David Walsh first made global headlines in 2009, when he gambled on the life of Christian Boltanski, a French artist whose installations often focus on death. Walsh was a mysterious figure even in his homeland, Tasmania, an island the size of Sri Lanka that lies a hundred and fifty miles south of the Australian mainland. There, other than lurid rumors of a fortune made by gambling, little was known about him.
Walsh agreed to pay Boltanski for the right to film his studio, outside Paris, twenty-four hours a day, and to transmit the images live to Walsh, in Tasmania. But the payment was turned into a macabre bet: the agreed fee was to be divided by eight years, and Boltanski was to be paid a monthly stipend, calculated as a proportion of that period, until his death. Should Boltanski, who was sixty-five years old, live longer than eight years, Walsh will end up paying more than the work is worth, and will have lost the bet. But if Boltanski dies within eight years the gambler will have purchased the work at less than its agreed-upon value, and won.
“He has assured me that I will die before the eight years is up, because he never loses. He’s probably right,” Boltanski told Agence France-Presse in 2009. “I don’t look after myself very well. But I’m going to try to survive.” He added, “Anyone who never loses or thinks he never loses must be the Devil.” In another interview, Boltanski described Walsh as being “fascinated by death.” “Ultimately, he would really like to view my death, live. He says that he is constantly anticipating that moment. He would like to have my last image.”
“It would be absolutely great if he died in his studio,” Walsh said when asked by the New York Times about Boltanski. “But I don’t think it’s ethical to organize it.”
Attempting to describe Boltanski’s devil is like trying to pick up mercury with a pair of pliers. At fifty-one, Walsh has the manner of a boy pharaoh and the accent of a working-class Tasmanian who grew up in Glenorchy, one of the poorest suburbs of the poorest state in the Australian federation. His silver hair is sometimes rocker-length long, sometimes short. Walsh talks in torrents or not at all. He jerks, he scratches, and his pigeon-toed gait is so pronounced that he bobs as he walks. He is alternately charming, bullying, or silent. As he looks away, he laughs.
At the time he was betting on an artist’s life, Walsh had embarked on an even more quixotic project: building a private art museum in Tasmania dedicated to sex and death. The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) opened in January, 2011, and was immediately welcomed by some as a new beginning for museums and derided by others as the end of art.
Walsh wanted his visitors to ascend to the museum from the water, as the ancient Greeks did to their temples. But at first sight from the Derwent River—from which most museumgoers approach by ferry from downtown Hobart, the capital—MONA looms above like a post-apocalyptic fortress, waffled-concrete walls intersecting with great trapezoidal battlements clad in rusting steel. Set on a small peninsula, the four-story complex is almost twice the size of New York’s Guggenheim.
Tasmanians are admitted to the museum free of charge and everyone else pays an entrance fee. Visitors descend by a large spiral staircase or a cylindrical glass elevator at its center, to cavernous deep passageways cut through Triassic sandstone, at the juncture of which there is a bar. Beyond the desultory drinkers is mysterious night. Elsewhere in the crepuscular light there hides a library, a cinema, various performance spaces, and three levels of galleries, all discrete and different. Some of the walls are gilded. One gallery is lined with bloodred velvet. Another room is flooded with water that’s dyed black, which you cross on stepping stones to an island holding two large and identical cabinets, one containing an Egyptian sarcophagus, the other a digital animation of CAT scans which unveils layers of the sarcophagus until it reveals the bones of its mummy.
At this point, MONA begins to feel like a mashup of the lost city of Petra and a late night out in Berlin. Everything about it is disorienting and yet somehow familiar, from the high-tech tropes, the low-culture babble, the black humor about so much that is so serious, the attention to aesthetics in a museum unsure if beauty exists or, if it does, if it matters.
Designed like a Borgesian labyrinth, lit like a night club, MONA, since it opened on a remote island, with a population of five hundred thousand, has attracted more than seven hundred thousand people. Visitors came first from Tasmania, then from Australia, and now, increasingly, from the world—a growing caravan of celebrities, art lovers, aficionados, camp followers, and the curious. In less than two years, MONA has become Tasmania’s foremost tourist attraction and a significant driver of its languishing economy. Lonely Planet listed Hobart as one of the world’s top ten cities to visit in 2013, largely because of MONA.
Walsh is explicit about what his museum is not: it’s not a rich man gratefully giving back to his community. It’s not an attempt at immortality, as he frankly admits that his collection may be deemed worthless in another decade. It is a theatre of strange enchantments: from a wall of a hundred and fifty-one sculptures of women’s vaginas to racks of rotting cow carcasses; a waterfall, the droplets of which form words from the most-Googled headlines of the day; the remains of a suicide bomber cast in chocolate; a grossly fattened red Porsche; a lavatory in which, through a system of mirrors and binoculars, you can view your own anus; X-ray images of rats carrying crucifixes; a library of blank books; cuneiform tablets; and stone blocks from the Hiroshima railway station, which was destroyed in the atom bombing. Its most loathed exhibit is also one of its most popular: Wim Delvoye’s “Cloaca Professional,” a large, reeking machine that replicates the human digestive system, turning food into feces, which it excretes daily.
Walsh calls MONA a secular temple and a subversive adult Disneyland. If some of his early ideas for exhibits—a crematorium and an abattoir that were viewable—remain unrealized, MONA still goes somewhere beyond the frontiers of taste into the badlands of emotion. It has been derided as a museum for the YouTube generation, a new Valley of the Kings, an underground inverted pyramid, an egoseum, the future, the past, an un-museum, and—one feels, hurtfully for Walsh—conventional. Mostly, people have loved it. Gary Tinterow, a former Met curator and now the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, described MONA as “one of the most fascinating and satisfying experiences I have ever had in a museum.” John Kaldor, a member of the International Committee of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, said he believes that “MONA has been a watershed in the way that art is understood by the general public.”
At MONA’s center is the largest modernist work ever made in Australia, the near Olympic-pool-size “Snake,” painted by Sidney Nolan in the early nineteen-seventies. Influenced by the Aboriginal mythology of the Dreamtime, its sixteen hundred and twenty panels, each a unique image—a flower, a bird, a face—unite to form a mammoth writhing rainbow serpent. Walsh lives in an apartment above, with windows in the floor through which he can view this Australian masterpiece every day. Whatever MONA is to others, it is for David Walsh home.
At a Sydney art opening, Walsh was approached by a man who asked, “Aren’t you the guy who built the great art museum in Hobart?”
“No, mate,” Walsh replied. “I sell drugs in children’s playgrounds.”
“Oh, well,” the man said. “It’s better than doing something bad like gambling.”
Walsh is a leader of what Australian newspapers describe as the world’s biggest gambling syndicate, a group of seventeen known as the Bank Roll. The Bank Roll’s other leader is Walsh’s best friend, Zeljko Ranogajec, a fellow-Tasmanian who’s been described by the Web site Blackjack Insider as one of the “most innovative” blackjack players of all time. Frequently portrayed in the media as the world’s biggest gambler, Ranogajec is perhaps its most elusive. His formidable partnership with Walsh can be traced back over thirty years. “I’d spot the opportunities,” Ranogajec, a gently spoken and amiable man, told me by phone from London, where he now lives, “and David would do the maths. He’s intellectually gifted. Present him with any problem or puzzle and in a few hours he can solve it.”
“Whenever he gets argumentative, I ask him how far Venus is from the Sun,” Kirsha Kaechele, Walsh’s girlfriend of the past two years and a self-described “life artist,” told me. “It always works. Numbers are very calming for David.”
“Mathematics,” Walsh has written, “is unsullied and friendships are dirty.” At times, his belief in the wisdom of numbers approaches the mysticism of numerologists. In his unpublished memoir, a “fictional” chapter has a thinly disguised Walsh claiming to have had eighteen significant relationships with women. Undertaking what he calls “the calculus of promiscuity,” he figures that there is less than a hundredth of a chance that it is not his fault his relationships have failed.
He happily parades his perversities, such as a fondness for group sex. At his lavish fiftieth-birthday dinner, Kaechele had the dessert made from a mold struck from the vulva of a former girlfriend. His loyalty to his family and devotion to his two children, Jamie and Grace—by different mothers—and to his grandchild, Lockie, with whom he spends much time, are not things he boasts about. It is as if Walsh would accuse himself of anything except virtue.
Walsh’s favorite novel is “Crime and Punishment,” and conversations with him can sometimes feel like talking to the deranged narrator of Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from Underground”: possessed, but rarely less than compelling. His obsessive desire to explain makes his thoughts sometimes seem to proceed algorithmically. Though the condition has never been diagnosed, Walsh and those around him believe that he has Asperger’s. It would explain his extraordinary gift with numbers, but it is hard to know where the condition ends and bad manners start. Walsh’s rudeness is legendary. “Let’s face it,” a close friend told me. “David can be a complete cunt. But he is also the kindest and most generous man you will meet.” Walsh funds a major tennis tournament, the Moorilla Hobart International, as well as Hobart’s MOFO music festival. There are also many and ongoing private kindnesses: kids he sponsors at Hobart’s Quaker school, support of several families, and friends he constantly helps. Pointing out that Walsh has always spent more than he has earned, Ranogajec said, “David was never motivated by money.”
Walsh has given many seemingly contradictory explanations for why he created MONA. “I invent a gambling system. Make a money mine,” Walsh wrote in 2011 in “Monanisms,” the first MONA catalogue. “Turns out it ain’t so great getting rich. . . . What to do? Better build a museum; make myself famous. That will get the chicks.” He has also said that he built MONA “to absolve myself from feeling guilty about making money without making a mark.” For Walsh, an immoral moralist, guilt and sex seem as plausible reasons as any. To these might be added the attraction of risk. Walsh frequently refers to a passage of Dostoyevsky’s that he says perfectly captures the gambling soul. “I wanted to astonish the spectators by taking senseless chances,” Dostoyevsky wrote in “The Gambler,” “and—a strange sensation!—I clearly remember that even without any promptings of vanity I really was suddenly overcome by a terrible craving for risk.”
MONA was the ultimate senseless chance. Walsh wanted an anti-museum that challenged every shibboleth—anything, as he put it, “that pisses off the academics.” As Nonda Katsalidis, MONA’s architect, an elegant cicada of a man, told me one night at a Hobart rock-and-roll pub, “MONA is David.” David was at that moment standing awkwardly alone in the middle of the dance floor, amid several drunken dancers, devoutly mouthing the lyrics to the songs of Mick Thomas, an Australian rocker and a favorite of Walsh’s, who was performing onstage. Walsh’s entourage of women, architects, and assorted flunkies were standing around drunk, lost, bored. Walsh had previously insulted Thomas and would do so again later that night and will probably keep on adoring him and insulting him for the rest of their lives.
“I am David and I am an arseholic,” Walsh writes at the beginning of “Monanisms.” If David is MONA, MONA is an enigma become a museum.
A few yards from the MONA bar is a theatrically lit cabinet, a cinerarium where, for seventy-five thousand dollars, you can have your ashes deposited and transformed into an exhibit. In the cabinet sits a Fabergé-egg-like urn containing the ashes of Walsh’s father.
Walsh’s mother, Myra Heawood, was one of ten children born to a possum trapper. In 1941, Myra left Tasmania to visit her sister on the Australian mainland “for a week or two,” and stayed eighteen years. She got married, was abandoned by her husband, and met Thomas Walsh, a barman in a Melbourne pub, known as Tim, or Hairpin. He, too, was married.
After the war, they divorced their respective spouses and married. Walsh’s sister, Lindy-Lou, was born in 1955 and his brother, Tim, in 1958. In 1959, the Walshes moved back to Tasmania, where Thomas found work as an asylum orderly and, later, as a headwaiter. But the marriage was going bad.
“Mum got religion,” Walsh recalled, “and Dad got violent.” Lindy-Lou Walsh tells of her mother hiding roast dinners under her bed so that her father would not throw the food around the kitchen. Her mother sometimes slept in Lindy-Lou’s bed. One of her earliest memories is of her father forcing the bedroom door open and Lindy-Lou, a little girl, standing between her father and her mother.
“And then?” I asked.
“Then I don’t remember.”
Myra, a Catholic, was told by her priest that as the Church did not recognize her second marriage she and Thomas could live together, but not as man and wife. There could be no physical relationship, an injunction Myra obeyed. Walsh, born more than a year later, believes he is the result of the rape of his mother by his father.
In 1963, when Walsh was two, his parents separated. “He spent his last forty-five years training greyhounds,” Walsh said of his father, “and waiting for Mum to come back to him.”
Beyond the ashes of Walsh’s father lies close to a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of building and art dedicated to carnal acts and charnel ends. It is a prematurely haunted subterranean world.
Walsh grew up in a small clapboard cottage, typical of Tasmanian postwar public housing. In his teens, he moved to an inner-city housing block so notorious as a slum that it was later demolished. He learned “to enjoy being hated” when he went to Dominic, a working-class Catholic school renowned for its harshness and where his academic success meant nothing.
Walsh, though, has no sense of his childhood poverty. Cripplingly shy, he lived in the endlessly rich world of his own mind, leavened by his loves: the universe of books, the infinity of the cosmos which he studied nightly, and the dusty mysteries of the old Tasmanian Museum, where he wandered when he was meant to be at Mass.
He remembers his mother as loving and dutiful but not affectionate. She had, Walsh said, “high hopes for me. She prayed that I might amount to something, perhaps a public servant or a teacher.”
And so Walsh ended up in his first and, as it happened, his last year at the University of Tasmania, getting about in zip-up wool cardigans that his mother knitted for him, studying mathematics and computing. One day in the Physics Club, he overheard a conversation about card counting.
Six years earlier, Tasmania had opened Australia’s first legal casino, a five-minute walk from the University of Tasmania’s mathematics department. The students in the Physics Club had read a book on card counting, and started using what is known as “basic strategy”—principles based on mathematical calculations—to play blackjack at the casino. They were betting four dollars a hand and winning six dollars an hour.
“Why not scale up?” Walsh asked.
“Who’d take that sort of risk?” one of them replied.
Walsh taught himself basic strategy, walked down to the casino, and began winning. One afternoon at the university bar, playing a video game by himself, he was approached by a student he knew only vaguely.
“Apparently, you’re the bloke to get gambling calculations done,” Zeljko Ranogajec said.
For the other student card counters, Walsh said, gambling at the casino was “a social thing. For Zeljko, it was serious.” Walsh burned his money, but Ranogajec, a law and commerce student and the son of Croatian immigrants, hung onto his winnings, using them to bet ever bigger. Ranogajec understood the need for a mathematical edge if they were to win, while Walsh could appreciate the virtues of Ranogajec’s approach. And so they joined forces. By the end of the year, Walsh was at the casino every day from when it opened, at one o’clock in the afternoon, to four in the morning, when it closed. The dealers laughed at the students for thinking they could win, but Ranogajec’s pool was growing rapidly: from a two-hundred-dollar stake to fourteen thousand dollars in twelve months, and then to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year later.
In 1985, Ranogajec took Walsh with him to Las Vegas. They lost almost everything they had. Ranogajec spent the next five months at the tables painstakingly winning back their stake while Walsh escaped what he called “the scream of the bland” for a new discovery which was to prove their big break: the world’s largest collection of gambling literature, housed at the library at the University of Nevada. He read widely and deeply on gambling history and gambling systems, the psychology of gambling, its management, its workings as a business, why people win and lose.
When they returned to Australia, Walsh, who had never liked playing blackjack, began writing a computer program to bet on horse racing. Walsh, Ranogajec, and Ranogajec’s girlfriend took the overnight ferry to mainland Australia and drove on to Sydney, Ranogajec singing “If I Were a Rich Man” over and over. On Australia Day, 1987, the two young Tasmanians placed their first bet on a horse race using Walsh’s program. They won.
Ultimately, Thoroughbred racing became the main focus of their gambling, but for a time they struggled. Their ideas, systems, and programs were good, but not good enough. They were making only a little money and spending a lot, and on occasion they came close to losing it all. They kept going by playing blackjack. They were by now formidable players, and their ongoing wins led to them being banned from all the Australian casinos, so they took to playing in Korea, Sri Lanka, Macau, and South Africa to stay afloat. But the Bank Roll was becoming too well known. The group trained new faces in its card-counting system and sent them out to play. But the new card-counters were in turn quickly identified and banned.
Walsh and Ranogajec diversified. Using high mathematics and low cunning, they identified where small profits could be made by betting large sums. Risk remained. In 1993, Ranogajec won an eleven-million-dollar jackpot in a Sydney club, but he had bet fourteen million to win it. They went from racetrack to dog track to gaming table and back, playing everything in between, from chocolate wheels to baccarat; from Thoroughbred to greyhound racing.
There was also what Ranogajec calls “the low-lying fruit.” One time, they paid hundreds of people to fill out entry forms with every possible permutation of a lotto game, and won $1.6 million. Another time, Walsh discovered that a particular model of roulette wheel had an inbuilt and undetected bias that led to the number 27 being twenty per cent more likely to win, and win they did. Walsh bought himself a new Mercedes with the vanity plate RED-27.
From the warehouses of the Hobart wharf district of Salamanca and from the rooms of Hobart pubs—where banks of computers and attendant programmers, mathematicians, and statisticians crunched information, enhanced mathematical systems, and placed bets—the Bank Roll’s gaming went global. It was recently reported in the Australian that the Bank Roll now gambles “as much as $3 billion” worldwide on betting-pool systems alone and continues to develop new mathematical models and computer systems for gambling on horse races, basketball, football, soccer, rugby, and dog racing in Europe, Asia, and the U.S.
These days, according to Walsh, the Bank Roll employs people who are much better than he is at mathematics and computing. At a MONA party, you are as likely to meet an Ivy League econometrics professor recruited to do statistical analysis of Hong Kong Thoroughbred racing as you are a Tasmanian abalone diver or a naked dancer, just let out of a cage suspended from the ceiling, expressing her gratitude for “the honor of dancing for David.”
Gambling, with its allure, its lore, its cosmology of numbers and chance, the immense skill it demands, the wild hope and dizzying despair it summons, remains powerfully attractive—and lucrative—to Walsh. For all the mathematical systems and computing power, Walsh remains a gambler. He bet on the election of the last Pope, studying the field of vying cardinals, putting his money down when Joseph Ratzinger was running 6 to 1. But at the heart of his passion he found emptiness. “Gambling, like future-markets trading, doesn’t produce anything,” Walsh has written. “It just causes money to change hands. . . . Winning gamblers end up with money but have achieved nothing else.”
And Walsh wanted to do something.
In 1991, Walsh’s beloved elder brother, Tim, died of cancer. Tim was many things that his younger brother was not: charming, a dresser, something of a leader. Walsh took to wearing Tim’s jackets, as though he were starting to take on the mantle of his brother—as if a metamorphosis were beginning.
Not long afterward, Walsh was in South Africa playing blackjack. Unable to bring his winnings out of the country in cash, he bought a Yoruba palace door for eighteen thousand dollars. He began buying antiquities from around the globe. Though many of his early buys later turned out to be fakes, Walsh had become focussed on collecting.
In 1995, Walsh bought a small peninsula of land, known as Moorilla, in Hobart’s northern suburbs, after family troubles forced its previous owner, Claudio Alcorso, a Jewish refugee from Mussolini’s Italy who made his fortune in textiles, into bankruptcy. Alcorso had built a high-modernist house there, but it didn’t appeal to Walsh as a home. He turned it into a museum for his antiquities. No one came. It was, in his words, generic. “It looked like every other museum.” He began to question everything he had been told about museums, from the white walls to the notion of neutrality of presentation. By then, his collecting had begun to extend into contemporary art, and the idea of a more ambitious museum took hold. Walsh’s first decision was radical. He didn’t choose to build his museum on the élite shores of Sydney Harbor, or even in the more select parts of Hobart. Instead, he chose Moorilla, which is less than three miles from where he grew up. Picturesque to visitors, set against a large river and wooded hills, MONA is, to locals, the working-class heartland of Hobart.
It’s not the only misperception to which MONA has given rise. Not the least is that it stands in sharp contrast to a Tasmania frequently misrepresented in mainland Australia as conservative. But Tasmania is better understood as a place of extremes, radicalism, and unreality, and MONA is merely its latest manifestation.
There is no Golden Age in the telling of Tasmania. For a quarter of its modern history, Van Diemen’s Land, as it was then known, served as the British Empire’s gulag: the island was populated with convicts who were brought out in the stinking holds of the ships that had once been used for the lucrative slave route. A war was waged and lost by indigenous Tasmanians against the British colonists, an apocalypse that later inspired H. G. Wells to write “The War of the Worlds.” The British governors who ran the island banned dancing and fiddle-playing, fearing their subversive powers. In the ruins of the totalitarian state that was left when convict transportation ended, in 1853, nothing much changed, because neither the prosperity nor the waves of emigration that transformed mainland Australia ever arrived in Tasmania.
The island became not so much a democracy as a mediocracy, in which the worst kept their power by destroying the best. Corruption scandals that were never properly investigated or punished came and went; a savage, self-deceiving complacency became the ruling creed; a culture of cronyism became the norm, and backwardness became self-perpetuating. Governments of astonishing incompetence had for many years no policy other than the blanket support of a rapacious forestry industry run on scandalous subsidies. If Australia was the lucky country, Tasmania became its unlucky island. Its people are by all social indicators the poorest in the country.
Such a society breeds extremes and revolt, the radical product of which is everything from the invention of the quintessential Australian outlaw hero—the bushranger—to the world’s first Green Party. It is perhaps no surprise that Walsh frequently mentions Wunderkammern—wonder chambers. Before science vanquished awe and fantasy, Wunderkammern were the fashionable way for European royalty to display their great, eclectic collections. The fabulous, the fantastic, and the fake were all thrown and shown together in a spirit of enchanted wonder. Tasmania is an island Wunderkammer, crammed full of the exotic and the strange, the beautiful and the cruel, conducive not to notions of progress but to a sense of unreality—an unreality without which there would be no MONA.
For Walsh, traditional art museums were “designed to inculcate a sense of inferiority, to prepare you for the instilling of faith.” Beholden to nobody, he wanted to “subvert the very notion of what an art museum is” by democratizing the viewing of art in a way that had “no viewpoint privileged.” But subversion didn’t come cheap.
In 2008, he ran out of money and borrowed eighty million dollars from Ranogajec. The combined cost of the museum and its art is rumored to be in excess of two hundred million dollars, twice the cost of constructing the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. By 2009, with MONA half-built, Walsh was again short of cash and faced bills of ten million dollars which needed immediate payment. On Ranogajec’s advice, he went out big at the Melbourne Cup, Australia’s largest horse race, won sixteen million dollars, and kept going. Not without reason, Walsh regards his life as shaped not only by his acts but also by “a series of successful but unlikely coin tosses.”
In keeping with a life of serendipity and his determination to put his experience at the center of his museum, there is no sense of an ordered progression in MONA. As with some ancient cave system, you explore it in your own way. There is no signage or wall text, and the visitor’s only guide is a modified iPod Touch, known as the O.
Another Walsh idea, the O connects to an internal geolocation system, and tells the visitor what she is looking at while delivering vastly more information of much greater richness than conventional signage. With titles like “Art Wank” and “Gonzo,” it allows a visitor standing in front of a particular work to read a curatorial description of the piece, hear an audio interview with the artist or delve into his biography, ponder Walsh’s own, often highly idiosyncratic comments, or listen to music matched to the exhibit. It also delivers to the museum valuable information about its visitors—where they go, what they look at, and what they don’t. The O liberated Walsh from white walls and meant that the museum could be dimly lit and moody. Walsh’s curators could embrace a liberating theatricality, while the architect, Nonda Katsalidis, was able to design in far more radical ways—the building, with its deliberately disorienting layout and dramatic, vaulting spaces crisscrossed by Escher-like stairs, won Australia’s leading architectural award.
MONA is, then, both a return to older ideas of enchantment and a vanguard of something new. Just as two centuries ago the bourgeois art museums, with their revolutionary ideas of a universe divinable and communicable as classifiable systems, overran the regal Wunderkammern, so, too, does an art labyrinth like MONA now challenge art museums. But exactly what it is challenging them with is harder to say. MONA’s ideas, like its owner, rarely spend the night with consistency. What, for example, is the meaning of juxtaposing an Aboriginal bark painting of a shark with a photograph of a naked man on all fours being mounted by a dog? In its free-flowing associations, MONA owes as much to the Web as it does to the past, and a visitor doesn’t so much visit MONA as surf it. It is as if the museum in its entirety were the art work.
“I’m not sure that art is so important for me,” Walsh has said. “It is the relentless dissecting of myself to bring me closer to an understanding of why I do what I do that seems to be important to me.”
Walsh happily says that he’s not even sure if much of his collection is good or bad, or whether it will have any enduring value. To him, that’s beside the point. Much contemporary discussion of art treats the feelings aroused by art as unimportant, the embarrassing kitsch of the uninitiated. With MONA, Walsh returned the experience of individual feeling to the center. Every paean of praise, every furious condemnation of MONA proceeds from where you stand with regard to this achievement.
After four years of construction, MONA finally opened in 2011, with Walsh talking up its controversial exhibits, perhaps hoping to be once more hated as he had been as a child. But, after strenuous attempts at provocation, he was underwhelmed by the contempt visited on him. There was a weary sneer at the arriviste from some of the Sydney arts establishment, with the Sydney Morning Herald comparing MONA to “rich kid Dick Grayson’s Batcave.” A pro-forma attack, denouncing MONA as “the art of the exhausted, of a decaying civilization,” came from Australia’s leading right-wing journal, Quadrant. Its left-wing rival, Overland, wondered if MONA wasn’t really “a monument to reaction.” But, other than the shock of these very few, that was that.
Could it all have meant so little?
MONA had made contingency plans for protests, picketing, bomb threats, and police raids. For a time, it troubled Walsh that none of the hate and contempt he had expected had eventuated. As the praise began to mount, though, as Tasmanians took to calling it “our MONA,” as visitors sought him out to thank him, Walsh came to see that gratitude and respect are also emotions not without virtue.
And then national news bulletins reported that MONA might have to close. Sitting in a restaurant he owns in Moorilla, overlooking the Derwent River, David Walsh talked about his tax problems over lunch last August. The Australian Tax Office had ramped up an aggressive campaign against Walsh and Ranogajec. With two hundred and fifty staff members working on the case, it was now seeking payment of, according to the Australian Financial Review, an estimated five hundred and forty-one million dollars in back taxes.
In Australia, gambling winnings are tax free. The tax office nonetheless made a claim for back taxes based on complex legalities. Walsh said that he was happy to pay tax on his winnings from 2010, the date of the claim, but he attacked what he saw as the injustice of the tax office’s retrospective demand for the taxes on the years before 2010, and argued that if it was successful he would have to close MONA.
This was no hollow threat. At various times, Walsh has publicly declared that he has spent all his fortune on MONA. In addition to the eighty million dollars he owes Ranogajec, he owes an undisclosed sum to his bankers. MONA costs approximately twelve million dollars a year to run but makes only four million, with Walsh putting up the difference. In essence, Walsh has some minor assets, very large debts, an enormous tax bill, and a loss-making avant-garde museum at the end of the world.
The tax case was finally resolved in a confidential agreement in October, but it demonstrated the fundamental fragility of MONA—its dependence on Walsh in all things. In his memoir, Walsh writes of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and there is more than a little of the vainglorious “king of kings” in him. In the restaurant, he told me he had plans drawn up to make sure that MONA continues after his death, but his conviction suggests a belief that he could pay for MONA in the first place. A senseless risk yesterday, it remains a wild gamble tomorrow. “If I cared about longevity, I wouldn’t have built a museum a couple of meters above the sea level,” Walsh told a newspaper in 2010. “The Derwent is a tidal river. In fifty years, there’s going to be a lot of money spent on MONA, or it’s going to be underwater.”
Later in our lunch, Walsh—with the autodidact’s vast appetite for books—talked of writers. I gesture across the Derwent, to the rusting hulk of the barque Otago, the last boat on which Joseph Conrad sailed before heading up the Congo River. “And the only ship of which he ever had oceangoing command,” Walsh said. He said that he struggled with “The Shadow Line,” Conrad’s elusive novel inspired by his time on the Otago. As with much else, Walsh is certain in his thinking about books. Perhaps the only real certainty with Walsh is that he is always certain about what he is saying.
A few days after the lunch, my sister received a diagnosis of advanced cervical cancer. We sat in her living room, like filaments in a light bulb that had been switched off. She talked quietly. Cancerland talk. Measurements, treatments, statistics. Numbers. Numbers. I told her about what Walsh had said about numbers and admitted that I understood none of it. She told me that she had gone to MONA after her diagnosis and sat in front of Sidney Nolan’s “Snake.” She had been there three times before, but she had never understood what it was about.
“And I was just sitting there,” she said. “And I felt it moving. That huge snake was moving through that room and rolling through me. And I got it. I got the snake.”
And now the filament was glowing. She leaned toward me.
“It’s creation. That’s what the snake is. Creation.”
Later, I told David Walsh.
“She’s right,” he said. And, being David Walsh, he then explained to me why.
Maybe that’s where you end up staring down sex and death and blowing hundreds of millions of dollars searching for something forever out of reach. You wake up in an apartment pondering what it’s all about and look out over an Olympic-pool-length painting. And you finally understand: it’s about creation.
MONA is a museum not of conviction and progress but of doubt and questioning, of despair and wonder; made not by committee, neither celebrating nation nor seeking to preach orthodoxy, freed from the desire to educate. Certain only of its own uncertainty, it touches something of now. To an outsider, it looks like Tim and Hairpin, and a mother who couldn’t show affection and a sister who burned in a different way, while to Walsh it’s just where the dice roll led. Chance, history, a lost island that dealt in dreams and nightmares—whatever explanation is forthcoming is futile. All that can be said is that David Walsh made something genuinely new.
“It is an amazing story,” Zeljko Ranogajec said, reflecting on their lives. “But the most amazing thing is the museum.”
It may be that when the devil dies MONA closes. That “colossal wreck,” Shelley wrote, “boundless and bare.” It may be that, as the oceans rise, the museum will, in a few decades, disappear under water, one more mad Tasmanian myth, a shadow line, another rusting skeleton mirroring the Otago’s ribs on the far side of the river, after its skipper abandoned it to head into his own age’s heart of darkness. ♦
