From The Australian. This is the weekend edition of The Front. I'm Claire Harvey. Contemporary art is all about pushing boundaries.
Someone's going to love it, everything about it is so wonderful. Someone's going to think it's garbage. I don't think I'll be got.
And then the conversation the publicity can become bigger than the art itself.
Dark Mofo is.
The brainchild of David Walsh, the founder of Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art, and his mates Lee Carmichael and Brian Ritchie. They seem to understand this principle better than anyone. Their annual Tasmanian Festival, a celebration of darkness, has gone from edgy to all grown up.
So does it still have the power to shock?
And why does everyone love getting nude at Dark Mofo. David Walsh, a professional gambler turned art magnate, has transformed tourism in Tasmania.
Dark Mofo is back some fantastic news for our tourism and hospitality industry by.
Luring huge crowds to his subversive adult disneyland, a gallery in Hobart called Mona. According to one of his collaborators Lee Carmichael. There's one thing Walsh doesn't like, spending money on marketing. Mona lures hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, but there used to be a winter loll when Hobart's cold and generally miserable winter kept the tourists away.
So Walsh, Carmichael and their.
Offsider Brian Ritchie, the bassist from the Violent Femmes by the Way, took ninety percent of their advertising budget and threw a party. It is very noisy, but that noisy to here is all part of attracting the evil spirits and then burning them in order to start a new life free of evil, not just any party a backenal that turns the city into a pagan playground. Tim Douglas is the editor of The Australians Review Arts and Culture section.
The Dark Mofo Festival sets out to be provocative, which is an interesting choice, isn't it for a state which is probably regarded by the rest of Australia as relatively conservative. Yet the choice of a festival is to be as troublemaking as possible.
Is that fair?
Absolutely fair? David Walsh is nothing if not an gen provocateur. The idea to make it as edgy as possible was certainly a conscious one and it's paid off. It has really changed the face of not only Tasmanian tourism, but midwinter tourism in that state. At the beginning, it was basically all funded by David Walsh. They eventually got some
government funding and then they had some commercial funding. They ended up scrapping that commercial funding about twenty fifteen or sixteen because they felt like they were being creatively compromised by those commercial imperatives. Now do they go out of their way every year to program something provocative? You'd have to say yes, I mean this year is another great example.
Nathan Maynard's work called they threw Us down the rocks like they did with the sheep, a verbatim quote from a police report in the nineteenth century about the murder of some indigenous people. This work by Maynard includes four hundred and eighty decapitated sheep in formaldehyde, which is a comment on the way indigenous remains have been fetishized and kept in private museums around the world. Now, that was the first programming venture for this year. They a ounce
obviously hoping to capitalize on media attention. Tasmania, as we know, has a very complicated relationship with its indigenous past, and in fact, this work didn't go down particularly well with a lot of indigenous people. There were some people who came out and said dark Mofo has some sick fetish with indigenous pain. So I'm not sure it worked entirely in their favor during the initial launch a few months ago.
But the first weekend has apparently gone off without a hitch, and there's plenty of other dark things to come over the next week and a half.
Presumably the artist's intention was to shock people who wear twin sets and pearls and not your art crowd, not necessarily to shock the people whose narrative he was trying to amplify. And that reference to dark Mofo having a fetish with indigenou pain, that's a reference to a twenty twenty two work, isn't it That caused a big controversy.
It did.
Santiago Sierra called on Indigenous Tasmanians to donate their blood, which would be collected in a vessel into which the Union Flag would be doused.
The work was called Union Flag. It caused a huge storm.
Aboriginal people have spilt way too much blood over the past two hundred years.
We don't feel like we need to bleed in.
The festival almost shut down. Lee Carmichael was hounded personally. I know that he had a very tough time trying to navigate those waters. The festival eventually seated and said, look, we made a mistake. They embarked on a six month program of Indigenous education for their.
Staff and for the festival itself, But.
In so doing many people wondered whether they'd actually compromised the integrity of their original vision, which was to be as edgy as possible and as unapologetically artistic as it was originally conceived to be. And people wondered whether Dark Mofo would shift to that place it fears the very most, the middle.
I'm interested in some of the works this year. One where an artist is staging ahead on car crash at what seems to me like great risk to her personal safety.
Absolutely so.
Paula Garcia, Brazilian artist and probably the best known student of the world's foremost performance artist, Marina Abramovich. She drives headlong into another car driven by a stunt driver.
Now it's not as simple.
As that they circle each other in this sort of centrifugal motion for ninety minutes until that tension builds and they eventually slam into each other.
It's called body crash.
The idea behind that work was that she was sitting on a bus and she wondered what it would be like to be covered in the armor of the bus and to have herself magnetically dragged into another object.
The other question when it comes to provocative art is about privilege and who gets to provoke. This is someone who has never been in her head on car crash that she didn't choose to be in. Presumably survivors of head on car crashes who've had their lives destroyed or seen other people's lives destroyed would not think it was amusing or an artistic endeavor.
No, I wouldn't think so. But perhaps in the moment it was.
Maybe that tension builds to something quite dramatic and visceral. I'm not sure it's a stunt, but it's art, or maybe it's a stunt in the name of art.
I mean, who are we to judge?
Another one that I was sort of prepared to be annoyed by but actually seems like it might have been quite fun. Was using the emergency warning system, the sirens in Hobart and the emergency messaging system to alert Hobatians that there was about to be a really unavoidable performance that they were going to have to listen to.
Yeah, that's right.
It's Richard Brussel, So, famed English DJM producer was tasked with taking over this, as you say, emergency sonic sound system. David Walsh is one of the only private citizens in the world to own this technology. It's called the Genesis three sixty x L and every state has one in case there's a title waver, there's an earthquake.
But they got permission from.
The council for half an hour last Saturday and this Saturday to do whatever they liked, and everyone within a seven kilometer radius of the Hobart CBD will find whatever comes out of those speakers unavoidable.
It's so interesting, this idea of deliberately setting out to annoy people or to provoke in the hope that you'll get some publicity, or to genuinely do something that you is different and that is coming out of you in an irrepressible way. And you could say that the works of Turner were shocking when they were first painted, or the music of Shostakovich that were not necessarily intending to be provocative in what we might regard as a self indulgent kind of dark Mofo got away.
What's your view about that?
Do you think art should just flow or is it legitimate and is it art to just set out to kind of get a headline.
I wouldn't suggest that that's actually what they're doing. I mean, I do support their right to make public art. I mean it's no more offensive really than walking past statue of rodin and in a public outdoor gallery in Canberra, really, and so I think it's really interesting, and I think people in Hobart, certainly my family, love dark Moto, love that experimental.
Edge, and are open to it.
I mean, I don't thk there's any other a city in the country, let alone the world, that would maybe allow that kind of thing to happen, would allow the inverted illuminated crosses to go up, would have allowed Mike Parer to inter himself beneath the city's main road for three days and have cars drive over the top of it. I mean it's just you have to hand it to the leaders there and also the way the festival works
with the government to get these things off the ground. Look, do I think Richard Russell's work is something of great artistic sustenance and substance? Probably not. Do I support his right to do it? And do I think Tasmanians on the whole, if not loved, then at least tolerate the idea. Yeah, absolutely.
Coming up.
Tim goes for a nude Solstice swim with Lee Carmichael In twenty twenty three. Tim Douglas was in Hobart for Dark Mofo and organized to speak with the festival's former creative director, Lee Carmichael. But given the theme, it didn't seem appropriate to do a normal interview in a boardroom or a cafe.
And I just said, wouldn't it be great if we did the interview naked and we did the swim together and he was up for it, which, to be fair, no one knows me and it hasn't made it. Everyone knows him, and so he had much more to lose. The Salsae swim has been a fixture of the festival since it started. The water is frigid, I think it
was seven degrees last year. The first year they ran it twenty thirteen, the police threatened to arrest people for public indecency because they didn't have a permits to do it. It's apparently illegal to go for a nude swim in Tasmania and the depths of winter. Such is the popularity of it now that there's two thousand tickets, they're all gone on the first day. Every year, we ran out of towels.
This year we thought we would get a thousand people and we were over one thousand.
So next year we're going to double our towels.
But it was a really amazing moment.
You stand there in your robe, it's dark, and these drums that go off and then these whistle blows and we're before you know it, we're all tearing down into the water. I managed to get a couple of questions into Lee while we were standing there before we immersed ourselves in the icy depths. But I felt my heart rate drop within moments of being in the water.
I thought I need to get out.
Of course, there's some other mad lunatics who were backstroking out in it to the pontoons. But you come back in and everyone's kind of stands naked around these forty four gallon drums for the fire, and it's just the most cleansing, beautiful community moment.
It was a really great experience.
Tim Douglas is the editor of Review, available.
In the Saturday edition of The Australian and anytime at the Australian dot com dot a slash review. This episode of the Front was hosted by me Claire Harvey and co produced with Jasper Leek, who edited the episode and also.
Wrote our theme. Thanks for joining us on the Front this week.
Our team also includes Kristin Amiot, Lea Sammaglue, Tiffany Dimack, Joshua Burton and Stephanie Coombs.