MONA’s On the Origin of Art: David Walsh’s tale of four visions

• 11:00PM October 21, 2016

A toddler at the next table goggles at him. Waiters with laden plates rush by. Tourists take photos of Hobart’s serene Derwent River snaking past the windows. Walsh rolls on. “Bonobos, where everyone is f..king everyone else, have giant ones — they produce 10 or 20 times as much sperm as humans.

“You only have to measure one parameter. Biology is very succinct — and it’s testable, unlike a cultural argument.”

It is early Thursday afternoon at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, and Walsh — mathematician, bibliophile, gambler, winemaker, autodidact, Darwin obsessive and founder of Australia’s largest private art museum — is in full flight.

Shaggy haired, his long legs clad in candy-green pants, a pocket watch pinned to the lapel of his Willy Wonka-style checked jacket, he pauses only to scroll through his iPad to refer to his recent reading list or artworks for his ­upcoming show.

His voice is hoarse. When we make this unexpected swerve off into simian sexual dynamics, he’s been talking for well over 90 minutes, in long, looping sentences that, typically, knit a complicated web of ideas around life’s big stuff: sex, reproduction, evolution, God, genetics, human agency, teleology: “Every time you introduce this idea of destination, you f..k up the world.”

His wife, American artist Kirsha Kaechele, briefly appears to remind him they need to pack and get going for a weekend trip. Walsh, nodding distractedly, rolls on.

From the mating habits of redback spiders to the signalling functions of peacock feathers, from why blood is red to the courtship architecture of bowerbird nests, MONA’s creator has big things on his mind.

The origin of human behaviour — how we find mates and reproduce, why we are hardwired the way we are as a species — is one. The origin of art — why we create and make things beautiful, what lies behind the universal impulse of “everybody with arms and legs to draw in the sand” — is the other.

To Walsh, it all boils down to biology: we are less in control of who we are, what we do and why we create than we think. In the grand scheme of things, says this lifelong lover of chance and the random in life, culture and intellect are mere sugar frosting; underneath, we are fundamentally shaped by primitive impulses rooted in the Pleistocene soup of our beginnings.

Is this an “uncomfortable notion” for some? Almost certainly, he says cheerfully. He believes “we’re cultural beasts, of course we are”, then adds: “But we are flesh and blood too.”

Next month at his subterranean “unmuseum” on the banks of the Derwent, Walsh will present this argument as it applies to art when he launches what he describes as the most ambitious exhibition to be staged at the museum since it opened five years ago.

In a sense, the show encapsulates all the ideas that led to him building MONA, he says: “This one exhibition continues out from how I see the world, it rarefies how I see the world … that’s why I built the gallery — to essentially be an anti-museum and to look at art a little bit ­differently.”

Running for six months, On the Origin of Art features four exhibitions by four guest curators of more than 234 objects sourced from MONA’s collection as well as Australian state and national galleries, private collections and 58 institutions from around the world. In terms of loans, “it is bigger than all of the other shows put together”, Walsh says.

The earliest items on show include three prehistoric flint hand axes thought to be 300,000-800,000 years old, from Californian artist and collector Tony Berlant; the most recent include nine new commissions, one of them a yellow and black polka-dotted and mirrored room-size installation from one of the world’s most popular gallery artists, Yayoi Kusama, another a new work, Graphos, by one of Walsh’s favourite artists, Brigita Ozolins: “a bloody good artist and very clever”.

In between these two chronological points lies the entire creative history of the world, it seems. Walsh scrolls through the catalogue on his iPad, whizzing past bronze royal heads from Benin, funerary masks from Egypt, terracotta fertility figures from northwest Iran, an ornate Islamic tilework border from Bukhara, butterfly masks from Burkina Faso, partridge tureens from Germany, a feline effigy vessel from central Arizona.

There are archival pigment prints of seed pods and coral snakes, Renoirs and Bouchers, sandstone architectural reliefs of celestial dancers from India, a gaudy Jeff Koons (“conspicuous consumption, see?”), a bronze lobster from Meiji-era Japan.

The history of artmaking scrolls by in a blink — we leap from a replica of a delicate atlatl (spear-thrower) from Le Mas-d’Azil in France, c. 13,000 BC — an ancient example of the human urge to “make beautiful” — to a 2011 music video by Gotye, to ornate shell necklaces made for the show by indigenous Tasmanian artist Lola Greeno.

Walsh lapses into a rare silence as he studies a snowflake black and white jar from central Arizona, made by the Anasazi in AD 1100. “Look at this,” he says, fascinated, zooming in. “We all know who invented abstraction, Kandinsky, or one of the early 20th-century abstractionists, in 1910 or so, but [look when this was made]. Amazing. Two of [the show’s guest curators] wanted to use this but only one could, so we’ve had to borrow another Anasazi work.”

Long fascinated by evolutionary biology, Walsh has looked over the parapets of art history and cultural theory to find four “bio-cultural scientist-philosophers” who will explore questions that have occupied him for years: Is art a biological impulse? What drives us, across all cultures and all times, to make art even when it seems to offer no practical benefits? Is it just a simple love of pretty pictures or are there more profound, evolutionary drivers at play? Is art adaptive, as in enhancing the reproductive rates of our ancestors?

For Walsh, a lifelong Charles Darwin fan, it’s all a delicious puzzle. He shies away from definitive answers — “art is a complex thing” — but leans heavily towards the biological imperative argument.

Art has an adaptive function “just as your opposable thumb is adaptive”. And while there’s a cultural component, certainly, biology ultimately provides the bedrock for human creativity, in his view. Artmaking, at its primal level, confers practical benefits. As he likes to bluntly say, “we make art to appease, to get laid, to satisfy”. Here, referencing Darwin’s sexual selection theory from more than a century ago, he backs the idea of art as evolving as a mechanism for attracting mates, acting as a kind of ­“fitness marker” that signals health, resourcefulness, status and intelligence to potential mates — much like a peacock’s gorgeous but otherwise useless feathers.

Almost every grand idea behind our understanding of the world goes back to science’s great radical, he believes. Darwinism, and the field of evolutionary biology in general, has coloured not just Walsh’s art aesthetics and 10,000-strong book collection — he has collected early editions of On the Origin of Species for years, last shelling out $90,000 for a signed edition in December at a Christie’s auction — but his views on life, reproduction and death: witness his tongue-in-cheek blog description of the birth of his daughter Sunday as “the physical manifestation of our evolutionary drive”.

“If you want to resolve an argument, you can pick up a 150-year text and go, ‘What would this guy have said?’ ” he says. Darwin “inspired the human race: his are the best ideas anyone has ever had, it’s as simple as that.”

Walsh says he has wanted to do a show such as On the Origin of Art for years — well before MONA was launched. A “training-wheels” attempt to marry art and evolutionary biology came in 2013 with The Red Queen show at the museum, based on the evolutionary theory of species competition termed the Red Queen hypothesis, developed by Leigh Van Valen in the early 1970s.

For On the Origin of Art, he says he deliberately looked outside art academia to find his guest curators because he wanted an outsider’s perspective — one that didn’t involve looking at art with the usual cultural filter.

To this end, he invited linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller and professor of literature Brian Boyd to curate individual exhibitions that will feature art they have hand-picked to advance their arguments.

Boyd will present a view that art is a form of cognitive play that translates to practical benefits: humans are naturally inclined towards cognitive play with pattern, in particular, and this hones vital survival skills.

Miller, meanwhile, will argue that art evolved through sexual selection as a signal of mate value — akin to a bee’s dance, a bird’s song, or a gorilla thumping its chest.

To Pinker, art is a byproduct of other adaptations, such as the desire to obtain status via conspicuous consumption, as well as a “pleasure technology” — we make art, essentially, because it pleases our senses. Then there’s Changizi, whose radical concept of “nature harnessing” — the process wherein aspects of our culture mimic nature so as to harness evolutionarily ancient brain mechanisms for a new purpose — “made my mind explode”, says an admiring Walsh.

The exhibition will also cast a light on Darwin’s lesser known role in influencing art. An art-lover himself (he reportedly wrote On the Origin of Species at his home, Down House, with a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci looking over his shoulder), Darwin’s revolutionary explorations of orchid anatomy, dubbed heretical by art critic John Ruskin, influenced artists like the 19th-century American Martin Johnson Heade — his Cattleya Orchid, Two Hummingbirds and a Beetle will be in the show — while impressionists such as Degas and Monet also responded visually to Darwinian theory.

Walsh is keenly aware that Darwin is not fashionable in certain circles — “half of the academic world operates under a huge veil of ignorance, essentially” — and is prepared for attacks from cultural theorists, art historians and feminist academics uncomfortable with anything smacking of biological determinism.

It’s already happening, he says dryly, citing a hostile “rant” on MONA’s Facebook page and a “loaded” question from a disgruntled ­female audience member following his talk in Melbourne recently.

Little matter: you suspect the man who happily talks about sex differences in everything from risk-taking to the propensity for genius is enjoying setting the cat among the pigeons.

Walsh even regards with a certain satisfaction the sniping his guest curators engage in when it comes to targeting each other’s positions. “That’s the point of science — to have some good ideas and put them out in the raucous caucus of debate.”

In any case, he is not trying to convince anyone. Think for yourself, he says bluntly. “That’s what we’re trying to do at MONA.”

Pressed on which argument he most favours, Walsh says Miller’s “I think is fundamentally right”. Pinker “has something to explain about the art market but not about art itself”. He thinks Boyd’s argument has too many holes (“but I’ll kill you if you print that”) and likes Changizi’s “headspinning” theories, especially about music.

So what will audiences see when they are faced with the four doors leading into the ­labyrinthine gallery space? When Review visits, the sound of hammering and drills bounces off the sandstone cliffs as workers rush to accommodate the exhibits, including an unprecedented number of loans from the British Museum, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the Museum of Natural History in Paris, among others.

Design-wise, Walsh says, “it is extremely complex. This is the first time I’ve been confused in the gallery, because there are four separate exhibitions.”

The four guest curators were whittled down from a long list of Walsh’s favourite thinkers and writers in evolutionary biology (he is planning a future show based on Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons’ The Invisible Gorilla) but he admits to some concern that he ended up with a homogenous bunch of “angry-speaking, middle-aged males”. Regrettably, leading female academics such as the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy declined to take part, he says.

The four curators were given free rein in terms of their wish lists, says senior curator Nicole Durling. “These guys wanted the best … but sometimes we had to tell them, ‘Well, it’s impossible for us to get you Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.’ ”

Pinker and Boyd were particularly hands-on, with Walsh describing the latter as “super engaged — he suggested a huge range of human dynamism and creativity, all sorts of impossible and incredible things … he’s put together one hell of an exhibition.”

Boyd’s space will include Yayoi Kusama’s Dots Obsession — Tasmania, the Hokusai print, Great Wave off Kanagawa, comic art, including works by Art Spiegelman, Anasazi art featuring circle and line geometry, and Vernon Ah Kee’s ghostly charcoal on canvas drawing — the latter will address Boyd’s section about faces.

Addressing his argument about our taste for enriched, elaborate visual “cheesecake”, Pinker’s space will include plenty of eye candy, including a new commission, Who Says Your Feelings Have to Make Sense? by Greek artist Aspassio Haronitaki — “an overwhelmingly beautiful, supernormal thing of life and colour”, says senior research curator Jane Clark. Universal ideas about female beauty, revolving around hip-waist ratios, symmetry and other aesthetic measures (“think of Nefertiti or Botticelli’s Venus, each a babe by modern standards”, Pinker quips) will be reflected in works such as Renoir’s 1888 Jeune Femme se Baignant,while our primal taste for serene pastoral landscapes, flowers, and fruit, signalling health, fertility and abundance, will be explored in works such as William Sonntag’s 1864 Scene on the Hudson.

Walsh describes Pinker’s theory of biophilia as very important, saying: “We are naturally attracted to nature.” Miller’s space, meanwhile, is “starting to look like a porn show”, he says. Key works include Takashi Murakami’s sperm-spraying My Lonesome Cowboy, and another famous Hokusai, Female Diver Pleasured by Octopi. Mankind’s ancient urge to “make beautiful” will be reflected in four hand axes; another key work is a new commission by British artist Mat Colli­shaw, The Centrifugal Soul.

Changizi’s selection is the smallest (“it was hard for him to make his argument succinctly, simply as he’s always trying to think around the problem”, says Walsh) but no less impressive, featuring new commissions by Ozolins “in reference to Changizi’s nature harnessing, particularly when it has to do with vision”, and a work by British artists UVA “about sound”, according to Durling.

“We felt from the start it had to be fantastic art to make people really look and understand,” says Clark. “If you’re trying to argue why people have been doing this since human beings began, then you have to make sure that people think, yes this is worth lasting for millennia … so I think it will be an incredibly beautiful show.”

Durling says it has fundamentally changed the way she looks at art. “It’s confronting in that way, but to me that’s a very, very liberating position. But also, we are not saying we are right. We are saying — think about it. You cannot talk about this stuff in absolutes.”

And that’s the way Walsh wants it to be. “I’ve been making arguments about what we are and what art at MONA is since it opened. It is a philosophical vehicle more than just a bunch of pictures on the walls ... I want MONA to be a ship afloat on a sea of chance, a deliverer of the alternate idea ... an antidote to certainty.”

Will it change the way we see art? He shrugs: who knows? As he likes to say, “If nothing else, you’ll get to see some pretty pictures.” And with that, he’s finally done, springing up — “ta-ta” — and bounding off like Alice’s white rabbit.

On the Origin of Art opens at MONA, Hobart, on November 5 and runs until April 17.

Justin Burke

Former TV writer