed a spectacular growth and increasing popularity, and while it has become firmly entrenched in new exhibitionary forms across a range of leisure activities, spheres and industries (Smith, 2012; Stallybrass, 2006), some have argued that its place in museums of art was mired in an older, culturally paternalistic form as ‘educative leisure’ that appeals only to a very narrow band of the educated middle classes (Bennett, 1995; Foley and McPherson, 2000; Hanquinet and Savage, 2012). There are now more new museums of contemporary art and more extensions to established art museums; they are seemingly more popular with tourists, neoliberal policy makers, as well as cities that, after the success of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, build them as flagships for culture-led regenerative strategies (if rarely successfully) (Franklin, 2016; Plaza and Haarich, 2013). Such readiness to build new public art museums is therefore accompanied by concerns to make them more appealing to a broader public, to increase their income generation and to decrease their dependency on public spending. Much has been written about extending their allure to visitors besides the traditional gallery-goer, whose disposition to art has grown in tandem with didacticism and art history as the main museological offer (Bennett, 1995; Judd, 2016; Prior, 2002). Assessments of these aims conclude that little progress has been made inside the mainstream conventional museum sector, while outside it there has been a seething mix of exhibitionary platforms and performances where contemporary art has become more distributed into the quotidian of city and regional life (Collings, 2001; Foster, 2015; Hanquinet and Savage, 2012; Prior, 2002; Smith, 2012).
The first section of this article examines the origins and scope of these new exhibitionary platforms. In the second section we introduce Mona, document how it came to identify radically different museum aims and how they went about building a new art museum experience. In the final section, we show whether these aims were actually achieved in practice, using a large survey of 5600 visitors. We argue that there are ways in which other art museums may follow Mona’s strategies and develop art publics along similar lines, without compromising the objectives and value of art.
Mona and the extending exhibitionary complex
Under the broad umbrella of ‘the new museology’ (Virgo, 1989) the past 30 years has seen the emergence of a variety of new approaches to curation, exhibition design and museum experience (Rojek 1995; Serota, 2000) but, as Radywyl et al. (2011) argue, few ‘extend beyond heightened participation’. McClellan (2008: 193) argued that recent curatorial and design developments have been overshadowed by dramatic increases in the commercialisation of museums, by ‘the expansion of the museum shops, the rise of the blockbuster exhibition and corporate sponsorship and the influx of marketing and fund-raising personnel’. Where such commercialisation is unbridled, others claim it undermines the cultural value of art and art museums, exchanging ‘the canonical, auratic art and educative-formative pretensions for an emphasis on the spectacular, the popular and the immediately accessible’(Featherstone, 1991: 96–7). For others, a sectoral change occurred where many art museums shifted from being bastions of high culture to join the entertainment-leisure complex, an assemblage of tourism-driven themed leisures, ‘infotainment’, exhibition spaces and fairs where excitement and fun take priority over quiet reflection and learning (Rojek 1995; Van Aalst and Boogaarts, 2002; Vander Gucht, 1998).
Added to this, there are now at least 317 new major private museums globally, 70% of them established since contemporary art shifted from obscure to mainstream after 2000 (Adam, 2014; Stallybrass, 2006). Typically, the projects of super-rich collectors (the Broad, LA; the Saatchi Gallery, London; the Long, Shanghai) or fashion-brand owners (the Prada Milan; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris), these became prominent once the price of contemporary art inflated beyond the means of most cash-strapped public museums to collect it systematically. A new stream of celebrity artists and their galleries exchanged access to their best works for guaranteed exposure by private collector museums in the most advantageous, eye-catching exhibitionary platforms (Falckenberg, 2014; Gnyp, 2015; Thornton, 2008). Hence also, the alliance between super-rich private collectors, architects and architecture, contemporary art and prime redevelopment city sites. This also signals a shift in the nature and content of philanthropy, and a recomposition of super-rich contributions to the life of the cities and regions in which they live (Webber and Burrows, 2016). These are certainly spectacular on the outside and look good on tourism brochures, but do they offer a spectacularly new museum experience? The empirical record is largely quiet on this.
An educative leisure?
It seems that for most people art museums have remained firmly situated in the field of ‘educative leisure’ (Foley and McPherson, 2000). Even the seemingly innovative, organically shaped Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a standard ‘white cube’ inside, with conventional didactic aims to match. Surveys of other private museums in Europe and Australasia confirm a tendency towards conventional art historical display in their ubiquitous white cubes (Heckmuller, 2011, 2014). An unusually in-depth study of visitors to all main art museums in Belgium (Hanquinet and Savage, 2012), for example, revealed that most visitors, regardless of social class, still held an image of art museums as places of educative leisure. Far from suggesting an unchanging cultural meaning and continuity in the exhibition of art, the study of 1900 respondents pointed to unexpected and new sources of dynamism and change, as well as a drift to new forms of exhibitionary platform offering critical perspectives on the conventional art museum (see also Smith, 2009, 2012; Stallybrass, 2006). Variations in the meaning and value attributed to public art museums were not linked to respondents’ social backgrounds, as expected, but to ‘cultural and experiential’ fields. Those with most experience of other art institutions and art forms, along with those involved in creative activities, were now looking for something beyond educational leisure. Tracking a shift from instruction to emotion, galleries, fairs, biennales and ‘other places of contemporary art’ – including music and art festivals, hotels, public spaces, cinemas and bars – have become more distributed into the fabric of city and regional life (Franklin, 2014; Gibson, 2012; Hanquinet and Savage, 2012).
Hanquinet and Savage (2012) argue that these proliferating art spaces, and the ‘expanded exhibitionary complex’ that generates them (Smith, 2012), have begun to generate new dispositions. In-depth interviews revealed that ‘the more a museum presents itself as a traditional educational place, the more it will be criticised for its detachment from the spectators, the rest of society and from ordinary life’ (Hanquinet and Savage, 2012: 52). Contemporary art connected this emergent art public to pressing social, cultural and political currents of their lives, creating a more dynamic field that made engagement far easier for many more people, globally (Foster, 2015; Harris, 2013; Papastergiadis, 2012). Hal Foster has recently identified the abject, the precarious, the traumatic and the lost as symptomatic objects of what he calls (after Brecht) the ‘bad new days’ of neoliberal ascendency that artists now address – often through carnivalesque techniques of ‘mimetic exacerbation’ and ‘mockery’ that reach directly to knowing audiences (Foster, 2015: 78–96).
And it has been artists rather than art museums who were among the earliest sources and creators of full-blown alternative museum exhibition formats and spaces (Lorente, 2011). As a critical, political reflection of the present-day, many artists felt that their work was not best served by the contemplative, reverential, art historical and corporate cultures of the modern art gallery (as pioneered by MOMA [the Museum of Modern Art, New York]), especially the ubiquitous white cube style of exhibition where all distractions from the art itself, emotional and otherwise, were removed or discouraged (Lorente, 2011; Maak et al., 2011). Yet, characteristically, contemporary artists want to stimulate strong emotional responses from their publics and to focus attention on the subjects and social/political objects of their art, and thus they grew increasingly frustrated. Such sentiments prompted a move from reason/instruction to emotions/experience, especially in the not-for-profit art spaces and foundations they created (Foster, 2015; Krauss, 1990; Serota, 2000; Smith, 2012).
In the late 1960s, Donald Judd and others developed forms of ‘anti-curation’ and ‘anti-museums’. For example, they moved single-artist sculptural exhibitions into spaces where the subjects of their art and its political and emotional impacts might be heightened (Goldberg, 1980: 369; Lorente, 2011). Judd himself moved away from the cultural centre and precinct to the high desert location at Marfa, Texas, the journey purposely adding aspects of pilgrimage into the experience as much as cultural consumption (see also Barush, 2016). Others used theatrical devices and musical platforms.
The spatial periphery, former industrial zones and other spaces on the social margin became a new ecological niche for the not-for-profit art spaces, though it is only relatively recently that major museums have been inspired by their example: for example, Bennesse Art Site Naoshima, on a remote island in Japan, and David Roberts’ DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation), which is in a former carpet warehouse behind a charity shop on a grubby main drag in Kentish Town, London. Requiring out-of-the-way touristic journeys, separation from the everyday and demanding significant commitments of time, these locations are deliberately chosen to foster receptivity to new ideas and enhance more sensual encounters with art – as well as bringing new business opportunities to depressed peripheral or inner-city economies (Franklin, 2014; Smith, 2009). David Walsh’s Mona combined both extremes: a remote, former convict island and a rustbelt industrial area in the island state of Tasmania, Australia. However, the extent to which such museums have generated a new form of art experience beyond educative leisure remains to be confirmed. Recent research conducted at Mona allows us to evaluate whether there is potential for this and the extent to which it might be realised more generally.
Beyond educative leisures? The case of Mona
The Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) opened in January 2011 in an outer working-class suburb of Hobart (in the top decile of social disadvantage) on the island state of Tasmania, off the south coast of Australia, just one stop from Antarctica. As an art museum, it was largely welcomed as a significant and new multi-dimensional cultural intervention that addressed critically and fully the historic emphasis on educative leisure. The Mona team regarded didactic museums as one-dimensional, potentially intimidating – and at worst, boring. Instead they favoured a more immersive and experiential pedagogy, combining wonderment, self-discovery, self-mockery and humour (Capon, 2013; Franklin, 2014; Prior, 2002; Timms, 2011a, 2011b). The Sunday Times dubbed Mona ‘the most exciting addition to the Australian cultural landscape since the Sydney Opera House. It makes the Saatchi Gallery, in London, look like a warehouse. It’s Tate Modern with a sense of humour.’
It must also be regarded as something of an experimental and singular arts and curation style that ventured out of the museum and into multiple sites of the city and its own grounds, combining art with music, food and festivity. It was expressly designed to tap into Tasmania’s already significant flows of tourists though it had no idea it would be so successful nor that it would quickly become the main driver of Tasmanian tourism, creating a main new current through art tourism. It was cited by Lonely Planet as a significant catalyst for Hobart’s cultural florescence, and, under the heading ‘Harbour town becomes hip’ they ranked it 7th Best City in the World in 2013. Two years later Lonely Planet ranked Mona itself as 20th Best Place in the World and Best Art Gallery.
We should make light of such rankings but what is real in its apprehension will be real enough in its consequences. In the first year following its Lonely Planet 2013 ranking, overseas visitors to Hobart increased by 22%, and not solely from its traditional European and North American visitor base: Chinese visitors increased by 18% and Indian visitors by 38%. Initially, 40% of its visitors were tourists who had travelled from interstate or overseas, mostly by air, but this rose to 70% by 2015 and 88% by the summer of 2016. It is notable that few other museums of contemporary art have such high proportions of tourists, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao being an obvious comparator here (Franklin, 2014). In the late 19th century Frank Cook (son of Thomas Cook) intended to impress his creative father with a scheme to bring the Indian Raj to the English summers of Hobart during their hot season (Morris 1974). Where he failed, Walsh may yet succeed.
Arguably the most important evaluations of Mona are those made by the visitors themselves, through their sustained rate of visitation (some 350,000 per year over the past six years) and through rising numbers attending their midsummer and mid-winter festivals (Mona Foma and Dark Mofo) (some 280,000 came to Dark Mofo 2015). Approval may also be inferred from unusually long ‘museum tours’ while visitors are in Mona’s labyrinthine subterranean galleries – some six times the international average (Franklin, 2014).
Aside from its socially and spatially peripheral location and smart architecture, neither of which were entirely new concepts by 2011, Mona made news because its owner, David Walsh, said he wanted to change drastically how art is experienced in a museum. He called Mona an anti-museum, a phrase not heard much of since the 1970s. Mona removed all wall labels and other forms of instruction or direction, and avoided presenting itself as a single source of authority and expertise. It pursued radical techniques for confusing visitors by forcing them to make their own decisions and judgement. It avoided chronology, taxonomy and repetition, and assured engagement by choreographing a constant stream of arresting and astonishing art works, often very large, with movement/action/sound and smell. Mona hit on the idea of the human body, and the subjects of sex and death as highly inclusive themes, though they are also significant themes of much contemporary art. This is why its impact has been more keenly felt and reflected on by those considering its implications and value for tourism, fostering broader art publics and the public museum sector (Capon, 2013; O’Connor, 2013; Timms, 2011b) – a sector which, according to Richards and Wilson (2006), is dogged by repetition or ‘serial reproduction’.
To date the assessment of Mona’s impact on visitors has been largely speculative, impressionistic and journalistic – and in the worst cases personal, pitched around a ‘cult of David Walsh’ (Franklin, 2014: 11). Initially, the museum was taken at face value, and judged on its theatricalities, its media antics, its new museum language, its audience communications and the sensationalism of its in-house metaphors – a ‘subversive adult Disneyland’, a department store, a secular temple. Many critics could not read past the riddling of its owner or the singularity and strangeness/absurdities of its appearance. It has an operational tennis court for a forecourt; it has distorting mirrors for a front entrance; it avoids signage of all kinds; it has a purpose-built columbarium ‘for guests who never want to leave’; it has a toilet (Locus Focus by gelitin, 2010) that allows guests to watch their own motion and it includes art historical notes on its O smartphone system under the heading ‘artwank’. Most critics missed its oppositional stance to the contemporary art world and the art gallery, and most failed to ask either about its museum aims or how these might make sense of the particularity of its museological and exhibitionary techniques (Franklin, 2014: 11–14). Instead, for the first year of its operation, serious and accomplished critics and writers reduced Mona to the oddity of Walsh’s mind if not to rumours of his ‘mild case’ of Asperger’s – often with the implication that Mona’s success and popularity was due to its quirky art-as-freak-show-cum-theme-park (Franklin, 2014: 11). A cultural anomaly rather than a serious cultural intervention.
This is surely why in 2012 David Walsh told Amanda Lohrey (2012) that he was disappointed at the level of critical attention Mona had received. How most critics had reviewed the museum favourably, but ‘very few have attempted to distil Mona’s goals and assess whether they have been met’. Since Mona is a private museum, and its collection is that of one man, it would seem appropriate to assess its achievements against its own stated aims, especially since these aims have now been distilled and accounted for (Franklin, 2014: 198–221).
Walsh was a fan and a critic of the museum but he believed that too many fall short of their transformative potential. His conviction came from personal experience of a rather rare and fortuitous kind. He had seen art as a transformative force, not in the forerunner to Mona, his Moorilla Museum of Antiquities when it was in its daytime, ‘white cube mode’, but at the same museum once it was festooned with Dionysian festive elements for use as a function space at his winery. The continuous serving of wine and the playing of music – for these were mostly ritual, transformative occasions – seemed to change the way guests engaged with his art. The emotional quietude of the white cube was reversed, as was the slavish attention given to labels and direction, with far more attention and time given to individual objects and conversation about them. At such times his museum was no longer ‘a collection of instructive labels illustrated by well-selected specimens’ (Flower, 1898) but a collection of objects with the capacity to generate wonderment, curiosity, independent thought and discussion.
Thus, when his collecting focus shifted to contemporary art, his thinking for a new museum to house it had already changed, away from the white cube but to what was never quite clear for many years. With encouragement from an unconventional museum team largely drawn from auction houses, and through new forms of exhibitionary platforms and styles, he deepened the theatrical setting for his art, he brought bars, alcohol and music closer to the art gallery experience, he placed food and festive elements into the everyday experience of his museum, he regularly broke out of the museum walls and into the public spaces of the city – derelict industrial precincts, disused dockland warehouses, market places, inner-city lanes and backwaters, under-used churches and a disused psychiatric hospital. With very significant personal wealth he could also choose where to build his new museum. That too avoided convention, bypassing major city art precincts in favour of the out-of-the-way industrial rustbelt of the Derwent estuary, forcing visitors to make long and ritually demanding journeys. Banishing wall labels and directions made even more demands for independent action and thought.
It was a design for a new experience of art rather than a housing for art, and to this end Walsh had shown the public art world what might be possible if they were also better supported financially and less accountable to conservative forms of governance. As O’Connor (2013) remarked: the caricature of the public museum as elitist and boring is not promoted by Mona but by the public sector itself. It forms part of that collective loss of nerve, or loss of mission, that once animated the great public museum. Mona is too often pointed to as an example of why a public museum cannot be relevant. Instead, it should be a lesson of how it can become so.
Even so, its impact on visitors has still yet to be revealed systematically.
The next section therefore evaluates Mona’s performance against its own aims, using our survey of 6410 visitors.
Evaluating visitor experience at Mona
Mona aimed to extend visitor experience far beyond the ‘heightened participation’ of the ‘new museology’ (Radywyl et al., 2011), notably perhaps to ‘demonstrate that dumbing-down is unnecessary and that a community will rise to the level required for appropriate engagement with an entity’ (Mona internal document quoted in Franklin, 2014: 221). Further aims for the immediate community included generating ‘Government interest in community driven projects with possible funding outcomes’, providing ‘educational facilities for schools’ and ‘improvements to cultural facilities in Tasmania’ as well as ‘patronage of contemporary arts and culture’ (Fraser, 2013). The subsequent arrival of two nationally significant arts festivals (Dark Mofo and Mona Foma), an art prize, art residencies and a research library, for example, shows that Mona fully intended to carry them out.
Of the 10 core aims identified by Mona, at least 6 were aimed at visitor experience and these can be organised into three new interventions:
Our survey developed a nested battery of questions that address these aspects and together provide the basis for a very substantial evaluation of Mona’s aims, though we would argue that more in-depth research will now be required for a complete understanding.
Visitors to Mona
We surveyed visitors face-to-face soon after they exited Mona’s gallery space, or online soon after they received the record of their museum tour from Mona’s O Device (a hand-held information device that records everything viewed and every type of information sourced about it).
A non-randomised sample survey using a 19-question schedule was designed comprising a mix of Likert-scaled and other direct questions taking approximately 5 minutes to complete. A total of 6410 completed questionnaires were obtained across the calendar year 7 November 2013 to 6 November 2014. We wanted our survey to reflect an entire calendar year because Mona’s visitation is highly seasonal, with a very busy spring and summer season, and an intense period around mid-winter during the Dark Mofo music and art festival.
In what follows we will discuss basic demographic and taxonomic variables as they relate to our interest in visitor experience. We will then look at overall experience responses and probe the extent to which forms of experience correspond in any way to Mona’s museum aims, and how these were operationalised through design and practice.
Visitor profile
One of the distinguishing features of Mona, a characteristic it shares with few others apart from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (GMB), is its very high (88%) proportion of tourists who travel significant distances to see it. Almost half of Mona’s overseas visitors are from Europe, almost a quarter are from North America, with the remainder, an increasing proportion, from Oceania and Asia. Seventy-eight percent of the tourists were from other states of Australia and 10% were tourists from overseas, but given the distances travelled across Australia the overall pattern is not unlike that for the GMB.
Social class, gender
As expected for a museum of contemporary art, most of these tourists were from the broad educated middle classes: 75% were tertiary educated and 77% were managerial or professional workers, although they were not especially high income earners – their income ranges between $60,000–$80,000 which approximates to the national average for Australia ($77,121). Only 7% earn over $200,000, while 74% earn under $100,000 and 26% earn under $40,000. These income data reflect the fact that almost two-thirds (64%) of the visitors are women, of whom a substantial number work part time though they earn substantially more than the national average ($60,000 versus $45,827).
Age
Owing to the high numbers of visitors travelling interstate and overseas, most arriving by air, the age distribution is skewed to a middle-aged and older demographic. Fifty-two percent are over 50 and only 15% are under 30. However, in a separate survey of Hobart and Glenorchy residents conducted by the project, it was found that 70% of the under 35s had been to Mona at least once as compared with 60% of the 45–70-year-olds. Only 19% of local residents had never been. In the main museum visitor survey, two distinct age groups stand out over others, those aged in their early to mid-30s and those in their mid-60s, groups either side of the most common ages for child rearing. It may be too expensive or deemed too adult, though what we have also found is that locally Mona is very popular among children who put pressure on parents (often not gallery-goers themselves) to take them.
Overall experience
The perception has always been that visitors enjoy Mona and this was borne out by our survey: 95% of Mona visitors said they had a positive experience (75% said ‘very positive’). Only 1.3% of visitors said they had a negative overall experience.
While the social composition of Mona’s visitor profile was highly stratified and dominated by the educated middle classes, visitor experience was far less socially stratified. Thus, while 75% of Mona’s visitors were tertiary educated and 25% non-tertiary there was little significant difference in how each group reported their overall experience there: 97% of those with tertiary education said their overall experience was positive compared to 94.4% of the non-tertiary educated.
For those types of experience where one might think, following Bourdieu, that middle-class visitors had a far greater disposition and access to the art at Mona, the differences in their reporting of them was not always remarkably different from the non-tertiary educated. For example, 80.3% of the tertiary educated agreed with the statement ‘Visiting Mona has made me think about a lot of things’ as compared with 79% of the non-tertiary educated. Similarly, 82% of the tertiary educated agreed with the statement ‘My visit to Mona has enriched my life’ compared with 73.8% of the non-tertiary educated. Even with respect to the capacity to enjoy art, reported experiences at Mona do not tend to support the dominant view that there is a gulf between the educated middle classes and the working classes: 77% of non-tertiary educated visitors agreed with the statement ‘Mona has increased my enjoyment of art’ as compared with 78% of tertiary educated visitors. While these data do not suggest their experiences are the same, they are not strongly polarised but suggestive of a general air of enthusiasm and pleasure that seems to be shared by most, if not all visitors.
The next three sections look at each of the three main ‘experience aims’ in more detail and the extent to which our visitors reported that their experiences were shaped by them.
Change the nature of engagement with the museum
Mona aimed to produce a more engaged, embodied and immersive visitor experience in comparison to the much criticised ‘white cube’. The Mona team were aware of Duncan and Wallach’s (1978) seminal critique of ‘white cube’ visitor experience. Its characteristically neutral, muted emotional environments have often been accused of fragmenting and disembodying the viewing subject as well as stifling in an institutionalised setting the very emotion (as well as the subjects of art) that contemporary artists seek to evoke among a viewing public (Klonk, 2009; Maak et al., 2011; O’Doherty 1986).
Wonderment was possibly the most important emotion that the Mona team hoped to engender in order to arouse a new, more engaged relationship between visitors, the gallery and their art. In the minds of the Mona team, wonderment was a deeply positive emotional-intellectual state that activated visitor engagement, aroused curiosity, doubt or excitement about the new. They felt that visitors should be treated as intelligent enough and capable enough to respond to art providing the cues were not restricted to those with particular social advantages or cultural dispositions. But did it work?
For the Oxford Concise English Dictionary the word ‘amaze’ means ‘to fill with wonder’ and was therefore a good common parlance term with which to probe wonderment among Mona visitors. We asked respondents whether, when compared with other museums their time at Mona was amazing. Eighty percent of the sample agreed with this statement, and there was no significant variation across the cohort. Regression analysis shows that this measure makes the strongest unique contribution to explaining overall experience (when the variance explained by all other measures is controlled for) at Mona. It makes a unique contribution of 1.6% to the explanation of variance in ‘overall experience’.
We also asked if visitors were fascinated by their experience at Mona, a term suggesting enchantment, and possibly a sense of being ‘drawn in’, or interpellated by Mona’s theatricality or the topsy-turvy nature of the liminal spaces of its architecture and exhibition design (Franklin, 2014). These were the techniques in which a sense of wonderment were conjured by Mona to prime or frame a different experience of art objects. Again, all questions relating to their experience at Mona were prefaced with the phrase ‘When compared with other galleries’. Thus, 92% of respondents reported that they were more fascinated at Mona and there was no significant variation by education, gender, income or occupation. For the 92 respondents who had never visited an art gallery museum before (1.5% of the sample) the proportion reporting fascination was lower but even here, the vast majority (82%) did agreed with the statement ‘I was fascinated by my visit to Mona’.
We also wanted to know how visitors would respond to the statement: ‘Compared with other galleries Mona made me think about a lot of things’, since this connotes the arousal of interest and curiosity and may be interpreted as a spur for, or a spark, that ignites a self-directed learning process that Mona was keen to encourage. Eighty percent of respondents agreed with this statement with no significant variation by gender, education, income or occupation. Significantly perhaps, of the other 20% only 4% disagreed with the statement with 16% neutral.
In sum, it seems that the aim to use wonderment to arouse curiosity, excitement, doubt, enchantment, interest and thought was largely effective in obtaining a positive response among our respondents, though there is a small minority for whom this strategy did not work. Being a total stranger to art galleries and not having a conventional museum to contrast with Mona might even make Mona’s apparent efforts to excite seem strange and incomprehensible. So, we were interested in how many people were baffled in this way and presented respondents with an opportunity to express a wholly negative experience. For this reason, we asked visitors to respond to the statement ‘I don’t know what to make of my time at Mona’. This revealed a more significant difference between those with no tertiary education (11.6% agreed) and the tertiary educated (7.1% agreed), though again 69.4% of non-tertiary educated visitors disagreed with this statement. Those who had never been to an art gallery before (n = 90) were the most likely to find Mona incomprehensible, and therefore inaccessible – and thus an ineffective pathway into an engagement with art.
Provide new ways of accessing and experiencing art
We asked very specific questions relating to the experience of art at Mona, whether visitors were able to build on the considerable stimulation provided to engage by becoming active in their own tours and discovery. So, first we asked respondents to comment on the statement (‘When compared with other galleries’) ‘I found Mona to be a different way of experiencing art’. Overall, 95.4% of respondents agreed with this statement, though here marginally more non-tertiary educated visitors agreed (96.4%) than tertiary educated (95.1%). This should not be surprising since the tertiary educated are more familiar with art (they visit art galleries more frequently) and thus more likely to have come across Mona’s style of curation and exhibition. For example, Mona’s is closer to the exuberant style of art biennales. Perhaps the most significant thing, however, is the high proportion of those with cultural capital who do affirm that Mona provides a different experience of art. This goes some way towards confirming that the Mona team have fulfilled their aim to provide a unique museum culture too.
Mona’s aim to empower their guests to be more active in the gallery and to be able to discover things for themselves was central to the entire architectural, exhibition and experience design. We therefore asked them to respond to the statement: (‘When compared with other galleries’) ‘At Mona I felt free to choose how I experience art’. Overall, 87% agreed with this statement with marginally more people with non-tertiary education agreeing (89%) than tertiary educated (86.5%) and with with no significant variation by income, age or occupation.
The issue here was whether such freedom would result in visitors branching out beyond their taste horizons in order to try different types of art. Therefore, we asked people to respond to the statement: (‘When compared with other galleries’) ‘At Mona I could experience different types of art more easily’. It is interesting here that marginally more non-tertiary educated visitors (85.4%) of agreed with the statement than the tertiary educated (81.7%), though of course the former probably had more scope to extend their familiarity than the latter. Again, there was little variation across other visitor characteristics.
The Mona team wished to do far more than extend an interest in art. They aimed ‘to challenge and confront visitors with topics currently regarded as taboo. Present exhibits that induce rage, polemics, emotively charged discourse’. We therefore asked respondents whether they agreed with the statement: (‘When compared with other galleries’) ‘I felt confronted by some of the art at Mona’. Fifty-six percent of respondents agreed with this statement, though only 18.3% agreed strongly, which confirms the slight anti-climax felt by the Mona team during the opening period. The hopes for drama and controversy were somewhat dashed by a welter of enthusiasm and ‘Mona mania’ (Kerkenezov, 2012).
In sum, our survey shows that Mona’s aim to provide new ways of accessing and experiencing art was largely successful. A solid majority of visitors also agreed with the statement ‘Mona has increased my enjoyment of art’: 77% of non-tertiary educated visitors agreed as compared with 78% of tertiary educated visitors.
Transform visitors’ lives and consciousness
The verdict on Mona’s hopes for its art to be transformative was also largely positive. In order to enable visitors to express the strongest possible form of this we asked whether (‘When compared with other galleries’) their experience at Mona had been ‘life-changing’. Twenty-five percent of our sample agreed with this, with the least experienced art goers marginally more likely to report a life-changing experience – that is, almost 30% of non-tertiary educated Tasmanians reported their visit to Mona as being a life-changing experience. This is to be expected perhaps, since their exposure to contemporary art is relatively new, while for many of the more regular contemporary art gallery-goers, key elements and themes of Walsh’s collection were not especially new or sensational any more.
We also enabled respondents to report a weaker form of transformation since, to be fair, Mona had only hoped that visitors might be changed ‘in some way’. So, we also asked whether, (‘When compared with other galleries’), their visit to Mona had enriched their lives. Overall 79% of visitors agreed with this, but here the more experienced tertiary educated gallery-goers were marginally more likely to report enrichment: 82% of tertiary educated versus 74% of non-tertiary educated. It suggests that aspects of its presentation and potential for engagement may have played a stronger role than the art content per se.
We also asked respondents a related question about affect, since to be affected also involves a degree of transformation: according the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary it can mean ‘mentally influenced; to be moved, touched in the feelings; influenced; acted upon; make a material impression’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993: 36; Radywyl et al., 2012). We asked respondents whether, (‘When compared with other galleries’), they agreed with the statement ‘My visit to Mona has NOT affected me’. Overall 82% disagreed with this statement, with the tertiary educated more affected (84.5%) than the non-tertiary educated (74.2%). Overall, however, only 6% reported being unaffected.
Finally, apart from the transformative experience of having one’s perspective, worldview or understanding altered/changed, or of gaining the value of enrichment or influence, it is also possible to be inspired to act. To inspire is to ‘animate with a noble or exalted feeling; to do something noble or exalted; to arouse the mind, instil (a feeling, an impulse etc.)’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993:1338). We therefore asked respondents whether, (‘When compared with other galleries’), they agreed with the statement: ‘My time at Mona has left me feeling inspired’. Seventy-eight percent agreed with this statement, with tertiary educated visitors more likely to report being inspired as against 74% among the non-tertiary educated, with little variation across other variables, apart from those who never visit art galleries (n = 90) where the proportion inspired drops to 57%. Overall, only 5% disagreed with the statement, with 17% neither agreeing nor disagreeing.
It would seem therefore that a substantial majority of visitors were changed in some way, from being moved, touched or influenced to being enriched or even having a life-changing experience. This aim was therefore demonstrably achieved in significant measure.
Atmosphere, architecture, space, collection and entertainment
Here we evaluate the relative contribution that each of these tangible and intangible objects made to visitors’ overall experience.
Atmosphere
According to our visitor survey, 93.5% agreed that Mona’s atmosphere was important for their experience. Marginally more tertiary educated visitors felt this (94.6%) than non-tertiary educated visitors (90.4%); very few felt neutral about it (4.8%) and only 1.7% said it was unimportant. However, it is clear that this is only one of several important ingredients that appear, in combination, to account for most visitors’ overall experience.
Architecture
Mona reversed the spatial geometry and symbolism that characterises most major art museums, taking people deep into the ground rather than raising them into the air. As Farrelly (2012) notes, it personifies Walsh’s desire for ‘receptacle not spectacle’. Which raises the question: is Mona’s architecture a quiet background presence, merely there to enable art to be experienced unmediated by the kind of potent language and symbolism that other museum architectures deploy? Or does it add something to experience?
Ninety-two percent of visitors to Mona reported the architecture to be important to their experience, with little difference between the tertiary and non-tertiary educated, and with few being neutral and even fewer saying architecture was unimportant. It is also notable that architecture and atmosphere were considered important in equal measure. There was little variation by gender, occupation, age or whether visitors were from metropolitan or other postcodes.
Layout
We also asked respondents to consider the layout of Mona, because this could be considered separately, referencing Mona’s stated aim to avoid linear forms of display such as chronology, taxonomy or directing how visitors proceed through the museum. Layout also encompasses the style of exhibition display and Mona’s wish for visitors to lose themselves in its galleries – in order to wean them away from the immediacy of curatorial interpretations and to develop their own views and opinions. Around 84% of visitors thought layout was important for their experience, with little variation, though there is some issue as to whether all respondents were clear about layout since more (around 13%) expressed a neutral opinion, though very few thought it was unimportant.
Collection
An overwhelming majority (93.5%) viewed the collection as important for their experience, adding a third and perhaps interlocking/mutually reinforcing strand alongside architecture and atmosphere. And again, marginally more tertiary educated visitors felt the collection was important (94.7%) as compared with the non-tertiary educated (90.5%), with few significant variations in the other taxonomic variables, though more non-tertiary educated visitors were neutral (7.5% v 4%). A negligible number felt the collection was unimportant.
Entertainment
Although entertainment was not originally a stated aim of Mona (and the word does not appear in any of their recorded correspondence on the issue), after their first Mona Foma (Festival of Music and Art) in 2009, the notion that their audience might be pleasurably engaged with their collection at the museum, and in their curated music and art festivals came to their attention and made a strong impression and became an element in their methodology. Almost everyone (95.4%) visiting Mona agreed, with no significant variation.
Conclusion
We have considered the continuing global project to broaden the experience of art museums beyond their historic mission as educative leisure. We noted how the arrival of contemporary art not only eschewed/resisted its framing in art history and didactic methodologies of curation and exhibition, but also founded alternative exhibitionary platforms and performative spaces outside the museum in an increasing number of locations and forms. This increased apace after 2000, when contemporary art increasingly shifted into registers of popular culture and occupied the numerous nooks and crannies of cities of culture. The article then considered the case of Mona, which had seemingly been inspired by alternative, more immersive and emotionally intense art experiences, as well as greater emphasis being placed on the subjects and transformative qualities of art rather than on the artists themselves and the history of art. It was a mix of different leisure experiences (through the body, music, gastronomy, festivity, Dionysian excess) that framed art in new ways, especially through the trope of theatre and carnival. The question was: were visitors able to negotiate a new relationship with art and an art museum if it was exhibited in this way? Survey results show that without using the normative curatorial framework of didactic or educative leisure, by taking what the Mona team call an ‘anti-museum’ approach instead, an overwhelming majority of visitors respond in a very positive way and that their museum aims were achieved. Visitors felt Mona introduced them to art in new ways; that it provided new ways of accessing and experiencing art, and that it had changed the nature of their engagement with the museum. Visitors reported new emotions of wonderment and fascination, and their unmediated exposure to art at Mona made them think about a lot of things – and not merely the artists and their history. Through Mona’s radical under-determination of experience (and extreme informality) they felt freer to choose how they experienced art and felt they could experience different types of art more easily. Almost all respondents reported being affected and enriched by the experience and for 30% it was a ‘life-changing’ experience. Almost all of our respondents felt that the atmosphere created at Mona, alongside a commensurate architecture and collection, contributed powerfully to such a positive experience. It entertained and gave them pleasure, and it occupied them without fatigue for considerably longer than most other museums. Because Mona’s museum aims are unique there is no equivalent survey data by which to compare other museums of art across the same set of experiences, but this is something that future research should investigate.
Mona successfully shifted the normative emphasis on educative leisure and civic virtue associated with the classical modern museum to the affective leisure emphasis of the anti-museum and its concerns to engage visitors through immersive experiences with their bodies, their pasts and their futures.
Footnotes
Funding
This article is an output from the Australian Research Council funded project: ‘Creating the Bilbao Effect: MONA and the Social and Cultural Coordinates of Urban Regeneration Through Arts Tourism’ LP120200302. Chief Investigators: Professors Adrian Franklin, Justin O’Connor and Nikos Papastergiadis.