EVER WANTED TO WRITE THE 'ART WANK' FROM MONA?

Jane Clark of Mona is actually paid to write what 'art wank' for a living. Here she talks about writing the micro-essays that guide you through Hobart's acclaimed museum.

For the past decade, Jane Clark's job has been writing the pithy essays you’ll find on The O, the tablet-style mobile technology that the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) uses instead of wall-labels.

This year The O even evolved into an artwork itself, providing augmented reality experiences for Simon Denny’s Mine.

Design consultancy Art Processors, which helped to develop The O, asked Clark about how the museum uses this technology to open up visitors' experiences of Mona's artwork.

Art Processors: What was your involvement in the early days of The O?

Clark: From the very beginning, David Walsh [Mona’s owner] said he didn’t want wall labels. It was his home, more or less. In his small Museum of Antiquities at Moorilla, which was on the site before Mona, he had masses of wall labels. Labels everywhere! He wrote them all, and they were really good. He must have done so much research.

When I arrived in 2007, he’d already started planning the new museum in 2005 with Nonda Katsalidis [founder of architecture firm Fender Katsalidis]. Very early on, they had this idea that it wouldn’t be cluttered with labels. So we had to figure out what to do instead.

During that first year, the idea of something electronic came about. Initially, we thought that would mean audio. But quite quickly it became clear that it would be more of a visual technology. I met Nic Whyte and Tony Holzner, co-founders of Art Processors, that year. My role, initially, was giving them sample ‘label’ texts for the artworks. I drafted these in a format essentially based on what I’d done years earlier while working as a curator at the NGV. But I wanted something much more user-friendly and also something that could work equally across all the kinds of art we display, from antiquities to contemporary.

You write the ‘art wank’, a moniker that’s intended to be ironic, for The O. There are also tabs where visitors can read Gonzo reflections on the artworks and, for some objects, there’s the family-friendly O Minor. How did that all come about?

One of the reasons David hired me was because he quite liked what I wrote. It wasn’t wanky art-speak. At first, I saw myself writing for The O ‘as Mona’, not as me. And David said, ‘Oh, no, you have to sign it with your name. I’m putting my name on what I say in The O. Elizabeth [Pearce, now Senior Writer and Research Curator] will be doing interviews with artists. So you’ve got to put your name on what you write.’

If I didn’t know anything about an artwork and I felt confronted by it, what would I like to know?

Once I put my name on The O texts, it meant the audience’s understanding changed from me as a neutral, objective, disembodied voice to the idea that Mona is made up of many different people. And I’m accountable for what I write.

My role has always covered documenting each artwork carefully and then presenting that information in The O in a way that we think is helpful to visitors. Not telling them what to think or being particularly didactic. But my sense has always been: if I didn’t know anything about an artwork and I felt confronted by it, what would I like to know? Or, what would be helpful? Or, what would be interesting or funny? Or, sometimes, provocative. Then I put that in The O.

The space is constantly changing. Mona in 2011 is very different from what it is today. You just touched on this, but how have you worked with Art Processors with regards to wayfinding and indoor location positioning for The O?

Through most of the museum, we still treat it pretty much exactly as we did originally — that it doesn’t matter if visitors start on the bottom floor, first floor, or go to the middle. They don’t need to look at The O for everything. Just look at, read and listen to what takes their fancy.

The biggest challenge has been with temporary exhibitions, where we often do want people to take a certain route, or when there is a chronological or, more often at Mona, ideas-based thematic unfolding. The main way we’ve dealt with that is we've put in more beacons. When we first opened, there weren’t as many things in the collection, and there usually weren’t as many things in a space as there may be now. You could be offered a large number of objects in The O. But if we want people to move through and have an introduction to a room, then the spaces need to be more defined and fewer objects offered on The O screen at a time.

The first exhibition with thematic rooms was Theatre of the World, back in 2013. I think the traffic flow went quite well, but it wasn’t perfect. We got some location bleeding from room to room. But after the opening of the show — it was on for about 10 months — Art Processors improved the location positioning more and more. And they got it pretty perfect!

This is an edited extract of the post How the curatorial team uses The O which originally appeared on the Art Processors blog.