MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, is one of the beacons of culture in Tasmania. Built into a hill with sheer rock walls and informed by an avant-garde sensibility like something you might find in Berlin or New York, it has gained an enormous reputation in a short time.
With a dizzying collection including ancient Mesopotamian tablets, paintings by Australian greats and contemporary sculptures and installations, MONA is meant to impress. But the edginess of its art is also in its desire to confront and shock the viewer.
Sex and death loom large. Walk in one direction and you meet a framed photograph of a dog humping a naked man. Turn a corner and there is a long row of plaster-cast vaginas. In one place a mummified cat's head; in another a sculpture depicting a dismembered body. There's a kind of appeal to what lurks in the collective shadow.
Shock is obviously not a new element in art — consider Caravaggio's brutal, sexual paintings in the 17th century, through to the modern day with Dada, Surrealism and the rest. The artist is a transgressor, pushing the boundaries of culture and society, challenging the norms of acceptability.
Working functionally, this approach renews society by cutting through its stale and restrictive forms and opening the door for new, life-affirming possibilities. It can also expose underlying issues with the hope of change.
Chaim Potok's novel My Name is Asher Lev explores this role beautifully. The artistic soul of the main character demands the creation of a crucifixion painting that is taboo in his rigid, ultra-orthodox Jewish community. The painting symbolises the inner torment and hope for redemption in the psyche of his community. The artist holds the seed for change.
But there is also a dysfunctional side to the artist as transgressor in which shock is elevated as a goal in itself. Boundaries are broken for the sake of merely doing so, not in the service of a broader context. The artist disgorges whatever is in the unconscious, without proper discrimination or maturity.
I wonder whether integration/synthesis could be a valuable underlying idea or goal in art. That is, the aim is not so much breaking boundaries as playing with boundaries so that