HOBART.- Mona is hosting an astonishing exhibition of art objects selected and curated by The Museum of Everything —the world’s first wandering institution for the untrained, unintentional, undiscovered and unclassifiable artists of modern times.
James Brett, Founder, The Museum of Everything said, “The Museum of Everything is not an exhibition of art objects. It is a dictionary of private languages, a survey of human behaviours and an encyclopedia of profound beliefs. Our artists do not create for the markets or museums. They make because they must and—from Henry Darger to Nek Chand Saini—have something vital to say about the essence of their lives. We invite you to discover them and their lifetime’s labour; and we hope that they move you as they have always moved us.”
This is the first time The Museum of Everything is visiting Australia.
“We have long admired The Museum of Everything —a museum without walls and without boundaries,” said Nicole Durling, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Collections at Mona. “ The Museum of Everything will dramatically transform Mona’s touring gallery spaces in a kind of takeover of our established aesthetic.”
“The exhibition won’t be telling our visitors what to think. This is consistent with Mona’s philosophical approach to challenge established perceptions. It will be an interesting continuum to our exhibition On the Origin of Art , which also questioned established ideas,” Nicole said. “We hope that The Museum of Everything will raise a range of questions and issues that aren’t only about art. We hope that it will introduce our visitors to new ideas for consideration and wonder.”
The exhibition features over 1500 works from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, arranged over a series of themed spaces in an informal journey through human making. Included in the show are drawings, sculptures and paintings, as well as ceramics, collage, photography, assemblage, plus found objects and installations.
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.
Yet these are only a handful of the artists on display.
